Confluence.VC

This week we had on Abha Nath (@abhanath) of Wonder Ventures.

Wonder is an early-stage fund that aims to invest earlier than anyone else in Southern California’s best founders. Since its founding in 2015, the firm has invested in category-defining companies like Honey, Luxe, Joymode, and a number of others. Abha is the first and only hire at Wonder, and we wanted to have her on to dive into her unique path.

In this talk, we discuss:

• Abha’s journey to venture and how her previous roles at the Disney Accelerator and Ring prepared her to be an investor
  
• What makes Southern California unique as a startup ecosystem
  
• What has changed when evaluating early-stage companies virtually
  
• Some red flags that make businesses un-investible
  
• We flip it around and let Abha ask us a few questions at the end

📫 For weekly insights from the next era of investors and operators, make sure to subscribe to Confluence.VC Weekly.

This week we had on Steven Venino (@spvenino33) of Rosecliff Ventures.

Rosecliff has built up a reputation as one of the top early-stage funds, and their portfolio consists of companies like Allbirds, Casper, Roman, and others. The fund is sector agnostic, but Steven focuses most of his time within fintech, agriculture tech, and sustainability.

In this talk, we discuss:

• Steven’s path from banking —> hedge funds —> venture
  
• Overlooked sectors that Steven expects to outperform over the next decade
  
• Bottoms-up vs. top-down investing and deciphering what is noise vs. signal
  
• Assessing founder-market fit at the seed

📫 For weekly insights from the next era of investors and operators, make sure to subscribe to Confluence.VC Weekly.

This week we had on Sutian Dong, who is the co-founder of Women in VC.

Women in VC is the world's largest network for women working in venture capital, and since its founding in 2015, the group has grown to nearly 3,000 members today. Sutian has been of our earliest supporters, and she has given us tons of priceless knowledge on building and scaling communities.

In this talk, we cover:

• Sutian's path into venture and the spark that led to the formation of Women in VC
• The challenges of scaling a community from niche to global
• Statistics and findings from the Women in VC emerging manager report
• Tactical advice for the Confluence community on how to best support more investment into women

📫 For weekly insights from the next era of investors and operators, make sure to subscribe to Confluence.VC Weekly.

This week’s guest is Kenn So, who works as an associate at Shasta Ventures.

We wanted to bring on Kenn because he recently published the most comprehensive book we have found on breaking into venture, but we touch on a lot of other things as well. In this talk, we cover:

• Kenn’s path into venture,
  
• the benefits and tradeoffs of having a banking and consulting background,
  
• Shasta’s pivot towards investing exclusively into B2B, and
  
• the idea behind Shasta Elevate and taking a more hands-on approach with portfolio companies

Check out Kenn's book here: https://kenn.so/Breaking-into-early-stage-VC-55bec51b43254c858abfceb16b21827f

📫 For weekly insights from the next era of investors and operators, make sure to subscribe to Confluence.VC Weekly.

This week we had on Brandon Beck with Kickstart.

Kickstart is an early-stage fund based in Salt Lake City that focuses on building and partnering with the best companies in the Utah region. Since launching in 2008, this targeted approach has established the fund as one of the most successful in all of the Mountain West with their portfolio consisting of companies like Galileo, NAV, Lucid Software, and countless others.

In this talk, we cover:

• Brandon’s background and path into venture
  
• The origin story and thesis of Kickstart
  
• Investment trends that Brandon is monitoring
  
• The startup ecosystem in Utah and the Mountain West and the Utah Startup Guide that Brandon helped author

📫 For weekly insights from the next era of investors and operators, make sure to subscribe to Confluence.VC Weekly.