Cindy Padnos built her venture capital career by investing her own money first. She proved she could attract deals and deliver exits, with companies she backed acquired by Autodesk and Hearst Corporation.
So what I decided was that I had to prove to myself, frankly, that I had the ability, frankly, to attract the best deals, to make the hard decisions about what companies to invest in, to take other people's companies through to exit and help them to do that. And so the first thing I actually did was start investing my own capital. I warehoused, I don't know if you're familiar with that term, to warehouse investments. It means you make them, you hold them. And what it really means is you go with no salary, no income, no nothing, and you put your own money to work for a number of years, literally years before you can see what the performance in those companies looks like. That's what we did. That's the set of companies that you see up here that we ended up calling the Spotlight Fund. So part of what we did was prove to investors that we had that access, that we could get the best co investors in those companies with us and that we could actually take some of those companies to exit, which we've done. Now, two of the companies out of that original portfolio have been acquired. One of them by Autodesk here locally, and the other by Hearst Corporation. Both nice, profitable exits. And so there's nothing, frankly, that matters more to an investor than performance. And I felt that we needed to be able to show it. We then allowed those same limited partner investors, that's the category of institutional investors that we were looking for, to participate in those earlier investments that we had already made.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
Depois de tantas histórias, aprendizados e pausas necessárias, o @interior_iza está de volta
