Movers & Shakers Ep 2: Gaby Goldberg of The Chernin Group

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Welcome back to our 4-part miniseries, Movers and Shakers, where we highlight entrepreneurs and investors who are shaking up the way it's always been done. Today we sat down with Gabby Goldberg, an investor at the Churning Group who boasts 34,000 followers on Twitter. A self-proclaimed Gen Z, Gabby natively understands the creator and gamer economy, having grown up playing Minecraft and RuneScape. Through a self-discovery semester off from Stanford, where she spent time working at a startup in Tel Aviv, Gabby fell in love with the concept of venture capital. Through Twitter, she landed her first job in VC at Chapter One, and from that experience, she found herself at Bessemer before recently joining The Chernin Group to focus on the evolving space of crypto. Gabby is wise beyond her years and had really insightful yet accessible points about this increasingly relevant vertical.

In today's episode, we explore insights and themes such as navigating early career milestones, the concept of modern friends, and the future of Web3. Let's open the door. Hi Gabby, thanks for joining us in The Room today.

Thank you so much for having me.

We always love to start our podcasts at the beginning. Obviously today you're quite known in the Twittersphere and online for all of your amazing commentary, but we'd love to start a little bit more at the beginning of your life. Where did you grow up?

I originally grew up in a small town in Connecticut called Farmington, and I lived there until I turned 12. I think it's almost like epigenetics or something in me of loving to take risks because of my parents and how they raised me. Basically, we lived in this town. My parents are both immigrants to the United States, and when I was 12, they took a trip with our neighbors to Los Angeles to go to the ESPY Awards, and they had never been to LA. And they had no idea what was out there. And it's almost out of a movie where my mom wanted to drive up the PCH after the award ceremony was over. And my dad said, "No, we can't drive up the PCH because I'm sick and tired of living in Farmington. And I read in a magazine about this place called Santa Barbara. And if we go there, I'm gonna make us leave." And so they drove up the PCH and they stopped in Santa Barbara for a weekend. And I still remember when they came back home to Farmington and they said, "Okay, we're moving." They both quit their jobs. My parents are both doctors. And so my dad was flying back and forth between California and Hartford, Connecticut, where he was working in one of the hospitals there. And my mom quit her job and started her own private practice in Santa Barbara. And we built a house and moved to California. None of our family lived there. And now all of our family lives in California with us. So really, I grew up in Santa Barbara from like middle school, high school, and then I went to school up at Stanford. So I've been in California really for most of my life, but just moved back to the East Coast 2 months ago, and now I'm in New York.

That's amazing. I personally love Santa Barbara, and I totally relate being from Seattle where it rains all the time. My mom loved coming to Santa Barbara or Palm Desert was actually our, our family's favorite spot to go to escape the rain in the middle of nowhere. But I love that your parents just finally said, yeah, actually we're just gonna get up and go and, and move our whole family to this opposite side of the country.

It's so hard because I feel like it's— every young person wants to be able to say they like escaped their hometown and they found somewhere better. But Santa Barbara is my favorite place on earth and I never want to escape my hometown. I have to make it back in one day. Yeah, but I was very lucky to grow up there.

Explains a little bit more about how you found yourself at Stanford because it is hard to leave California. Just walk us through that journey of ending up at Stanford and how that was a part of your decision process early in your life.

The early part of my life I sometimes share online, but I'm not super public about. And it's that I was selectively mute when I was growing up. So from ages 5 to 9, when I was living on the East Coast, I don't really know why, but I was selectively mute. So I didn't talk to anybody besides my two brothers and my two parents, and that was it. And clearly I got over it and now I can't shut up. But it really influenced my childhood and the things I care about and the way I spend my time now. And I think that actually wasn't even something that I realized until kind of during COVID when I had a chance to slow down and reflect on how I got to where I am. So when I was growing up, obviously I was super quiet and I spent a lot of time alone, and that manifested in me spending a ton of time online. So I played a lot of Minecraft and a lot of RuneScape, and I learned how to code on Tumblr, and I had a very active blog when I was a teenager and all this kind of stuff. And honestly, I didn't realize that any of those things had material value until I was a teenager and realized that you could sell those RuneScape accounts and actually make what was a lot of money at the time and things like that. When I got to high school, I turned into a mock trial kid. And so I wanted to go to law school. When I got into Stanford, I went in and I applied as a philosophy major because I wanted to go to law school after. But very soon after just being up in Silicon Valley, I started taking a bunch of computer science classes and I found myself very interested in this intersection of computer science and philosophy, really understanding how do people interact with technology. So for example, my favorite class was social computing, and it was a computer science class all about how do you grow and scale and moderate social computing systems all the way from like Wikipedia to something like Facebook. I worked in the virtual reality lab for a couple years trying to research how do you make decisions in VR, how do you make friends in virtual space and things like that. And now obviously, investing in Web3, thinking more and more about the future of the internet. When I sort of retrace my steps, it makes a lot of sense how I got here.

First of all, thank you for sharing that.

I think a lot of times today when you see anyone, you think, oh wow, their career looks really up and to the right and they have it all figured out and they just always were that way. But you sharing about some hardship that you faced younger in your life and what you learned from that experience and how it ultimately was planting the seeds to what and who you are today, how it's actually given you a unique vantage point on what is possible with community on the internet, online. We'll talk a little bit more about your concept of modern friends later, but I love how those early seeds have been planted to become who you are today. In the vein of this career path of philosophy to law, to maybe symbolic systems, to all these things, was venture on your horizon [Speaker:MADISON_MCILWAIN] It totally came out of nowhere.

Candidly, I had no idea what venture was until I got into it. Basically, I was at Stanford doing all these things. And again, like I said, when you look back on it, it makes a lot of sense. But at the time when I was going through school, I totally felt like I was on the wrong path. And everyone at these, like, high-performing schools look like they have it all figured out. And I definitely did not have it all figured out. I had done a summer fellowship in Israel the summer after my sophomore year, and I worked at Deloitte in a branch called Deloitte Catalyst, I loved it and I loved being in Israel, but I came back my junior year and I fell into what all of my friends were doing, which was interviewing for consulting roles and finance roles and things like that. So I did it too, except the difference was they all got jobs and I literally got none of them. And I had no idea what I was going to do. And I had this quarter-life crisis of, okay, I didn't get these jobs, but I didn't even want them in the first place. Maybe I should figure out what I want and then maybe I'll get that instead. —so I took the rest of my junior year off and I went back to Israel just because I had loved it there. And I found that when I was there, I was working at my startup basically 9 to 5, and it was great. But in the evenings and on the weekends, I was going to all these networking events, trying to meet founders, meeting investors. I was very interested in what was happening on the ground floor of the startup ecosystem there because it's very hot. And I ended up meeting a VC who was splitting his time between Tel Aviv and New York. And we became close friends and we're still friends. And he told me, if you work in venture, you could actually get paid to do what you're doing on the weekend. And so that was the unlock for me. And his advice to me was to get on Twitter, which obviously I'm still on, and I do spend a lot of time on Twitter, and I think it is the most valuable place to spend your time, honestly, as a young person. So I got on Twitter. Two weeks after I met him, I got kicked out of Israel because of COVID So I got sent home. I knew I wasn't going to go back to school, and I had lost that job. And it was actually on my flight home, like sitting in SFO, that I saw this tweet from a solo GP, Jeff Morris at Chapter One, saying that he wanted to hire an intern for his venture firm for the very first time. So honestly, it felt like the stars had aligned because someone just told me I might like venture. I just lost my job and I wasn't going back to school. And so I thought, let's just send him an email and see what happens. So I ended up working with him remotely during that sort of COVID summer, just thought it was going to be an internship to fill the summer. but I absolutely fell in love with it. I knew that at least for now, that was what I wanted to do for my career. So from then on, things made sense because I knew what I was looking for, but the path was definitely not linear.

Today you are an investor at the Chernin Group. Tell us a little bit about how that early internship that turned into a full-time gig actually brought you to where you are today.

When I was at Chapter One, I was focusing a lot on early stage consumer investing. Thinking about what the future of the internet might look like. I ended up moving from Chapter One to Bessemer Venture Partners where I spent a year. Bessemer is one of the oldest venture firms out there, invested in companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Shopify, et cetera. And I was really focusing on their early stage consumer practice. And I was thinking about big marketplaces for consumers and creator tools, things like the Kickstarters of the world and Patreon and Cameo and Substack and all of these different types of companies that were really emerging over the last decade. And I was getting confused and a little bit frustrated because these marketplaces and these tools for creators allow users to build on those networks, fund people on those networks, and make a living on those networks. And it didn't make sense why there was no level of ownership on those networks too. I was really thinking more and more about how the internet had evolved. And it seemed to me individual users today online already do all of these things that I just mentioned. They already build operate, fund the networks they use every day, we should be able to own them too. And so where do we go from here? I was living in LA at the time and by chance was hanging out with a lot of folks who happened to be in crypto. And I started to understand a little bit more of how we actually got to where we are. Basically, a brief history of the internet is the web was created in 1989 with actually this vision of a decentralized open network of information. And in this vision, users were in control of what happened, not centralized platforms. So during this first era of the internet, it was things like HTTP, SMTP, all open protocols. And the internet at the time was really only for highly technical people who could build on them. It wasn't really like a powerful consumer platform. So it was pretty small. That's how it was created. Over the next couple decades, as those platforms reached scale, consumers ended up migrating to more sophisticated centralized platforms. And so when we think about Web2, like the read-write era of the internet, those were the companies that emerged during that time, things like Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. And so these centralized platforms reaching scale was a good thing because the internet is an amazing piece of technology that has connected the world. And Web2 brought billions of people access to all the technology online. But it was also really hard because it became harder for individuals and groups and businesses to create things online without fear of centralized platforms taking control. Basically, I just gave a lot of history, but what does that actually mean right now? One example is the App Store. I was meeting with a bunch of different creator tools that were allowing creators to make a living online when I was at Bessemer, and oftentimes these were iOS apps. Any creator who gets payments through the App Store, 30% of the revenue that they would make would go directly back to the App Store. So maybe if you're a huge business that's generating billions of dollars, 30% is fine, but if you're a creator trying to make a living, 30% is a lot to go back to this huge company. It really didn't make sense to me. And then like I said earlier, like the Kickstarters and Patreons and Substacks, you see the same model over and over, but the creators are the ones giving these platforms value and it didn't make sense why they didn't actually have ownership in what they were doing.

I love that call out and I think it's something that I've heard from other friends who starting companies do the Apple Store embedded payments play or do you use Stripe and have they kick out to its own webpage and does that create this friction with the users? I do think what Apple does provide is distribution. Everyone has the App Store on their iPhone, so therefore you have access to all these users at your fingertips, which is kind of part of the Web2 value prop, so to speak, of distribution. How do you think about with Web3 and a world in which you're not paying for distribution in that way, people will gain access to people who would wanna use their product?

Absolutely. It's a really good point. Distribution is a huge part of it, and that's a really good example of why all of these platforms did reach scale. And that's why it's one of these trade-offs is I don't wanna say like the internet as it stands now today is terrible and decentralization is like a silver bullet that will fix all the world's problems. I don't think either of those things. What I will say is Web3 allows for a level of distribution that we actually don't have with the current model. So as platforms grow today, instead of users becoming more aligned with what the platform wants, they actually become more misaligned as it grows. And so you can see the line graph going down or something like that. A really good example is Instagram. When Instagram replaced the post tab in the middle with the shopping tab, everybody hated it. They hated it. That is not what consumers want. Consumers want to post a picture and share it with their friends and not have ads and just be able to have a powerful and simple consumer experience on Instagram the way it was created. But of course we can't fault Instagram for doing that because they're a business and they're trying to make money and replacing it with a shopping tab was maybe what they had to do to keep the business alive, really strong and powerful. When we think about what decentralized networks allow for is actually when users have ownership stake in the business, as the platforms reach scale, they become more and more aligned with the business and they become more incentivized to help it succeed because they have a stake in it too. So as the platforms grow, they actually become more resilient and more strong and more powerful in a way that consumers want. This is something that we're just seeing now and it's just beginning to start, but I think what that unlocks will be really powerful and really mostly just put the power back in the hands of the consumers.

You have the opportunity to be knee-deep investing on this frontier of technology and what the internet's going to be at the Chernin Group. Could you tell us more about some of your favorite investments in the crypto space or trends and companies that you find incredibly exciting?

We are in a really exciting time right now, and it makes sense that this is the time that I jumped into the space full-time, where more people are coming into the space now than they ever have before. And what comes with that is a huge translation gap between Web2 and Web3. Crypto can often feel like a black box to people who are just getting into the space, and that's why I care so much about writing about the space. I have a reading list that I send out of my favorite things I've read about Web3 because I'm trying to add more transparency to an otherwise very complex space. So along a similar line, I love companies that try and increase financial literacy in crypto. There are two that are top of mind. One is a wallet called Rainbow. It's an Ethereum wallet, and you can use it to interact on like most kind of decentralized apps and sites these days. You can showcase your NFTs and you can discover profiles of your friends as well. But what I love about it is they have a learning page. If you go to rainbow.me/learn, it has these really user-friendly guides that are written basically saying, what does it mean for a wallet to be self-custody versus custodial? What does it mean to pay a gas fee? What's the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of Ethereum allowing for software and things like that? And it really lays out the fundamentals. And I think that's super, super important. Like we're dealing with real money, real economies here. And the last thing I would want is for people I know and care about to get into the space and lose money or have a negative experience because the space is so confusing. Another company that kind of fits that is a company called Rabbit Hole. It's quote unquote, learn to earn platform where you can use decentralized apps and earn their tokens for using them. So let's say Uniswap wants people to use the platform. They'll say, okay, we're gonna give out a bunch of our tokens. And if you use the platform and verify through Rabbit Hole, then you'll get a share of those tokens as well. And so you're financially incentivized to check them out and learn along the way with how all of these different apps and platforms and protocols work. That's also a website that I tell a lot of my friends who are new to the space to check out if they want to really get their hands dirty. I think the other area that I'm spending a lot of time in is identity in Web3. Basically the way I think about it is the first wave of social apps that really hit scale online, like MySpace, Facebook, even Instagram, they were all about bringing real life experiences online. So Facebook was bringing your college friends online and Instagram was taking real life photos and putting them online. And for those use cases, obviously they did really well. Those platforms are huge. Unintended consequence of that is as we spent more time online on those platforms, we stopped having just real life experiences, but we had digital experiences too. A lot of this is relevant to Web3. So we took screenshots, we watched livestreams, we followed creators, we bought digital goods, we spent a lot of time in games and metaverses online. We own NFTs and all of these things, and these are digital experiences. And the platforms that are at scale today weren't built to help us share those. And so now I think that's why a lot of us feel really lonely online and there's no way to bridge the gap or share those experiences with others. And so any platform that allows you to share your digital identity, I think is very cool. One of them that is top of mind, it's actually the link in my bio on Twitter, is this company called Cyber. It's almost like a gallery or like metaverse type home for all of the NFTs that you own. So if you click into my gallery, you can see all of my NFTs on the wall of the gallery and you can walk around and you can click through them and you can see like how I've decided to present them and order them and things like that. And I think it gives a much more holistic view of how I've spent time online.

That's super cool. Speaking of NFTs and kind of some of your points around education, I'm like super into art in the physical world and being a founder, being in tech, it's like an obvious thing for me to dabble around in, in terms of making NFTs, buying NFTs. And I just went knee-deep into the platform, started minting NFTs, had no idea what a gas fee was. And I really wanted to buy something and then ended up spending like $500 worth of Ethereum in gas. And then because I like throttled it down to make it a little bit cheaper because I didn't want to spend $600, the transaction didn't actually go through. And so then I couldn't buy what I was trying to buy. And it was just like this whole experience where I was like, how is this even like, how does that happen? Because I feel like with so many other consumer apps, there's all these guardrails around user experience and really making sure that you don't have negative experiences to the point where everything is incredibly controlled for, which is just not really the case yet with Web3. And so to your point, I think education is so incredibly important. I'm a founder in the e-commerce enablement space, and I think a lot about the issue of like discovery of D2C brands and physical products. And while that's still an issue, it's solved. Like you can definitely search for physical products and spend targeted ads and get eyeballs. But I was thinking about the problem of discovery around NFTs, and there's so many of them now that I'm super curious to see how a lot of the experience components and platform components that have made discovery really helpful for non-Web3 experiences, how that kind of trickles down into this new wave of Web3.

It's an interesting class because like, I like literally, I do think I just have really high expectations for what my consumer experience online feels and looks like. And we were just talking about this with Madison McIlwain from Leda Health and the idea this hasn't happened yet in healthcare is very apparent to everyone who grew up with the internet because it's just like, I have to mail my therapy reimbursement forms back to my insurance to get half of what I paid because it's not even covered. It's just so frustrating. Like I'm mailing, I just, if you have to mail anything, I'm not, I'm sorry, I'm not going to do. So with crypto, like there is this gap is what you're saying between the experience of seamlessness that we're used to, but then the upside that actually creates for ownership and opportunity is what Gabby's saying.

Definitely. The answer that I have to that of the consumer experience just not being great yet is we are just really early and that's the price you pay for being early. When I first got into the space, and I think a lot of people feel this way too, is, oh, I'm already too late. Like I wasn't around when Bitcoin was created or I didn't get in on the Ethereum presale. Like I'm too late. We are so early. Hopefully won't be that long before the consumer experience gets a lot better. Gas goes down a lot. NFTs are not super, super crazy expensive, and it's gonna be a whole lot more accessible for everyone.

Within this context of the future of the internet and Web3, there is all this commentary happening about the next generation, Gen Z, and how we are interacting in these spaces. We're definitely here to stay. Claudia and I have gone back and forth on this podcast about whether or not we're Gen Z. Frankly, I just think we should just say we are at this point, Claudia, cuz I think we have maybe like a toe in millennial, but more like a foot in Gen Z?

I definitely think when we were like younger, we were convinced we were millennials, and now we're getting into our mid-20s. I'm more than happy to say we're strongly Gen Z.

Gabby, do you identify as a Gen Z? I am definitely a Gen Z. There's no way around it.

Talking about your Tumblr blog, I had a Blogger blog back in the day, which really was just my bread and butter in high school, and I cannot share the URL live because it's truly embarrassing, but it really was an exciting creative thing for me. How do you think about the difference of investing into the Gen Z community, Gabby, working with founders who resonate with that archetype? Do you think there's a difference in their expectations and what they're looking for in an investor?

The first thing is crypto and Web3 is especially because the community skews very young. A big reason for it is we all grew up online. We've all grown up with the internet. and there are parts of it that we love, and there are parts of it that we've really grown disenchanted by. We're quite scrappy and willing to hustle to get what we want. And so going to various like crypto conferences and meetups and things like that is always fun because for the first time I get to hang out with folks my age. One example is a company I've worked with recently that's basically a gaming company, very similar to Minecraft or RuneScape. It's meant for teenagers. and you can go on and you can play games and build your own home or land or metaverse, and you can talk with your friends through audio, and there's a currency in-game that can allow you to do all of these things. And when I was quote-unquote like diligencing this company, it was so fun because it reminded me so much of my time growing up on Minecraft. This company is pivoting into Web3 by tokenizing and adding real-world liquidity to this economy that is already existing within the game. And I think that step change was really interesting to see, and it just really resonated with me from my own childhood and this founder's own childhood as well. Generally, for what founders look for within the ecosystem, I really don't wanna speak for the entire ecosystem, but I think where I fit is I've grown up with you through this ecosystem, and I'm also existing really authentically within this space. Like, I'm in the Discords with you guys. I built a decentralized media network called DAM with a friend of mine, and building that and spinning out that community as well. And there's just like a level of mutual trust and respect that comes for people who are in this space full-time. The last thing I would say is our focus at the Chernin Group is really to act as translators from this transition from Web2 to Web3. The smartest people I know are building in crypto, but they're not necessarily the same people who built and scaled consumer products in Web2. And so this idea of How do you craft your messaging for your company? How do you scale a brand? How do you create content? How do you optimize SEO? All of these things are actually like not really conversations being had within crypto quite yet. And that's where we hope to fill in the gaps. And so that has been a message that has really resonated with founders.

I'm hearing you touch on so many components of community, whether it right now being in a Discord channel and like really being authentic, where it's having platform where a community owns really components of it. To the early days of social media and how we learned to build communities and build friends online. Could you talk to us about the concept of the modern friend?

Definitely. I wrote a piece because I was feeling very nostalgic for all of the modern friends that I had made this year. A modern friend is someone you meet online and then becomes a real friend. Honestly, it's most of my friends these days. I initially met online, which is crazy. And actually my partner at TCG, Jared, We were basically internet friends before we ended up working together. It's become very common for me, and I've gotten better at not being weird about it. I remember the first time I, like, hung out with my internet friends in real life. I was like, is this real life? But it's more normal now. I think the idea is, like, what I've been talking about this whole time is we spend so much time online that the concept of having a real life and a digital life are no longer two separate things. They're becoming increasingly blurred, and we should treat it as such. It's all one part of our identity. I think putting a name to it, the concept of a modern friend, is really great because it removes like the stigma. When you think about it, it's very interesting that for a long time, the only place where it was normal to meet people online and then bring them into real life was dating. It's so interesting to me that Tinder has not really been taboo anymore for years, but to meet a friend online and hang out with them is still quite taboo. And I think with anything, this is also true in crypto too. Messaging is so important and I think giving it a name, a modern friend, is really valuable. This is actually something real.

These are my friends. I'm obsessed with this new nomenclature I'll be using. What comes— is coming up for me though is the authenticity of who I am online versus who I am in person. I'm a little different in person. I am pretty much myself online, but I feel akin to the Instagram aesthetic of I need to be performative and I need to have a certain look and appearance online that's really professional or really fun and jovial and not necessarily like the real full me. It is a version of me and I am not putting out something that is inauthentic. But how do you think about reconciling like authenticity of your digital self with your IRL self? It's really true.

It's a good point. And I actually don't know if I have a good answer for this. I've had this conversation with my friends too. I told them I really do feel like I'm being authentic online, but it's just not the full version of myself. I'm authentic on Instagram and I'm authentic on Twitter and I'm authentic on LinkedIn too. But these are all different sides of myself and I don't know how to reconcile it all. Where I have settled for now, but I don't really have a fully fleshed out answer, is it's the same way in real life. You bring one version of yourself to work and you bring one version of yourself when you go out with your friends on the weekend and you bring one version of yourself when you're home with your family for the holidays. And these are all real parts of you and it's all authentic and it's like the combination of it all that makes the holistic version of you. What we see online is we are moving more and more towards more high fidelity or high resolution representations of ourself online. And you see that with, for example, like social audio, like now our voice is online too, or livestreaming. Now you get to see a little bit more raw and real parts of us without the editing. But I wouldn't say there's a perfect answer because I guess there's not really a perfect answer in real life either in terms of bringing your full self anywhere.

You're reminding me of that meme that I used to see where it was like photos of different people. It's like me on Hinge, me on LinkedIn, me on— I'm really interested to see how not only does our sort of presence online evolve with our existing platforms, but also curious to see how those communities continue to take shape in kind of the decentralized world for sure. Gabby, would love to shift gears a little bit and ask what's next for you? What are you personally excited about?

I just moved to New York 2 months ago and And I don't really feel like I really live here yet. I'm still doing all of the very touristy things. I'm excited to do all of those things and I'm excited to actually feel like I live here. Professionally, there's a ton of really exciting stuff happening from our end in terms of where we're investing. And so all I can say there is stay tuned. And mostly I'm just really excited for this next year. I think there was a lot of change in my life and in everyone's life with COVID I changed jobs and this new space that I'm working in and like living in. And so honestly honored to join this ecosystem of people who have been in it for longer than I have often, and I'm just excited to spend more time soaking it all up. We're excited for you as well.

I miss New York. Enjoy it. Do all the touristy restaurants. They're great. We ask this one question to every guest on our podcast. Who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

This one is easy, and it is my previous partner at Bessemer, Talia Goldberg. We actually have the same last name, which is why I first found out about her, but we're not related. The story goes back so far, so Right around the time that I was working in Israel, or maybe even before, my next-door neighbor— this is crazy, just bear with me— my next-door neighbor sent me an article about Talia, and he said, "Have you ever thought about venture capital? This girl looks like you, and she has the same last name as you and looks like she's crushing it. You should read this." And it was something like, maybe it was like Forbes 30 Under 30, or maybe it was like Talia getting promoted to VP or partner at Bessemer. But I read it and I was like, wow, she's a baller and I want to be just like her. So fast forward, like years went by, I was doing my own thing and I got my job at Chapter One and I was working in venture and I found my way to a 30-minute Zoom call with Talia. And I get on the call and I was basically saying, this is so embarrassing, but I'm actually a huge fan. I've known about you for years and I think you're so inspiring and you are such a powerhouse. Female in VC. She's just a powerhouse in VC in general, I think is important to note. And we had a really great conversation and there was actually a lot of things that we were interested in together. And she was the one who brought me over to the team at Bessemer and really made venture as a career a possibility for me. She's absolutely the best. I learned so much from her. I think if there's anything that I took away from working with Talia is how thoughtful she is. It's even like in the way that she speaks, you can tell it's really slow and deliberate and thoughtful. And anytime I'm like getting really excited about a deal and moving really quickly or like maybe not thinking about something in my life as deeply as I should, she's the one who always reminds me in the back of my head to slow down and be very thoughtful about the decisions that you make. And she continues to be a powerhouse. And so she's definitely had the biggest impact on me.

We must send this episode to Talia. Big shout out to her. It's awesome that you've been able to have that mentor at this juncture in your career. And hopefully we encourage all of our listeners to find the same kind of figures in their life. Thank you so much, Gabby, for joining us on The Room today. It was such a pleasure to hear about all of the super cool things that you're up to. And definitely listeners, follow her on Twitter. A lot of great content to check out there.

Thank you so much for having me.

It was a blast.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room podcast.

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See you in the room. All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The5EC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

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