S3E3: Founder & Funder Perspectives- The first fundraise featuring Maria Salamanca of Unshackled Ventures

Welcome to The Room Podcast. My name is Madison McIlwain and I'm a partner for seed stage investments at DefyVC.

And I'm Claudia Laurie, a co-founder of Pryve. We're a founder and funder who are in the room where it happens. If you're a first-time founder or an emerging venture capitalist, we're glad you found us. We share inspiring, authentic, and insightful stories from founders, funders, and operators who have been in the room and provide tactical feedback on their early aha moments and learnings along the way. Before we dive into this week's episode, we have a short message from our partners.

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On today's episode of The Room Podcast, Claudia and I sit down with Maria Salamanca, a partner at Unshackled Ventures. Maria moved to America from Colombia with her family as a child. She went on to attend UC Berkeley for undergrad and spent her senior year doing one of the coolest college internships, working for Mark Zuckerberg's lobbying group. Serendipitously, she joined Unshackled Ventures right as it was getting started in 2015. Named by Forbes 30 Under 30 in VC, Maria became a partner at Unshackled earlier this year. For those who aren't familiar with Unshackled Ventures, They were built to back revolutionary companies founded by immigrants. The fund's focus is pre-seed stage investing with a twist. They support entirely immigrant founders and lean in to help navigate the chaos of founding a company, which is typically amplified by inherent challenges in America's immigration system. Before we jump into our conversation with Maria, Claudia and I take a step back and examine her own pre-seed raising process to set the stage for Maria's expert advice. In today's episode, we unpack the pre-seed round, discuss the unique experience of being an immigrant founder, and the value of time versus money at the early stages. Let's open the door. Hi, Clauds.

How's it going?

Not too bad. Excited about what we have in store today.

I know we are going to be testing out a new style of podcast where we're talking about the issues that I face as a founder and many other founders, and also get your take as an investor on a lot of these topics. So today I think we're gonna be talking about fundraising.

I'm so excited. These are questions that we get DMs about. We have friends texting us about all the time, and I think today's conversation is gonna be really fun to orient us about probably what is one or the first of many conversations we'll take a deeper dive into on this elusive pre-seed round.

Yes, absolutely. And for our listeners, I think one of the first intersections between a founder like myself and an investor like Madison is during a pre-seed round or our first round of funding. Madison, can you tell our listeners what a pre-seed round actually is?

I love that you started with that because I don't think about it that way, but you're right. This is oftentimes people's first opportunity to meet venture capitalists or meet investors, capital I. So it's an interesting framework because I obviously spend a lot of time with investors all day long, but sometimes we can be intimidating. Other times people have fundraised before, so they're pretty used to the rodeo. But if you have never raised venture capital before, or you don't really have the means to raise what sometimes is known as a friends and family round, which can be a precursor to the traditional seed, people think about doing a pre-seed round. And I think of pre-seed rounds as being usually pre-product, probably around the ideation stage of, wow, I have this idea that is keeping me up at night every night, and I just can't even do my regular job that I'm probably still doing because I'm So excited about what opportunity lies ahead in fintech or real estate or e-commerce infrastructure. So you're at the precipice of what could be a company, but it might not be more than an idea. It might be a 14-page write-up. It might be wireframes. It, you know, quite frankly, it might be a full product that is in beta or in the App Store. It can vary based on the entrepreneur, but really pre-seed capital is backing great people with solid ideas and amazing recommendations and track records in their professional career who investors at at that stage know that what they're backing is gonna change 15 times before the Series A, but are excited to be on that journey with those founders from day one.

I think that's such a great explanation because I remember before I fundraised or even thought about fundraising, I had heard many friends of mine go through their first pitches and they would go on walk and talks with investors. I had a lot of assumptions as to what that was and what that looked like, which were all very quickly debunked as soon as I started fundraising. I like how you sort of mentioned that. There's really no right answer to when is a good time to raise a pre-seed. I think a lot of people always feel like their ideas are not formal enough or they're not far enough along in order to raise a round, but I would challenge aspiring founders that that's often not the case. And I think that was very much true in, in my case.

It is funny how you call out these little moments where it doesn't feel like you're going to fundraise, and then all of a sudden it just hits you over the head because you realize that what you want to build is needs capital to do so, and there's just an opportunity to find the right people to help you on that journey sooner rather than later. What changed about how you approach these conversations after you realized they weren't just theoretical, they became real?

One advice that I have to founders is that things will happen really quickly and fundraising will happen really quickly, and then all of a sudden you're pitching to Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz and you really should be prepared for that. I would definitely urge founders who are even starting to talk to angels, just read up on what it's like to pitch and start to think about your storytelling and start to think about your mission, because I think you'll need to be equipped with those soundbites and storylines because those conversations might sort of evolve incredibly quickly. But to answer your question, Madison McIlwain, when I realized that we wanted to start fundraising formally because we knew that we needed funding to really accelerate the growth of this, this company, to hire, to get resourcing. It really became formal pitches and we came to the table saying, hey, we'd love to chat with you, Investor ABC. We have this idea. Let me send you a pitch deck. Can we set up time? And that's when we started really thinking, okay, everything that we say is incredibly important. I think we mentioned in a previous episode that you lose people after 8 seconds. I don't know if it's exactly 8 seconds, but something like that. And so I think you start to become incredibly intentional about your leading message, having structure. And I mean, you can look online of all these different pitch deck templates and guidelines, but truly having that quick story has to be sort of thought through because you can't really go into a conversation with a senior partner who's looking to sort of fund you without that structure. Great.

And you're really just selling a story at that point because I know when you were raising for Priv, uh, you'd had You definitely had some mockups and you had a really good handle on what the product would look like down the line, but you hadn't actually built it in production yet. It was an idea and it was a story and it was you and Alex and what you could build, which you guys are incredible. So it's no shock that you were able to raise, but if you were on the outside looking in, it's crazy, right? It's normal. I think today might not have been normal 10 years ago, but people do raise on ideas. And so I think from from my perspective as an investor, I would really encourage people who do have ideas to go start having those conversations because A, you never know where they'll, they'll go. And you also might learn quicker about whether or not the idea has legs because we see hundreds of pitches a year and we might have a perspective on whether or not a million people are already doing that. And therefore you might wanna try a different idea or your insight's so unique that you should definitely go after it. I tend to think early investor conversations, whether they yield to an investment, are hopefully fruitful dialogue because they can help you understand what the market thinks about your idea, maybe even before you decide to raise.

Yeah, there's a really important piece around relationship building. Almost all of my pitches were through introductions from people that I knew, friends. When you have the opportunity to chat with an investor, even if you don't think that you're necessarily ready, What's the worst thing that can happen? They get to know you, you form a relationship, and maybe in a few months' time when you are ready, they'll be more than happy to set up a time to pitch. So I do think there is value in definitely building those relationships early. To your point around feedback, I think that's so critical. I think a lot of people hold onto an idea, build it for a year and a half, finally feel like they're ready to pitch to investors and no one's biting. And then you have a lot of people, like a couple of old coworkers of mine went through YC on an idea, pivoted 3 times, and now because they've gotten all of that feedback through YC, they have traction and are actually building something that the market thinks is exciting and investors are eager to hop on board. So major plus one to that point.

Oh, I'm glad. I'm glad to hear that that resonates with my founder in the room. One thing that I saw you do that was super tactical that I really admired and felt like was absolutely the way I would want to run a fundraise if I was on the other side of the table was this incredible spreadsheet that you and your co-founder had built around everyone you had talked to. You wrote where they were in the process, either first meeting, second meeting, term sheet, and then you also had the passes on there and people who said, we're not interested in this at this time for these reasons. You now are armed with the data to go back to those investors in a year or 2 years or 5 years and say, hey, when we spoke to you then, this was your concern. And by the way, we've beaten your concern and now we're solving for this problem. Really because of your feedback, or maybe even we've just solved it. I love that you did that, and I would encourage any entrepreneur to do that going forward in any fundraise, but especially in your first. What did you think about that process for you?

I think it was incredibly helpful. And two pieces of, I guess, my two top pieces of feedback. One, really learn from every pitch. What made my fundraise easier over time and eventually successful was that after every single pitch, especially when there were passes, my co-founder and I sat down and for 30 minutes we would brainstorm on why that was the case. How could we tell a story better? Maybe there was a serious issue that we needed to think through more. And I think a lot of people who go raise for their first time will just heads down, go through 30 pitches and have the same script. And then they wonder why nothing sort of came of it. I think the early nos are the most important pitches because that's when you can actually troubleshoot and make the changes in time so that when you continue pitching, you are telling a better story and the pitch is stronger and there's going to be much better feedback later on. So my number one tip to founders is like, be very critical of how you can improve after every single pitch. My other piece of feedback is really think through objection handling. I think another thing that's really valuable through those early pitches and those early nos is that you will get the hard questions and the, how does this make sense? Or have you thought about this? And I don't know about this. And those are those questions that are going to keep coming up. So take those, write them down, think through the answers. And then when an investor even probes at something, just because they're trying to see how thought through your thinking is, you will then be able to come back with a very strong response. And I think that will make it or break it at the end of the day.

So helpful. So tactical and tangible. Thank you for sharing those two insights. I'm really excited for the rest of our conversation today because we are going to have Maria Salamanca from Unshackled Ventures coming on to talk to us about how to raise a pre-seed round and what Unshackled Ventures' mission is in the pre-seed space and how she's recently become a partner there. I'm excited for all the wisdom that she's going to bring to the table.

What's also really cool with Unshackled is that it's a fund that's focused at immigrant founders, and that's a set of founders that are often underlooked and often don't really know like the tips and tricks on fundraising because they didn't necessarily grow up in the States and understand what the ecosystem looks like. So I think she's going to have some pretty interesting sort of stories and advice.

Awesome. Let's welcome Maria. Maria, thank you so much for being with us here today in the room.

Yes, I'm so excited to be here.

So we're very excited to have you. Starting off a little bit about your background and your story, uh, you are recently made a partner at Unshackled Ventures, but you've been there for the past 6 years. Tell us a bit more about your early career and how you ended up in venture.

A lot of the folks that joined venture around my time when it was not quite as clear of a like path out of school, ended up here by accident in a way. I definitely don't come from a very traditional venture-ish background from back in what the old guard of venture looked like. So I was born in Colombia, I'm an immigrant, came to Florida with my parents when I was 6 years old, and this is where I grew up in Orlando, Florida. My immigrant story in particular is my family were refugees, so political asylum is one of the paths into being here in the US long-term, and Colombia at the time was pretty rough, but it was in a weird way, so was luckier than most because I happened to come from the right country at the right time when refugee status was available to us. Obviously there's hundreds, if not thousands or millions of immigrants every year that probably come from equally troubling countries or in danger that can't do that. So do— did feel fairly lucky. It was an easy process. I didn't become a citizen until I was 18. So I was a senior in high school. So it was a very long process to go through. But I did feel a big responsibility. And, and so I think as, as a kid, the most things you could do is probably be a good student. So really did that, just, just be decent at school and, and go to a good college, headed off to Berkeley. I went into Berkeley really set on being pre-law and decided through many trials and errors of, of internships at the public corps as well as like law firms that it was probably not gonna be for me. I was like, a little bit more of a chaotic agent, and, and that I like to work in chaotic and like just work environment, small teams, and definitely not very hierarchy-led. So learned that law was definitely not the way I wanted to go. I like, I definitely like the, the culture of, of building something fast and, and learning and iterating, and the legal profession's not as big on the iteration part. But I did fall in love with everything that was at the intersection of policy and tech. I thought that there was some really interesting things happening. Obviously I really cared about all things immigration and And I think it was one of like really early times when a lot of tech CEOs and VCs had started being outspoken about immigration reform and how important immigrants had become to like the, the tech community and ecosystem in Silicon Valley. And so there was an organization that had just started called Forward.US that was actually started by Zuckerberg, his roommate from Harvard, Joe Green, and then a couple of founding partners like Bill Gates and Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman that were stepping up to lobby DC around immigration reform. And so I really wanted to work there. I was like, I, I like what they're doing. It seems like all these people are super accomplished. Sent them a really just cold email at the time being like, look, done a little bit of everything. I got really lucky that the chief of staff of the president at the time emailed me back. And so joined him for my entire senior year at Berkeley. Our team was focused on special projects, all things Zuckerberg might have going on in terms of the organization or, uh, relationship management. Did that for that year and then my boss Manny got pulled in by the Hillary campaign. Definitely knew I wanted to move more towards the tech and VC world, and so asked Manny, I was like, who do you know in VC? Like, who, who should I talk to? And he made the intro to the two founding partners at Unshackled. Unshackled was just getting started as a fund. I joined as the first community and investment person that was going to do a little bit of absolutely everything. And so 6 years later, I, I've done everything you can think of. We're going into fund 3, so we definitely learned a lot about what it takes to build a fund as well as help founders build companies.

From a cold email to partner, that is an incredible story of how you had an idea of what you wanted and you went after it, and it has gotten you to an incredible position of authority and power and voice. So really cool to see that journey for you, and thank you for sharing a little bit of that path, right?

It looks so much more clean after the fact, but we know it's a messy— it's, it's not, it's not clean.

I think that's a theme we've heard from almost all of our sort of founders and other investors we've interviewed. It, it always looks good on LinkedIn.

It's not as always clean and up and to the right as it comes across. And you're helping founders, uh, at Unshackled in the earliest days of their fundraising and entrepreneurship journey, specifically focused in pre-seed. But as a whole, Unshackled has a really unique thesis that clearly sits close to your heart around investing in immigrant founders. Tell us a little bit more about Unshackled as a venture firm and its mission.

And in retrospect, I'm incredibly thankful for like having the chance to grow something and, and build something and, and something that's a little bit more mission-driven to who I was. But yeah, the fund obviously was getting started and the idea that the partners had was there's a, a massive opportunity if we look at just the data, Fortune 500 companies, uh, unicorn startup founders. Anywhere, depending on the year that you look at the data, 40 to 50% of them are immigrant founders or first generation. And so it's definitely not a population that is 40 to 50% of the US population. So clearly they, they over-index in entrepreneurship startups, tech startups just being one part of that. Obviously we see it across many things, including everything related to small businesses. And so there's definitely a lot of data on all things small businesses and now a lot more on entrepreneurship, but Really, the opportunity being that similar to other underrepresented groups or minorities like women or folks of color, immigrants definitely have similar lack of access to certain things, right? A network, right? Like the first, the family or friends round in terms of capital, as well as the network that that family and friends might be able to introduce. And then the third part is there's a big pain point on all things immigration. Immigration process. And, uh, like system is incredibly confusing. It takes many years to figure out, and founders have a lot of things to focus on and, and time is the most valuable thing. And, and immigration is the definition of time suck. It just will take all your time if, if you really try to figure it out. And there's obviously a lot of restrictions. Most of our visas are not designed for people to come here to start companies. They're designed for them to go to school, to work at companies that are sponsoring them. To become, like, come in as investors, uh, come as job creators in a very old school way of defining job creators, which is like you're hiring 10, 15, 20 people, which we know as startup in day one is not hiring that amount of people. So it's pretty just old school archaic system. And the fact the GPs really saw an opportunity to create a fund that was uniquely structured to support these founders legally as an entity, we are structured in a way where we can support visas. We have an in-house legal counsel that helps Founders figure out what is like the short-term strategy to work full-time on their company, long-term strategy, which is how do they stay in this country. And I think we're probably the only fund that does that in the country right now.

A lot of what you just mentioned really resonates with me because I'm also not American. I came from Australia and then my co-founder is from Canada. Luckily I'm a permanent resident, but my co-founder's not. So during company formation, we spent so long trying to figure out H-1B transfers. Can we look at this other visa? Our first hire that we intended to bring on was, you know, from Turkey and also had a bunch of immigration issues. And we looked at our expenses for our first quarter and 90% of it was, was legal fees. So I, I personally resonate with, with a lot of what you mentioned.

That's something we're seeing as well, that obviously because their networks are not always US-based, a lot of the early team hires are not US-based. So it's usually a problem that trickles down into not just the founding team, but employees, like the first employees will need some support and, and like that institutional knowledge is not really held at the VC level. Most VCs are like, talk to an immigration counsel, but we have an in-house immigration person. And so when you get an investment for us, you're, you don't pay legal hours. So the time that lawyers spend working on your case, which is what really adds up time-wise, that all that stuff is covered by us and founders don't have to worry about it, which is it. I mean, we've run the numbers. It can be like, and we have at any given point, we're trying to figure like 2 to 3 different visa types for a founder. If you add the hours, it can be close to like $100K to $200K. uh, per founder of expenses, just in legal hours.

That's incredibly unique what Unshackled is offering in the market. And even though you're only 6, 7 years old as a firm, you've really created such a name for yourself in the founder community. I've had the pleasure of meeting a couple of your founders as they've come up for Series A raises, and I've just been overwhelmed by the positive affirmation they have for the Unshackled team and all that you've done for them. Answered half the question I was gonna ask next, But Ella, if there's anything else you wanted to add, how do you work with your founders?

The difference on the support, and it's like, it's really hard to like define or quantify without having, if you're not that immigrant founder or like, uh, I'm sure a lot of funds that focus on, on folks of color or women maybe feel the same, but just having a community of folks that like understand you, like we've noticed that there is a difference in the way that immigrant founders think about the, the company building playbook.

When I started fundraising and I'm also, I, I think I'm very lucky. I, I went to school, I came to to the US when I was 6 from Australia. So I think I had a lot of the benefits of growing up here, but I would ask my parents for, you know, advice on fundraising and they had a very different world context. Same with my co-founder. But I think I was very lucky to have close friends who were plugged into the venture community, gave me a lot of advice. And ultimately I felt like a lot of the knowledge that I learned fundraising was really passed down through other people who were in the know in the industry. And I had imagined that If you didn't have that network, I think you're definitely handicapped going into that process. I think one thing that was really interesting for me was knowing when to fundraise and when the right time was. I would love to get your thoughts. What does a pre-seed round mean to you and what unique challenges do you feel that immigrant founders have when approaching their first fundraise?

Pre-seed to us really is so much less about how much you're raising at what cap and so much more of where you are in that company journey. So it is at the point where you probably have a team that is, is committed to this. You have some certainty on a market need or customer problem and have built some frameworks on how you're going to go about proving that. And so the de-risking a couple of things: one, customer willingness to pay, and two, the customer segmentation. And so most of the founders at Pre-Seed, like our conversations when we talk to the founders that we're, uh, evaluating are so much less on like monetization, business model, like metrics. Like we don't even touch that that much. We touch so much more on like, with this amount of money, you have to prioritize X, Y product features, like which ones and why, like what customers are you prioritizing versus the other? What's your perfect customer persona? Have you like come to like define that yet? Or how are you gonna go about defining your customer persona? Willingness to pay and how you're thinking about pricing. So we bet so much more behind a team's frameworks or problem-solving abilities to like de-risk. I'm a main, like, I'm a really strong believer that the main thing capital buys you is time. So we spend a lot of our conversations with founders understanding how they will use time, not money. And I think that's the biggest difference from what we consider pre-seed to later stage, at which point when, when you are putting a lot of money for some type of growth or some type of proving out sales, right, you hopefully want to see what my money gets me in terms of money long-term. Like there is some multiplier that you wanna see there versus for us, we know that what we're putting in is some money, but really ultimately is we are buying you time. And so we wanna know where that time is going, where does, what is the, the time multiplier that comes from that?

[Speaker:MADISON_MCILWAIN] That's a really helpful framework for folks who are thinking about fundraising or who are currently going through a fundraise. I just went through one a few months ago and as I keep mentioning, it was quite a learning experience. Madison McIlwain, I would love to now focus on some tips and tricks from your perspective for our listeners who are maybe going through a fundraise. What are your top tips for thinking about going after a venture capital raise?

Different funds have different cultures and things that they look for. And I think obviously it's really hard when you're a founder to go into the depths of research of every fund. But I would say as you narrow down your top, like ideal funds, like really your dream team and board and what that looks like. Like, definitely do your homework there, right? Like, we, we know what we look for as a fund. Like, we at the early stages know that we look for speed of execution, relentless prioritization, the ability to like define the toughest problems to de-risk. Most funds have built some internal institutional knowledge, good or bad, pattern matching or not, that lets them get to a point of conviction or not. And I think it's really important for founders to understand how might that be different. It's like unfortunate because I think founders go to raise their seed or their Series A and they think, okay, like, as long as we have these 10 things on the checklist, we should be okay. But the reality is that every fund analyzes those 10 parts of the checklist totally different, and they prioritize all 10 things on that checklist totally different. There's definitely some research to be done at the very least. Obviously you're not going to go research all 100 funds that you're going to talk to, but at Either the first conversations you have or the last conversations, if you're really towards the end of it, it's not working out, but you have like 10 more, more shots at the goal, or you're just like your top investors that you would love to have, like really do your research on, on, on the investor individually and the fund. I think the other one that I, I, we definitely recommend to our pre-seed founders is to do different grouping of investors. Like don't just do back-to-back meetings for 3 weeks of all kinds of investors. Try to group them into similar stages, similar similar, like, approaches. Time in between, like, give yourself, like, a couple of days in between the different groups to do some iteration and learning and feedback loops. Because if you don't raise by, like, your 50 meeting, you would need a pause to learn why not, and then rearrange.

I was gonna add, Claudia and I were talking about her tips from her pre-seed raise right before we got on with you, and that was one of her tips was carve out 30 minutes after your 30-minute pitch to restass with your co-founder and understand what works and didn't work. And I would just add also as an investor that I think that's an incredible idea, partially because we schedule 30 minutes because we like to reserve our time. But if the conversation's going well, it may go over 30 minutes. And so it's nice to always bookend that pitch with an extra 30 minutes just in case. And I love the flip side. If it doesn't go over, you have time carved out for you and your co-founder, or even yourself to do some self-reflection.

Definitely. And it doesn't have to be immediately right after, like maybe it's at the end of the day, maybe it's every 2 to 3 days, maybe it's after 1 week of, of sprint. But having the, the time to carve out what, what is noise, what is actually signal and, and learnings is important because you have, it's, it should be an iterative process. It's, it's very unlikely that you nail it right out of the bat from the first 2 calls. Not saying founders don't do that, but it's much harder because you raise every 18 to 24 months. So it's, you gotta get back into it. And so So it's totally normal and you should be giving yourself time to like just iterate on the process.

I deeply resonate with that tip for sure. Speaking about the pitch specifically, what's one thing that founders commonly do in a pitch that you would, you would advise them not to?

I imagine this has been said before, but we don't usually run through pitch deck during meetings. We feel like it's very distracting in the actual meeting. Especially in the earlier stages, because we're really trying to get to see how you think on your feet, how to like, how, what the rapport is between us and the team. And so pitch deck is something that we, we as a fund should be looking at before the meeting and after the meeting, like we should come prepared and do our homework. The best VCs do instead of doing it during it. So I should walk into a meeting, I have some, some questions that I wanna dig deeper into from the deck. And usually the deck really is that introductory teaser part of the conversation. I think if you walk a VC through the deck for the first meeting, knowing my, my peers and colleagues, folks get bored, lose attention. VCs are not the most patient folks. They will skip to what they wanna see. They'll hear what they wanna hear and miss everything else. And so really figuring out what are, what are the headlines that you wanna bring and make sure you highlight that in the conversation without really doing like a whole deck is, is probably my, my biggest recommendation, at least at the early stage.

Yeah, and I think that's especially important, especially in the remote context where it's really difficult to build that relationship beforehand. I think back to the most successful pitches I've had with funds started with a more personal call, and then if it was going well, then maybe there would be a more formal pitch, um, to a broader audience at a later stage. Related to that, Zoom fatigue is really rough, especially when you have maybe 5 back-to-back pitches a day. Do you have any tips for founders going through a remote fundraise?

Yeah, I, I think definitely spending a little bit of time either at the beginning or at the end to like bring it back to like the people and the person, getting people out of the transactional mindset of like meeting to meeting. I think founders that connect with you or make the space to, uh, get to know you or get to know the fund, a little bit of lightheartedness never hurts. Obviously keeping it professional, but still just connecting with like human to human. Otherwise, yeah, meeting to meeting can get exhausting and I think folks zoom out of like the person to person and focus so much more on like, okay, like action items and whatnot. So sometimes you need to shake the individual to be like, okay, let's, let's chat like person to person.

That's helpful feedback. We're coming up on time and our final question, Maria, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you?

One of my mentors and, and trusted individuals is, is Jennifer Carolyn at ReachCap. She's forever been a, a big supporter of, of me. I think I, I tend to remember folks that like give you the time of day when you're like no one and you're like just entering this crazy world of venture. And she was always just such a good person and human and individual who took me seriously from, from day one. And that was like such a refreshing feeling to have back then. But I think she, like, her background is incredibly impressive, right? Like in a non-traditional, in a good way that I think makes her a fantastic investor, right? Like she came, she was a teacher in public schools for, I wanna say like like 7, 10 years and went to Stanford for education and learned the craft of venture and runs her fund in, in a way that's very people-centric and like human capital-centric as, as like a teacher would. And I mean, built a fund around the future of work, future of education, and like the future of like human capital. And so that's, that's just incredible. I think it's, it's one of the few GPs that were able to come bring that together and, and do it in a very successful fund. And so I'm like excited to, to have her my corner for always.

She sounds incredible. We'll have to have her on The Room.

You totally should.

Maria, thank you so much for being here with us today. It was such a pleasure to have you on and for sharing all of these incredibly helpful insights and for your sharing your story.

Yeah, thank you ladies for having me.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room Podcast. If you're new here, please subscribe, follow, write us a review, or DM us on social. We'd love to say hi. We've had some pretty incredible guests over the past 2 seasons, so go check them out. We'll be back next week with an all-new episode, Tuesday, May 25th, 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific. 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 The5AC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

Support for The Room comes from Silicon Valley Bank.

What's next? What if? Now what?

Silicon Valley Bank understands these questions can keep founders up at night like Claudia. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has helped high-growth companies through scalable financial solutions, plus insights and expertise that many other banks just can't, which could be why 50% of US-based venture-backed tech Tech and life science companies bank with SVB. Learn more at svb.com/next. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next.

Cooley is a global law firm built around startups and venture capital. The firm has been devoted to entrepreneurs and investors, partnering with both to transform breakthrough ideas into successful companies. Cooley works with thousands of entrepreneurs and newly formed companies to ensure that they are structured for growth and long-term success. Since 2005, Cooley has been ranked the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Learn more about the firm at cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com, Cooley's award-winning free legal resource for startups.