Mercedes Bent thought venture capital meant "vulture capitalism" in college. After working at Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve, she moved into startups around 2012 and discovered how funding actually worked, eventually becoming a Lightspeed partner.
Chapters
I would love to dive a bit into what initially sparked your interest for venture. You know, I first got interested in venture probably like 2017, 2018. In 20— like, I remember in college, like 2009, 2010, like I had no idea what venture was. Like, I remember telling my dad and I, I was like, this venture capital thing. He's like, That's vulture capitalist, 'cause like he was an entrepreneur. And so I was like, oh, that's a bad thing. Yeah. Okay, I won't go do that. And then I went into finance for a little while. I was at Goldman, I was working at the Federal Reserve, and I went to the startup world in 2012 and I started to get more exposure to it. And I was like, oh, okay, this is what people are talking about. Um, but I still thought as recently as 2015, like I knew startups got funded by VCs, but I thought you sent, like wrote up a business plan in like a Word document. Yeah. And you just emailed it to them and they would give you funding.