Illuminate Ventures

“Our second IPO was coupon, which was the second largest IPO of the year in 20, 21.”

“Meaning, they write the script and say, here's the email, just send to Sarah Fryer, who's now the CFO of OpenAI next week, who's been an advisor to us for 10 years, and I just put my personalization on it and off it goes.”

“We have three companies in our portfolio right now. With husband and wife team co-founders. One of which right now returns the entirety of our fund to at its current valuation and the other two doing extremely well.”

“We actually reopened our fund to bring them in, so it was really the final close, and then, of course, they became the anchor for our next fund, and we had the good fortune to have a wonderful relationship with them now in our third fund as well”

“They'll be the next unicorn in our portfolio.”

“And lo and behold, we've ended up across the years now with three dozen or more investments we've made. 90% of those have diverse teams. And nearly half of them have a woman as one of the co-founders, which we're obviously very proud of and very excited about.”

“The male and the female entrepreneurs responded to a long set of questions, almost identically. But when you ask the VCs, the question is a male or a female, what are the most important attributes first stack rank them? And then is a male or a female more like…”

“That group today is 45 people. Across them, they sit on over 100 public company boards. And they've sat on more than 250 private company boards.”

“They're really not only proactive about it, But they provide us with the tools that we need to make it easy for us to do. Meaning, they write the script and say, here's the email, just send to Sarah Fryer, who's now the CFO of OpenAI next week, who's been an a…”

“Is that the returns that you can achieve at seed stage investing are enormous and they are at a higher level of probability. It's at the simple, it's simple math. It's the law of numbers. It's no different than saying, can I get a, two X return on a house? I p…”

“That company is, has increased revenue, more than six fold in six years. And I should say, sorry, start over a 60 fold in six years.”

“Most of them are also LPs in our funds, those that don't have a conflict.”