I took some time off over the holiday break to reflect on the past year, and I realized it has already been two years since I joined the team at Laconia.
Two years ago, when I first joined the Laconia team, I shared why I fell in love with the team. From the outset, three core reasons simply set them apart. First, their values center on making venture capital more accessible and transparent. They actively break down the industry's traditional barriers through open office hours, education, mentorship, and honest feedback to founders. Second, their investment approach is practical and disciplined. They focus on backing mature founders who solve real business problems, and they provide hands-on support in sales acceleration, operational execution, and capital strategy. Finally, their commitment to diversity and inclusion isn't just talk; they've built it into every aspect of their operations, resulting in a diverse team and portfolio as well as a community of 1,500 venture fellows worldwide.
As 2025 comes to a close, I wanted to share some key learnings about Laconia and seed investing.
With wide reach and focused systems, we can source at scale
When I first joined Laconia, my constant question was: where shall I be spending most of my time? Can we find data to suggest that one source is better than another? I quickly learned that to avoid a stale and homogeneous pipeline, Laconia’s approach is to consistently and deliberately widen our reach and then apply rigorous order, ensuring we have a systemic and repeatable approach to meeting exceptional founders at scale.
I soon found myself sharing knowledge, mentoring founders, and collaborating with different communities that support early-stage founders. Some examples include:
Mentoring founders and giving a “friendly investor perspective” during open office hours with NextNYC, MIT, NYU Summer Launchpad, ERA accelerator, Center for Accelerating Financial Equity (CAFE) and many more;
Joining panels on seed investing market trends like J.P. Morgan StartOut Innovators Summit, Forum Venture: State of the Market and being a judge at HearstLab & the Female Founder Collective for the Built to Scale Pitch Demo Day, alongside Eastin Rossell of HearstLab, Claire Biernacki, of BBG Ventures and Rebecca Minkoff;
Hosting community events with brilliant co-investors in the seed stage, like our Female Founders Dinner with JPM Startup Banking and Rhian Horton of Stellation; Founders Breakfast with Lucy Deland of Inspired Capital and B2B Lunch with Lynx Collective.
Participating in quarterly coffee meetups with NextNYC, inviting co-investors such as Yuriy Dovzhansky of Visible Ventures, Nika Duan of inflect Health, and Priyanka Rao of Rackhouse
Working closely with ecosystem communities like the NYC EDC Venture Access Alliance and All Raise
Even making my first TV appearance at Sherveen Mashayekhi’s The Feedback Loop
Over and above spending time out with founders and investors across the ecosystem, we take cold inbound seriously through a structured intake and review process.
Our multiplier is the Venture Cooperative: a 1,500+ person fellowship across 30+ countries (80% from underrepresented backgrounds) that extends our reach and sharpens our skills. Fellows learn to source and evaluate companies, and they often become co-investors, collaborations, and even LPs. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have guessed I’d be teaching venture; now, I get to train the next generation and even make my first investment at Laconia directly through this community.
A meaningful share of our portfolio (roughly 40%) comes through these non-traditional channels (ecosystem events, Venture Cooperative fellows, demo days and direct inbound).
All of this activity may sound like a lot! But paired with deep relationships across hundreds of co‑investors, operators, and founder communities, our openness helps us meet teams early and surface non‑obvious opportunities in messy, mission‑critical industries like finance, healthcare, climate, and the built world.
Two years in and I am learning it is really just a structured serendipity of sorts: a wide funnel in, a rigorous filter out, and a butterfly effect that keeps expanding where great founders find us.
Being human really matters; it is why we win
I went into venture thinking that winning competitive deals would come down to negotiating the right valuations or terms (hello, law degree), or sharpening my negotiation skills (hello, career in sales). But what I have discovered is that founders are looking for a genuine human partnership, partners with whom they feel comfortable picking up the phone when things go south, not just for the nice photo ops.
In a world of automated emails from VCs, consolidation across VC funds, and “right to play” seed checks from multi-stage firms, being human has become our competitive advantage.
We run an efficient and transparent process, keeping the founders in mind. We turn the process on its head: we all meet founders for initial pitch calls, and if there is an initial fit, we immediately move to a meeting with the full investment team. The goal is getting to a ‘No’ as soon as possible if it is not a fit and only running due diligence when we are all interested, saving founders' time. We also focus on validating the value proposition by connecting founders with prospective customers (vs. focusing solely on speaking with existing ones), which means that whether or not we end up investing, we bring value from day one.
Our investment process also includes workshop-style meetings where we go through the operations and go-to-market of the business, and founders get to see who we are, how we think, and what working with us would be like.
I think of this as “Being human, where it counts”. It starts with our investment process and continues through the relationship. We care about our founders as people – their families, health, and lives outside work – not as a means to productivity, but as an intrinsic value. That culture shows up especially when things get hard. Founders see this in our first onboarding call, when the check has cleared and we want to know all about what challenges they are facing.
A story I loved hearing drives this home. When a portfolio company shut down right before the holidays with all of the founder’s relatives on the other side of the country, Jeff invited the founder to his own family’s Thanksgiving. No press. No performative posts. Just care. This humanity also drives better outcomes; when founders trust us, we can have the hard conversations early and fix what matters.
I guess that is why founders refer other founders to us and come back after exiting their first company with us, and why we win 97% of the deals we commit to.
Two years ago, I thought that winning would be all about negotiating; today, I know it is actually about being human.
Impact isn’t measured by check size
Before joining Laconia, I already knew size really doesn't matter; with boutique funds and a 4-person team, their reputation has already reached far beyond their size. That is why I joined them.
But having now sat on boards holding different roles (as a lead investor and otherwise), the thing I am most proud of is that no matter what size check we’ve written and how many years have passed, we support our portfolio founders relentlessly, even when everyone else may have moved on.
I have seen this firsthand in multiple cases. We don’t just post online when our portfolio companies are successful – we are also there when things get tough. In one example, a pre-seed founder with weeks of payroll left, but so much momentum and potential, needed someone to continue to believe in them and help them fight another day. While other investors may have decided to allocate their time differently, we doubled down. We made a soft landing plan in case we needed it, and then we pushed full-steam ahead with fundraising support. We believed in the founder, the opportunity, and the upside potential, and we supported them as they closed a very successful raise and surpassed a key inflection point.
In other examples, our now later stage founders, with multiple series A and B investors around the table, still come to us for capital strategy advice and introductions to future financing partners. They know they can always pick up the phone for advice, and they see us as a consigliere.
Two years in, I’ve learned that we have two important promises in this job. Our founders know that we always have their backs, regardless of the check size we write. And for our LPs, they know that we don’t give up. Maybe not all companies will succeed, but we will be sure to go down fighting.
Finding diamonds in the rough requires keeping an open mind
The last point brings us back to our core investment thesis and how it has evolved over the years.
While venture investing is often criticized for “pattern-matching” and chasing signals, trends, and hype, investing at Laconia has challenged my thinking and helped me work hard on keeping my biases in check. I’ve learned that by not over-indexing on pattern-matching, we bring a fresh perspective to finding unique opportunities.
Though we have had the same focus for ten years – companies that bring systematic order to complex workflows – the way in which this plays out has evolved, and I’ve learned that having a b2b software investment strategy does not mean only one thing.
Given that we manage small funds and aim for outsized results, we follow a few core principles. At our core, we focus on capital efficiency; business models with high margins and recurring (or re-occurring) revenue streams; and scalable go-to-market strategies that facilitate high-growth potential (such as one-to-many distributions and high contract values). These attributes inevitably push us toward b2b models over b2c, and software over hardware, but the core principles are more important than the superficial attributes.
When people see “b2b software”, they often think of classic SaaS businesses, such as sales & marketing enablement platforms, and overdone verticalized software plays. But two years in, I’ve seen that even within the constraints of what may sound like a vanilla investment thesis, there is both evolution and flexibility for finding interesting outlier businesses. For example, Laconia’s first fund had no healthcare companies, but in Fund III, about a third of the portfolio will be healthcare-focused. Our pipeline has also evolved beyond well-established categories like fintech to include AI-enabled platforms for uranium discovery, behavioral health models for drug development in neurology and psychiatry, and edge computing on satellites.
Two years ago, I did not think that investing in hyper-spectral satellite imaging for detecting nitrogen levels in wheat crops would be part of my resume, but it turns out that when applying a structured and disciplined process, you are forced to question preconceptions, challenge your thinking, and uncover truly overlooked opportunities.
What next?
2025 has been an exciting year so far! We celebrated our 10th anniversary with a beautiful blog series and a celebration at the iconic Katz’s Deli. As we gear up for our next chapter, it has been fun to go down memory lane of a decade of seed investing and take stock of all that we have accomplished. I am more than excited to continue to execute on the strategy we have been refining over the past decade and find serious founders building must-have technologies in mission-critical industries.
For me, some areas of interest include healthcare, workflow vertical AI, and financial infrastructure. If you are a founder, investor, or industry operator focused on those spaces, please reach out to me here!
