Power to the Adventurous
I’ve always been curious and appreciative of different cultures and different people. Even though I grew up in Washington D.C., both my parents are immigrants who moved to the United States from Venezuela.
Every year we’d spend a few weeks in Caracas, Venezuela and Margarita catching up with aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.
In America, I was always the Hispanic girl to my classmates.
In Venezuela, I was the American girl to my Venezuelan family members.
Oddly enough, I never felt out of place.
The things that made me not fit in perfectly were reasons to start conversations and jumping off points for people I met to ask me questions. I always found striking up conversations with people unlike me to be both fun and exciting.
It’s something I enjoy to this day when I meet with founders who have backgrounds that differ from my own.
Surrounding myself with new people and new experiences has become a fun adventure for me. In college, it would have been easy for me to dive into a study abroad program somewhere more comfortable, like South America, where I knew people and the language. Instead, I headed to Israel.
Change is a constant companion. We aren’t growing and stretching unless we strive to connect with different people about topics that are new to us.
Any new experience, at first, can feel awkward. It’s natural to doubt yourself and wonder why you ventured out of your comfort zone in the first place, but the rewards you reap from fresh experiences are so worth it.
I enjoy putting myself in challenging situations, ones where I’m a fish out of water, and then leveraging those experiences to connect with people.
Israel was amazing. I made lifelong friends (I met two of my roommates during that trip abroad) and my interest in entrepreneurship was beyond piqued.
When I was little, other kids would bond over TV shows in the cafeteria. Discussing what happened during recent episodes of Zoey 101, SpongeBob SquarePants or The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.
Those references were completely lost on me. That’s because the big TV treat night in my family was catching an episode of Shark Tank every Friday night.
We’d have lively debates about each episode over dinner. We’d buy the products and discuss their pros and cons.
The show facilitated discussions, which my parents loved, and sparked my affinity for founders, the process they go through to come up with an idea and the commitment it takes to bring a fledgling startup into the world as a viable business.
I love listening to people come up with ideas and thinking, “Will this idea work or not? If the answer is yes, how can we work together to make it stronger?”
During my sophomore year of college, I worked at a startup in Santiago, Chile that helps upskill women who never went to college.
Laboratoria teaches women everything they need to know in order to pursue careers as front and back end web developers including connecting them with startups who are actively hiring. Empowering women, especially in developing regions like Latin America, is a topic I’m passionate about.
Toward the end of college, I hit it off with a fellow University of Michigan alum who was an analyst at Insight during a job fair. We stayed in touch throughout the summer, I ended up interning at the firm and then joining Insight full time.
It provided me a wonderful opportunity to work with a number of companies like Blue Ocean, a brand monitoring tool that provides you actionable recommendations, and Pathlight, a performance intelligence platform.
Prior to joining CRV, I was at a Series A startup called Saturn which enabled students across hundreds of campuses to manage their time and stay better connected with friends. Working on the product operations team at Saturn gave me empathy for how hard it is for founders to build an amazing company.
Hands down, the people at CRV were what caught my attention. Conversation after conversation, I discovered that it’s a firm where people ask you about you.
It’s not just about business, which is rare. I felt like people cared about getting to know me, for me. Coming from an immigrant family myself, the diversity across the team members at CRV also really aligned with my values. In a way, from the initial interviews all the way through to today, the discussions I have with my teammates here at CRV feel as though I’m chatting with family.
At CRV there’s a commitment, not just to wanting to work with the best founders and pushing them through the funding round, but to supporting them over the long haul.
There’s a desire here to be a genuine partner and it’s not transactional. If I was starting my own company I’d want people to feel the way I felt, which is why I joined CRV.
As a kid, I played travel soccer very competitively and loved it because it was a team sport.
I have always been a team player - I enjoy camaraderie and working with several people to achieve something larger than myself.
CRV is an incredibly collaborative group which is something I truly value.
I enjoy working with founders who are hyper-aware of how real people use their products and are customer-centric by nature. Builders who don’t get their inspiration and create in a silo. I get excited when I come across customers who are obsessed with a product, and don’t just like it, but can’t imagine getting their job done without that product by their side every day. I’m interested in meeting entrepreneurs developing tools, like Slack and Zoom, that are critical to our day-to-day workflow. Products we need to function and platforms that become a daily delight for customers.
