珍妮Lefcourt

2023年5月23日

當珍妮Lefcourt談判的創始人,她常常發現他們是如此地忙碌賽車達到他們的目標他們忘了他們想要達到什麼或者為什麼——就像一個司機花所有的時間計劃目的地的最佳路線不知道為什麼他們超速在第一時間。“我認為理解他們所要實現的目的是最強大的,我可以問,“Lefcourt說。迫使創始人認為更多的故意,Lefcourt已經開發了一個框架,她稱之為“反向工程師成功的。”"It's really getting them to understand what's going to make or break their business and understand what success looks like, and then work backwards to make sure they're on that path," she said. Lefcourt has had considerable success of her own as two-time founder and now one of two partners (along with Dave Samuel) at the small San Francisco firm Freestyle, which is sector-agnostic and usually leads seed rounds with checks between $1.5 million and $3 million. Thanks to savvy early bets on BetterUp and Discord, Lefcourt catapulted from No. 74 to No. 34 on Insider's 2023 Seed 100 list and broke into the top three for Insider's Seed 30. Dropping out of Stanford In 1997, Lefcourt dropped out of Stanford's Graduate School of Business to start WeddingChannel.com, which aggregates gift registries of major retailers. She said she didn't think twice about leaving Stanford after she got a term sheet from one of Silicon Valley's leading venture-capital firms. "We couldn't wait a year to do it because the opportunity wouldn't have been there," Lefcourt said. "The impetus was a million dollars from Kleiner Perkins." Samuel invited her to join Freestyle for a part-time trial. "We got to date before we got married," Lefcourt said, using an analogy from her previous startups. Investing with conviction Lefcourt eventually made partner in 2015 and said she's most proud of her conviction in two nascent startups that "no other VC would touch them with a 10-foot pole." Those startups eventually raised new funding at much higher valuations. There was Narvar, a customer-loyalty tool, which she backed after barely a month at the firm. Lefcourt's biggest home run so far was in 2016, when she wrote one of the first checks into BetterUp. The professional-coaching platform was last valued at $4.36 billion when it raised Series E financing in 2021, but Lefcourt said other VCs initially looked down on BetterUp as involving too many humans and feared it wouldn't have software-like margins to vault it to venture-like returns. "A lot of people just didn't see the macro trend of how much companies were going to spend for coaching and how important that was to this next generation of employees," Lefcourt said. "I was OK with the fact that humans were involved in delivering that experience." Lefcourt has also written early checks as an angel investor into Discord, Main Street Hub, and Minted. And as one of a few women to ascend to the highest ranks of venture, she cofounded All Raise, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity in tech. As the tech market cooled in the past year, Lefcourt said she had slowed her pace of investing, but it's not because she doesn't want to put the firm's cash to work. "I'm hardily, hardily desiring to deploy," Lefcourt said. "It feels like a wonderful time to be a seed investor with a fresh fund, but I'm also still finding myself having a little bit more trouble finding opportunities where I have conviction."