Impulsum Ventures’ Ed Wilson on Skateboarding, Failure and Building a Startup

Minnie Ingersoll
Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at TenOneTen and host of the LA Venture podcast. Prior to TenOneTen, Minnie was the COO and co-founder of $100M+ Shift.com, an online marketplace for used cars. Minnie started her career as an early product manager at Google. Minnie studied Computer Science at Stanford and has an MBA from HBS. She recently moved back to L.A. after 20+ years in the Bay Area and is excited to be a part of the growing tech ecosystem of Southern California. In her space time, Minnie surfs baby waves and raises baby people.
Impulsum Ventures co-founder Ed Wilson
Image courtesy of Impulsum Ventures

On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Impulsum Ventures co-founder Ed Wilson talks about building the firm, supporting founders and the industries that Impulsum is funding.

Impulsum Ventures invests through its fund, which cuts checks of around $500K and focuses on health care, financial technology, and consumer. Impulsum also has a separate 30-person development studio staffed by engineers, designers, developers and product specialists called Impulsum Studios. Wilson said that the studio team often helps fill in the gaps for the companies in which he’s invested.


“When we focus on investing in a company, there is no obligation [...] that they need to use the studio in any way. It is just there to support them,” said Wilson.

Wilson credits his background in skateboarding with helping teach him the value of failure and testing what’s possible.

In skateboarding, he said, “there's this constant failure that you have until you actually land it and succeed.”

That’s the perspective he tries to bring to young startups in complex environments, where it’s not always clear what’s possible until experiments are conceived of and tried.

When companies come to Impulsum for insights, Wilson said he can pull together the appropriate team from his studio and come up with a suggestion for how they can improve.

But Wilson said they’re not just limited to giving advice.

“If you actually came to us and said, ‘Hey, we want you to build this thing for us.’ We would then say, ‘Okay, treat us like you would any other development studio that you were looking to hire to do that. We're gonna scope this out, we're gonna set a price for it,’” said Wilson.

Wilson said he’s keen to build relationships with the people at the startups Impulsum to whom writes checks.

“I'm a little bit old school in this, but it's on that like a one-to-one, just build relationships with people and really figure out, ‘are there ways that we can be helpful to each other?’,” said Wilson.

Wilson described his relationship with founders much like a friendship, with time constraints and a budget. His talks with them are usually centered around creating something useful together.

“We want people to make mistakes that we haven't made before,” he said.

Even if he doesn’t always agree with the directions his portfolio companies go in, Wilson said he thrives on being a supportive voice and someone who can help young companies and individuals think about their opportunities and problems..

“Something that can feel like it's catastrophic, really isn't that big of a deal,” he added. “And it can even lead to this incredible opportunity. But that only happens if you're able to keep a calm head.”

dot.LA Engagement Fellow Joshua Letona contributed to this post.

Hear the full episode by clicking on the playhead above, and listen to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.

The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All
Decerry Donato

As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is home to almost 5 million people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx. Yet, many feel they still lack representation in the city’s tech space.

“I can safely say that last year’s LA tech week hosted all of the events on the west side, and very few were focused on telling Latino and Latina entrepreneurial stories,” said Valeria Martinez, investor at VamosVentures. “We wanted to change that this year.”

Read moreShow less
LA Tech Week Day 3: Social Highlights
Evan Xie

L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.

Here's what people are saying about day three of L.A. Tech Week on social:

Read moreShow less

LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys
Decerry Donato

Women remain a minority among startup founders. According to Pitchbook, even though women-led startups in the United States received a record $20.8 billion in funding during the first half of 2022, U.S. companies with one or more female founders received less than 20% of total venture funding in 2022. U.S. companies solely led by female founders received less than 2% of the total funding.

The panel, titled Female Founders: Planning, Pivoting, Profiting, was moderated by NYU law professor Shivani Honwad and featured Anjali Kundra, co-founder of bar inventory software Partender; Montré Moore, co-founder of the Black-owned beauty startup AMP Beauty LA; Mia Pokriefka, co-founder and CEO of the interactive social media tool Huxly; and Sunny Wu, founder and CEO of fashion company LE ORA.

The panelists shared their advice and insights on starting and growing a business as a woman. They all acknowledged feeling pressure to not appear weak among peers, especially as a female founder. But this added weight only causes more stress that may lead to burnout.

“The mental health aspect of being a founder should not be overshadowed,” said Kundra, who realized this during the early stages of building her company with her brother..

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Kundra was surrounded by the startup culture where, “everyone is crushing it!” But she said that no one really opened up about the challenges of starting your own company. .

“Once you grow up as a founder in that environment, it's pretty toxic,” Kundra said. “I felt like I really wanted to be open and be able to go to our investors and tell them about challenges because businesses go up and down, markets go up and down and no company is perfect.”

Honwad, who advocates for women’s rights, emphasized the value of aligning yourself with people with similar values in the tech ecosystem. “[Those people] can make your life better not just from an investment and money standpoint, but also a personal standpoint, because life happens,” she said.

Moore, who unexpectedly lost one of her co-founders at AMP Beauty, said that entrepreneurs “really have to learn how to adapt to [their] circumstances.”

“She was young, healthy, vibrant and we've been sorority sisters and friends over the past decade,” she said about her co-founder Phyllicia Phillips, who passed away in February. “So it was just one of those moments where you have to take a pause.”

Moore said this experience forced her to ask for help, which many founders hesitate to do. She encouraged the audience to try and share their issues out loud with their teams because there are always people who will offer help. When Moore shared her concerns with her investors, they jumped in to support her in ways she didn’t think was possible.

Kundra said that while it is important to have a support group and listen to mentors, it is very important for entrepreneurs to follow their own thinking and pick and choose what they want to implement within their strategy. “At the end of the day, you really have to own your own decisions,” she said.

Kundra also said that while it is easy to turn to your colleagues and competitors and do what they are doing, you shouldn’t always follow them because every business is different.

“When I was in the heat of it, I kind of became [a part of] this echo chamber and that was really challenging for us,” Kundra added, “but we were able to move beyond it and figure out what worked for us [as a company] and we're still on a journey. You're always going to be figuring it out, so just know you're not alone.”

RELATEDEDITOR'S PICKS
LA TECH JOBS
interchangeLA
Trending