Image by Candice Navi
Here Are LA's Top VCs, According to Their Peers
Though Silicon Valley is still very much the capital of venture capital, Los Angeles is home to plenty of VCs who have made their mark – investing in successful startups early and reaping colossal returns for their limited partners.
Who stands out? We thought there may be no better judge than their peers, so we asked 28 of L.A.'s top VCs who impresses them the most.
The list includes many familiar names. Dana Settle, founding partner of Greycroft, and Mark Mullen, founding partner of Bonfire Ventures, garnered the most votes.
Settle manages West Coast operations for Greycroft, a New York firm with $1.8 billion in assets under management. She is one of only nine of the top 100 VCs nationally who are women, according to CB Insights.
Mullen is a founding partner of Bonfire Ventures, which closed a $100 million second fund in September to continue funding seed stage business-to-business (B2B) software startups. Mullen has also been an angel investor and is an LP in other funds focusing on other sectors, including MaC VC and BAM Ventures.
Below is the list of the top ranked investors by how many votes each received from their peers. When there was a tie, they appear in alphabetical order according to their last name:
Mark Mullen, Bonfire Ventures
Mark Mullen is a founding partner of Bonfire Ventures. He is also founder and the largest investor in Mull Capital and Double M Partners, LP I and II. A common theme in these funds is a focus on business-to-business media and communications infrastructures.
In the past, Mullen has served as the chief operating officer at the city of Los Angeles' Economic Office and a senior advisor to former Mayor Villaraigosa, overseeing several of the city's assets including Los Angeles International Airport and the Los Angeles Convention Center. Prior to that, he was a partner at Daniels & Associates, a senior banker when the firm sold to RBC Capital Markets in 2007.
Dana Settle, Greycroft
Dana Settle is a founding partner of Greycroft, heading the West Coast office in Los Angeles. She currently manages the firm's stakes in Anine Bing, AppAnnie, Bird, Clique, Comparably, Goop, Happiest Baby, Seed, Thrive Market, Versed and WideOrbit, and is known for backing female-founded companies.
"The real change takes place when female founders build bigger, independent companies, like Stitchfix, TheRealReal," she said this time last year in an interview with Business Insider. "They're creating more wealth across their cap tables and the cap tables tend to be more diverse, so that gives more people opportunity to become an angel investor." Prior to founding Greycroft, she was a venture capitalist and startup advisor in the Bay Area.
Erik Rannala, Mucker Capital
Erik Rannala is a founding partner at Mucker Capital, which he created with William Hsu in 2011. Before founding Mucker, Rannala was vice president of global product strategy and development at TripAdvisor and a group manager at eBay, overseeing its premium features business.
"As an investor, I root for startups. It pains me to see great teams and ideas collapse under the pressure that sometimes follows fundraising. If you've raised money and you're not sure what comes next, that's fine – I don't always know either," Rannala wrote in a blog post for Mucker.
Mucker has a portfolio of 61 companies, including Los Angeles-based Honey and Santa Monica-based HMBradley.
William Hsu, Mucker Capital
William Hsu is a founding partner at the Santa Monica-based fund Mucker Capital. He started his career as a founder, creating BuildPoint, a provider of workflow management solutions for the commercial construction industry not long after graduating from Stanford.
In an interview with Fast Company, he shared what he learned in the years following, as he led product teams at eBay, Green Dot and Spot Runner, eventually becoming the SVP and Chief Product Officer of At&T Interactive: "Building a company is about hiring correctly, adhering to a timeline, and rigorously valuing opportunity. It's turning something from inspiration and creative movement into process and rigor."
These are the values he looks for in founders in addition to creativity. "I like to see the possibility of each and every idea, and being imaginative makes me a passionate investor."
Jim Andelman, Bonfire Ventures
Jim Andelman is a founding partner of Bonfire Ventures, a fund that focuses on seed rounds for business software founders. Andelman has been in venture capital for 20 years, previously founding Rincon Venture Partners and leading software investing at Broadview Capital Partners.
He's no stranger to enterprise software — he also was a member of the Technology Investment Banking Group at Alex. Brown & Sons and worked at Symmetrix, a consulting firm focusing on technology application for businesses.
In a podcast with LA Venture's Minnie Ingersoll earlier this year, he spoke on the hesitations people have about choosing to start a company.
"It's two very different things: Should I coach someone to be a VC or should I coach someone to enter the startup ecosystem? On the latter question, my answer is 'hell yeah!'"
Josh Diamond, Walkabout Ventures
Josh Diamond founded Walkabout Ventures, a seed fund that primarily focuses on financial service startups. The firm raised a $10 million fund in 2019 and is preparing for its second fund. Among its 19 portfolio companies is HMBradley, which Diamond helped seed and recently raised $18 in a Series A round.
"The whole reason I started this is that I saw there was a gap in the funding for early stage, financial service startups," he said. As consumers demand more digital access and transparency, he said the market for financial services is transforming — and Los Angeles is quickly becoming a hub for fintech companies. Before founding Walkabout, he was a principal for Clocktower Technology Ventures, another Los Angeles-based fund with a similar focus.
Kara Nortman, Upfront Ventures
Kara Nortman was recently promoted to managing partner at Upfront Ventures, making her one of the few women – along with Settle – to ascend to the highest ranks of a major VC firm.
Though Upfront had attempted to recruit her before she joined in 2014, she had declined in order to start her own company, Moonfrye, a children's ecommerce company that rebranded to P.S. XO and merged with Seedling. Upfront invested in the combination, and shortly after, Nortman joined the Upfront team.
Before founding Moonfrye, she was the SVP and General Manager of Urbanspoon and Citysearch at IAC after co-heading IAC's M&A group.
In an interview with dot.LA earlier this year, she spoke on how a focus for her as a VC is to continue to open doors for founders and funders of diverse backgrounds.
"Once you're a woman or a person of color in a VC firm, it is making sure other talented people like you get hired, but also hiring people who are not totally like you. You have to make room for different kinds of people. And how do you empower those people?"
Brett Brewer, Crosscut Ventures
Brett Brewer is a co-founder and managing director of Crosscut Ventures. He has a long history in entrepreneurship, starting a "pencil selling business in 4th grade." In 1998, he co-founded Intermix Media. Under their umbrella were online businesses like Myspace.com and Skilljam.com. After selling Intermix in 2005, he became president of Adknowledge.com.
Brewer founded Santa Monica-based Crosscut in 2008 alongside Rick Smith and Brian Garrett. His advice to founders on Crosscut's website reflects his experience: "Founders have to be prepared to pivot, restart, expect the unexpected, and make tough choices quickly... all in the same week! It's not for the faint of heart, but after doing this for 20 years, you can spot the fire (and desire) from a mile away (or not)."
Eva Ho, Fika Ventures
Eva Ho is a founding partner of Fika Ventures, a boutique seed fund, which focuses on data and artificial intelligence-enabled technologies. Prior to founding Fika, she was a founding partner at San Francisco-based Susa Ventures, another seed-stage fund with a similar focus. She is also a serial entrepreneur, most recently co-founding an L.A. location data provider, Factual. She also co-founded Navigating Cancer, a health startup, and is a founding member of All Raise, a nonprofit that supports and provides resources to female founders and funders.
In an interview with John Livesay shortly before founding Fika, Ho spoke to how her experience at Factual helped focus what she looks for in founders. "I always look for the why. A lot of people have the skills and the confidence and the experience, but they can't convince me that they're truly passionate about this. That's the hard part — you can't fake passion."
Brian Lee, BAM Ventures
Brian Lee is a co-founder and managing director of BAM Ventures, an early-stage consumer-focused fund. In an interview with dot.LA earlier this year, Lee shared that he ended up being the first investor in Honey, which was bought by PayPal for $4 billion, through investing in founders and understanding their "vibe."
"There's certain criteria that we look for in founders, a proprietary kind of checklist that we go through to determine whether or not these are the founders that we want to back…. [Honey's founders] knew exactly what they were building, and how they were going to get there."
His eye for the right vibe in a founder is one gleaned from experience. Lee is a serial entrepreneur, founding LegalZoom.com, ShoeDazzle.com and The Honest Company.
Alex Rubalcava, Stage Venture Partners
Alex Rubalcava is a founding partner of Stage Venture Partners, a seed venture capital firm that invests in emerging software technology for B2B markets. Prior to joining, he was an analyst at Santa Monica-based Anthem Venture Partners, an investor in early stage technology companies. It was his first job after graduating from Harvard, and during his time at Anthem the fund was part of Series A in companies like MySpace, TrueCar and Android.
He has served as a board member in several Los Angeles nonprofits and organizations like KIPP LA Schools and South Central Scholars.
"Warren Buffett says that he's a better businessman because he's an investor, and he's a better investor because he's a businessman. I feel the same way about VC and value investing. Being good at value investing can make you good at venture capital, and vice versa," Rubalcava said in an interview with Shai Dardashti of MOI Global.
Mark Suster, Upfront Ventures
Mark Suster, managing partner at Upfront Ventures, is arguably L.A.'s most visible VC, frequently posting on Twitter and on his blog, not only about investing but also more personal topics like weight loss. In more normal years, he presides over LA's biggest gathering of tech titans, the Upfront Summit. Before Upfront, he was the founder and chief executive officer of two software companies, BuildOnline and Koral, which was acquired by Salesforce. Upfront backed both of his companies, and eventually he joined their team in 2007.
In a piece for his blog, "Both Sides of the Table," Suster wrote about the importance of passion — not just for entrepreneurs and their businesses, but for the VCs that fund them as well.
"On reflection of the role that I want to play as a VC it is clearly in the camp of passion. I really want to start my journeys only with people with whom I want to work closely with for the next 5–7 years or more. I only want to work on projects in which I believe can produce truly amazing change in an industry or in the world."
Lead art by Candice Navi.
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But as Ring expands its user base, it is also drawing increased scrutiny from privacy and social justice advocates who are concerned about the Amazon-owned subsidiary's partnerships with law enforcement agencies and reports of racial profiling by users of Ring's Neighbors app.
Ring Chief Technology Officer Josh Roth spoke to dot.la about Ring's product development process and how his company approaches privacy and neighborhood safety.
Since the Amazon acquisition, Ring has developed some integrations with the Alexa system and other Amazon products. Are there ways this relationship may become even closer in the future?
Ring Chief Technology Officer Josh Roth
At the end of the day it comes down to what we call a "better together" story. From our side, we can create better solutions and systems that aggregate devices in your home and give you a better way of leveraging those devices together—whether that's interactions between an alarm system and a light, or your Alexa acting as a sensor for other things. There's a tremendous amount of work to continue to iterate and improve on that. No doubt about it, there will be future integrations that continue to enhance that experience.
How much do you see Ring as a smart home company vs. a home security company? Are there ways you might use the tech stack you've developed in ways that move away from the home security focus you've had thus far?
Our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. I don't see that mission changing. We are a safety and security company. With that being said, things you may not think of as safety and security at the end of the day can become part of a safety and security system. An example of that would be anything that can give awareness about the state of a home. Your thermostat has home and away modes so that it can turn itself hotter or cooler depending on whether someone is at home. If you can integrate that into an IoT system to leverage that awareness and tie it to your alarm system, there's tremendous benefit for your safety and security. There's not always this cut-and-dry IoT space and safety and security space. The reality is that if you do things correctly, they actually merge into one.
And of course as more of these functions become automated, there's going to be growing concern about security. There have been some horror stories about hackers being able to spy on families through their Ring systems. How are you alleviating concerns that someone might gain access to a customer's footage?
Privacy and security are really foundational to everything we build. We start with a security and privacy-first mindset and then we try to introduce those features to our customers, and we try to do it in the quickest fashion possible. If you take a look back historically, Ring was the first in the safety and security space to require two-step verification; we were the first to introduce end-to-end encryption. Ring has never been breached, but we put things in place constantly to improve on security. Where we have to, we put in tighter controls. But when we do it, we make it extremely transparent to the customer. From my perspective, security is of the utmost importance, and I think everyone at Ring and Amazon would tell you the same thing.
You rolled out the end-to-end encryption feature earlier this year, but it's turned off by default. Why make it an opt-in setting rather than an opt-out?
End-to-end encryption implies that there's a key that can only be used by a very specific system or user. It requires us to actually turn off some features that our users actually like to have, because those keys can't be shared in all situations. For example, with the iteration of end-to-end encryption out there today you can't have a shared user. The reason for that is key management and how you would actually hand those keys off that shared user for a temporary or permanent amount of time, and which videos you would give access to. We opted to give something that was the most stringent control we could at launch, and to give the users asking for that the ability to turn it on—with the intent of iterating over time and adding more features like shared users.
There's a handful of items like that. Another use case would be a third-party integration. If you use Alexa, for example, to do video recall or to see who's at the front door, they don't have the keys because we don't have a method to pass the keys from a user's phone to Alexa devices. It would break our user promise around encryption and privacy. We really wanted to focus on the beginning experience of end-to-end encryption being as tight as we could, and then adding to it over time based on customer feedback.
How do you balance privacy concerns with the desire to give customers access to new features?
The baseline default experience that a user gets is the highest level of security that can be provided, and we constantly iterate and improve on that. I look at end-to-end encryption as an advanced security feature. I use the analogy of a hotel room. You have the top lock and you lock the door and you put the sign on the door. You may find you don't necessarily need all that, but it gives you peace of mind. So we want to offer that to our users. But the default standard encryption we provide still provides encryption in transit and encryption at rest. And we always examine it to see if we can improve on that. There is a tradeoff between end-to-end encryption and some of the features we know our users like. But I can tell you as a promise from Ring: We will always push toward providing more security and more options for our users with increased transparency. Any time we add something new they are going to have awareness of it. Any time we give them something around security, we're going to give them a choice to enable those items or not.
You mentioned that Ring's goal is to make neighborhoods safer. Is there an evaluation process as you add features to ensure that you are meeting this goal?
We believe in the power of the community and the power of the neighborhood. We also believe in the privacy of the neighborhood. In addition to privacy shutters on our cameras, we also have privacy zones. When you set up a motion zone, you can block out certain areas to respect the privacy of your neighbors if you choose to do so. Again, it's all put in the hands of customers for customer choice.
We also work with public safety agencies. We've been a great resource for COVID-19 information. We work with local fire and police departments. What that means is they have the ability to request videos (through the Neighbors app). They provide requests in a public way so that everyone is completely aware and it's transparent to the entire community what's being asked of them.
Those partnerships with law enforcement have been controversial. Are there ways you approach product development to ensure devices aren't being used as tools for mass surveillance?
Everything we do is customer first. Our customers are the neighbors who live in those neighborhoods. Our customer is not the police department. It's not the fire department. Our customer is the user who has a home, who's putting a Ring doorbell on their house. We start with that premise, and we build everything around that from a privacy and security perspective. Any time that there's anything involving a public safety agency, users have a choice and it's entirely up to them when and if they share information, when and if they share videos, when and if they work with those agencies. We've seen nothing but positive things come out of that. Kidnappings have been solved because of people working with neighborhood agencies. Neighbor advocates are helping track down things like package theft. We're big believers in people working together. We're big believers in customer choice.
Is there a limit to customer choice? Ring has said in the past it won't use facial recognition technology. What if customers want it? And are there other features that may be off the table?
It's a hard question to answer because I can't predict the future of what I haven't built yet. What I can tell you is we don't use facial recognition on any of our devices or services and we will never sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement. Privacy is so important to us. Anything we build will include these strong privacy protections for our neighbors.
We go through privacy reviews, legal reviews, customer reviews, and internal discussions. We make decisions as to whether we think the items we want to build meet the mission to make neighborhoods safer. Is it in the customer's best interest? Is it providing additional privacy, security, and transparency to the customer? If we can say yes to all of those things, I think we are able to build them. If we have question marks, we don't build them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Tim Ellis
Tim Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Relativity, the first autonomous factory and launch service for rockets. Relativity recently created the largest robotic metal 3D printer in the world and has tested our entirely 3D printed Aeon rocket engine over 180 times. Previously responsible for bringing metal 3D printing into Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, and a propulsion development engineer on Crew Capsule RCS thrusters, BE-4, and New Glenn. Alumni of USC and played a leadership role in launching the first student designed and built rocket into near space. Testified to the US Senate on commercial space policy and is the youngest member on the National Space Council UAG by nearly 2 decades, and directly advises the United States White House on all space policy. Has spoken at numerous conferences including CBInsights Aha! and TEDx. Relativity is backed by Playground Global, Social Capital, Y Combinator, Mark Cuban, USC, and Stanford.
Spencer Rascoff
Spencer Rascoff is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire and dot.LA, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. He is currently executive chairman of dot.LA and a board member at TripAdvisor. In the fall of 2019 Spencer was a Visiting Executive Professor at Harvard Business School where he co-taught the "Managing Tech Ventures" course. In 2015, Spencer co-wrote and published his first book, the New York Times' Best Seller "Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate." Spencer is the host of "Office Hours," a monthly podcast on dot.LA featuring candid conversations between prominent executives on leadership, diversity and inclusion, and startups.
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