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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Once a Moonshot, Los Angeles' Venture Scene is Bigger Than Ever
Los Angeles has long taken a back seat to San Francisco when it comes to investing in and incubating local companies, but in recent years the venture capital scene in Silicon Beach has exploded.
Greycroft Partners co-founder and partner Dana Settle told dot.LA co-founder Spencer Rascoff during the second annual dot.LA summit Friday that when she started Greycroft 15 years ago, her fellow investors in Northern California balked at her choice to leave the Bay Area and start investing in what was then a seldom talked-about market: Los Angeles. But since then, Settle's happily proved the haters wrong.
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Speaking to dot.LA co-founder Sam Adams during the "The Future of Urban Mobility" session out closed out dot.LA's summit, Israel described his vision of a complete repurposing of parking spaces and mobility that looks ahead at least 30 years into the future. Electric cars fit into this vision; rideshare companies do, too.
"Parking is the wild, wild west of real estate," said Israel. "It's a component of real estate that represents a large swath of the city that is non-institutionalized."
The startup raised $41 million in Series A financing earlier this year. It has parking garages throughout the U.S., in cities that include Los Angeles and Nashville.
Israel laid out three components that are at the core of Metropolis' work in understanding how to improve and empower the future they hope to create. The first is to understand the inventory of the facility in real time. The second is to have the ability to provision access to that facility in real time. Finally, one must be able to price inventory in real time.
"You have to understand the underlying infrastructure before you can repurpose the infrastructure," said Israel.
In a city as car-dependent as L.A., Israel will certainly have a lot of people rooting for his company's success.
"Getting around L.A. is one of the biggest obstacles to [Los Angeles] being, objectively, one of the nicest places on Earth to be," said Adams.
dot.LA Summit: Women at the Top on How to Expand LA's Tech Scene
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But, it was the yeses that kept them going.
"We have to expand the tent, we have to figure out how to continue. The tent needs to get bigger every day. If every one of us every day can find one more woman to bring into this tent, in some way it gets bigger and bigger," Nortman said.
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Going Beyond Lip Service
Pledges to boost diversity and inclusion are widespread in the tech and startup world, but the industry chronically fails to realize its own goals.
That's no coincidence. The venture capital world, which provides much of the capital fueling fledgling startups, remains a boys club with a bias towards white male founders. And that bias has a ripple effect, warping industry hiring practices and decision making. The problem is repelling workers, too, as post-lockdown resignations skyrocket and companies weigh new policies, such as remote work and hybrid schedules, to retain staffers.
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In a conversation with Rachel Horning (CEO of RippleFX Events), Invisible Universe CEO Tricia Biggio described the company as the "Pixar of the internet." The company creates beloved, celebrity-sponsored animated characters who live on social media and interact with fans.
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How the Pandemic Changed Entertainment Tech Forever
Like so many other industries, the world of entertainment went through some radical shifts during the pandemic. And, for the speakers at dot.LA's "The Evolution of the Digital Landscape in Shaping the Entertainment & Tech World" panel, that wasn't always a bad thing.
Take the music sector, for example. When the pandemic put a pause on live concerts—leaving musicians, promoters and stage crews without a main source of income—industry players pivoted to streaming.
"We found other ways to get our clients into people's homes, whether it was through a digital series or just releasing music in a more unconventional manner," said Allison Kaye, president of SB Projects. "Our clients really turned into content creators in a way that they hadn't been before."
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Technology can also help to strengthen traditional models such as the sale and purchase of a concert ticket. There are many issues that fans and promoters face when purchasing or selling a ticket. Scalpers use bots to scoop up tickets en masse and resell them on a secondary market. There's also the risk that a fan will purchase a fake ticket from a scammer. Tech such as blockchain and crypto can help with these challenges.
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What It Takes to Transition From Founder to CEO
A good founder will have a clear yet flexible vision. The same might be said of a good CEO. Still, there are plenty of differences between the two titles, as the speakers at dot.LA's "From Founder to CEO" discussion made clear.
"To be an entrepreneur you are the tip of the spear," said Boba Guys and Tea People USA founder and CEO Andrew Chau. "You want to be apologetic, you want to be authentic."
Chau chatted with KraveBeauty founder and CEO Liah Yoo about starting their businesses from the ground up. He said that as the company grew, he became much more than "a guy who owns a boba shop"; Yoo said she, too, morphed into something beyond a YouTube influencer.
"I call myself an accidental entrepreneur because I now have a skin care brand. Nowhere in my life did I ever think that I would be starting a company and second running a company," Yoo said.
One might assume a business' creator would spearhead its strategies, but that's often not the case. In fact, in a World Management Survey that looked at 212 startups over a 20-year period, only 50% of founders were still in control of their companies.
For Chau, the key lies in embracing both the micro- and macro-level problems. He said that though he has successfully transitioned into CEO, he sometimes can't help but treat his business like a grassroots operation, picking up trash he finds in front of his Boba Guys storefront in Culver City. Yet he's also often talking business strategies with other entrepreneurs over Zoom.
For Yoo, becoming a CEO was also an exercise in self-acceptance. "You keep comparing yourself to another CEO," she said. "I think the more I did that and then when we got started, I started to trick myself into this vicious cycle of 'I'm not good enough.'"
The Challenge of Finding Male Allies in Tech Circles
Women-led startups made up just 2.3% of venture capital funding in 2020. In addition, only about 12.4% of decision makers at venture capital firms are women. Though these numbers have increased throughout the years, the industry is still very much a boys' club, and, as the women at dot.LA's "Elevating Your Presence as a Woman in Tech" panel discussed, it can be tough to break through the glass ceiling.
"We are talking into an echo chamber about our problems, so it is also going to require a man to help us change that," said Samantha Ettus, founder and CEO of Park Place Payments.
Ettus was joined by founder and CEO of Makelene, Dulma Altan; co-founder and CEO of Vurbl Media, Audra Gold; and Head of Community at How Women Invest, Sophie Nazerian. Their discussion was centered around how they have managed to navigate leadership and microaggressions from co-workers, all while climbing the corporate ladder as an anomaly in the tech world.
Ettus discussed how she has experienced microaggressions firsthand; she remembered being on a conference call with a bank executive when he mentioned he brought a guest: his daughter. Ettus thought it was sweet until he mentioned he wouldn't have put her on the screen if it were a male CEO because he would not want to be seen as less professional. Ettus reminded him he has the power to change that.
"It's always on our shoulders to speak up or to wrong the right or to have this panel where 90% of the attendees are women," she said.
The panelists also talked about the importance of finding a good work/life balance — something that doesn't always come naturally. "The biggest thing I'm proud of, I've learned that not everything is actually on fire," said Altan. "My ability to discern what actually is from what isn't has increased, and my mental health has stabilized."
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NFTs aren't just remaking investments but they are changing how entertainment is being produced and distributed.
Non fungible tokens were the focus of the panel with Scott Greenberg, CEO of Blockchain Creative Labs; Andrew Klungness, Partner at Fenwick & West LLP; and Michelle Munson, CEO of Eluvio.
"When you own an NFT, you actually own what we call a convertible electronic record on the blockchain. You own a space in a ledger," said Klungness. As an example, it's the difference between owning the record versus owning the commercial rights to the property, like owning a baseball card doesn't give you the right to use that image commercially.
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The NFT startup behind NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs clearly sees the value of virtual influencers. Brands are expected to spend about $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022, according to Business Insider Intelligence. And the company is betting that a rising number of dollars will be spent on virtual influencers who can be fully controlled.
LA Investors on Tech Resilience and the Future of Work
Plenty of tech firms laid off workers as the pandemic took hold, but the industry ultimately raked in record profits as schools and offices spent big on remote tools and lockdowns drove shoppers toward digital services.
But there are challenges ahead for the startup community, like adapting to workers' evolving needs and expectations and building climate change mitigation into investment strategies.
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Everlaunch Wins dot.LA's Startup Pitch Competition
A startup that offers gamified how-to guides for aspiring entrepreneurs was declared the winner of the second annual dot.LA pitch competition on Thursday in Santa Monica.
"My mission is to 'Pinky and the Brain' all of the currently available resources," said Everlaunch CEO Michelle Heng, referring to a cartoon where the main character was obsessed with taking over the world. Heng's service sets out to build a community for entrepreneurs and bring together essential business resources in a single hub.
Jam City's Josh Yguado on How the Blockchain WIll Change Gaming
At dot.LA's second annual summit, mobile game publisher Jam City's Chief Operating Officer Josh Yguado said he believes the next generation of mobile gaming will enable users to own parts of their favorite games on the blockchain.
"More than anything we're investing in where gaming is going, so we're making huge investments right now in augmented reality and cryptocurrency," Yguado said during the summit's fireside chat Thursday evening. "We've talked about the metaverse a bit today, but we're really thinking about where gaming is going to be two to three years from now."
What to Expect at This Year's In-Person Summit
The Annual dot.LA Summit Kicks Off in Santa MonicaThe two-day conference will begin with a pitch showcase competition for early-stage startup companies that have raised less than $1 million in funding. Judges for the event include Boba Guys and Tea People USA co-founder and CEO Andrew Chau, Worklife Venture Capital founder Brianne Kimmel and Plug and Play Ventures Associate Kiswana Browne. The winner will receive a prize package from Fenwick, Coda Search and TriNet.
The pitch competition will be followed by a fireside chat and podcast taping with Jam City co-founder & President Josh Yguado. Jam City isa leader in mobile entertainment and Yguado has proven himself a mastermind behind it, leading the company's operations, growth strategies and game portfolio.
While this event will be in person, the panels will be covered by dot.LA and those interested are still able to register for the conference here. Last year, the event drew over 500 guests virtually. This year's summit expects over 300 in-person guests. There is no livestream this year.
On Friday, the activities will begin at 9 a.m. An L.A. tech and startup town hall will focus on the tech and startup landscape as the effects of COVID-19 retreat. There will also be panels on the future of cryptocurrency and storytelling at this hour.
The afternoon's speakers will include United Talent Agency Chief Innovation Officer Brent Weinstein, BallerTV Chief Technology Officer Kavodel "Kav" Ohiomoba, KraveBeauty founder & CEO Liah Yoo, Makelane founder and CEO Dulma Altan and many other CEOs, technologists, founders and innovators.
Join us here and on Twitter and Instagram for updates from the summit. And let us know your thoughts using the hashtag #DOTLASUMMIT.
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