We recently sat down with Ann Miura-Ko, General Partner at Floodgate, as she gave her views on the evolving nature of entrepreneurship within tech. Named as the most powerful women in startups by Forbes, Ann has led investments in several disruptive companies, including Lyft, TaskRabbit, and ModCloth. Ann also teaches entrepreneurship at the school of engineering at Stanford. Can you share Floodgate’s history and investment thesis? We emerged amidst the global financial crisis in 2008 to fill what we viewed as a gap in the financing market. This gap was triggered by the fact that traditional Venture Capital firms going up-market. And since angels were similarly facing the impact of the financial crisis, we felt we had an exciting opportunity to be disruptive within the seed market. We typically invest between $500K to $3MM in the initial round of financing as lead investors. We are looking for what we believe can become one of the top 15 companies in any given year. We feel very fortunate to have worked with some great companies and to have built a solid reputation within the entrepreneurial community. The cost of launching a start-up is exponentially less than what it was 10-15 years ago. As such, we’ve all seen massive growth in the formation of new start-ups. What is your take on the current state of the market at a high level? I think there is both a very positive side and a potential negative side to the exponential growth of new startups. On the positive side, I believe that the mass democratization of entrepreneurship we have witnessed over the last 5-10 years is as significant historically and economically as the Gutenberg press or the Ford Model T. With the Gutenberg press, we had the democratization of ideas – what used to take hours or days to copy could now be copied by the hundreds and distributed to the masses. The Ford Model T made a car affordable to the middle class and literally transformed the layout of our cities and suburbs. In a similar way, the Internet (and mobile) has enabled supply virtually through anyone can find demand anywhere. This has enabled a new generation of entrepreneurs – those who are located outside the geographical reach of Silicon Valley, those without access to a mentor who could make a quick call to a top tier venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road, and even the micro-entrepreneur who can now leverage platforms like Lyft, TaskRabbit, Etsy, or Chloe and Isabel to completely redefine the notion of employment so that it is fully on their own terms. At Floodgate, we believe that these trends point to the fact that the next...
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