Vanessa Larco doesn't take board seats — on purpose. The former New Enterprise Associates (NEA) investor and co-founder of new firm Premise believes that early-stage investors get better insight (and raw honesty) when they stay out of the boardroom. She joins us for this week's #VCWednesdays with Tanya Dua, where she breaks down her investing philosophy, why AI is more a behavioral rather than technological shift and what she looks for before the revenue shows up. https://lnkd.in/eVjBKJYs
Sr. Technology Editor at LinkedIn covering AI | Conference Moderator & Speaker | Columbia Journalism Grad | Ex-Business Insider
🚨 AI is reshaping behavior, not just technology. It's also where the biggest opportunities lie, says former New Enterprise Associates (NEA) investor and Premise co-founder Vanessa Larco, who joins us for VC Wednesdays. 🚨 ✒️ How did your product background shape how you approach investing? In a big VC firm, team dynamics are everything — just like in product, where you lead without authority. You can’t just push a deal through. You need consensus. In product, you decide what to build based on interviews, customer data and instincts. The same applies in venture — diving into engagement metrics, slicing data by persona, looking at monetization. Especially pre-revenue, that helps figure out if people love the product and will pay for it. Most VCs don’t think about product data like that. ✒️ Why did you start your own firm? I’ve always been more of a zero-to-one person. At a big firm, everyone has to align on a single framework. At Premise, we want to be able to move quickly and tailor diligence to each deal. Also, we very rarely take board seats, as that creates a different dynamic. When you’re on the board, what you get is polished. When you’re not, you get raw, unfiltered data. That’s when I can go into problem-solving mode — dissecting what’s not working and working through unknowns — what I love about this job. ✒️ What’s the #1 thing you look for in early-stage startups? What are they building, and why is it right for their customers? I’m looking for what I call product-market pull. Do people need this? Do they freak out when it’s down? Do they say, “Where has this been my whole life?” That can show up in different metrics, depending on the product. I work with founders to define what success looks like — what adoration for the product looks like — and translate that into metrics. If the pull is there, monetization and distribution follow. ✒️Your investments span B2C and B2B. What are you currently the most excited about? How AI is changing consumer behavior: It’s changing how we shop, search, consume media and make decisions, and creating software opportunities. It's also disrupting high-end services that were once reserved for the top 1%, like matchmaking, personal styling, trip planning and tutoring, and can deliver those experiences at a fraction of the cost. When TAM expands, iconic companies get built. An example is Sitch, which uses AI to replicate the human matchmaker experience based on past experiences and preferences, and has very different engagement patterns than typical swipes. My contrarian take is that there’s going to be a next-gen version of Quibi. The idea wasn’t wrong — the timing was. Netflix should pay attention. ✒️ What is one investment that you regret passing on? Figma. I met Dylan Field during their Series B. But even though I was personally convinced, I wasn’t a growth investor, and NEA had a framework that made it hard to get the deal through. #VCWednesdays #vc #venturecapital #startups #TechonLinkedIn