How VCs Think About Adding New Partners

Let me start with the news that I’m excited to share with you. After years of trying to persuade Kara Nortman to become a partner at Upfront Ventures I can officially announce now that she’s joined us effective immediately.

I have known Kara for 7 years and knew almost immediately after meeting her that I wanted to work with her one day in some capacity. Thus began my marketing campaign. It is rare to find somebody who matches exactly what I’m looking for in a partner so when you find it you act:

• Academic rigor (Princeton undergrad, Stanford MBA)
• Competitive (Athlete: skier & rowed at Princeton, hates losing at everything she does)
• Investment experience (5 years a VC at Battery Ventures)
• M&A experience (Morgan Stanley and later co-headed M&A for Barry Diller at IAC)
• Operating experience (Helped run parts of CitySearch & UrbanSpoon, tons of product management experience, Board of Hatch Labs which helped spawn Tinder)
• Startup CEO experience (Founded P.S. XO along with my good friend Soleil Moon Frye. Helped merge company with Seedling — on track to do $20 million combined revenue in 2015 — will now become Chairman)
• Wonderful human being who is civically engaged, mother of 3, mentorer of younger founders, hard worker and arguer extraordinaire (so says her current Twitter bio)

People often ask me what VCs look for when we hire partners and many have asked how to become VCs themselves one day. I can’t speak for other VCs but it may interest you to at least know our thought process at Upfront.

For starters we’re an LA-based venture fund who invests nationally (and sometimes internationally, but less so). We believe it’s important to have our partners all based in one location so our starting point is wanting our partners to be based in LA and be committed to making this city a vibrant startup community that is now the third largest in the country.

But some of our largest investments have come from all across the country: BillMeLater (Baltimore, $1 billion eBay), DealerTrack (NYC, $1.3 billion IPO), Envestnet (Chicago, $1.25 billion IPO), HealthDataInsights (Las Vegas, $400 million) as well as LA (Maker Studios $1 billion, TrueCar $1.3 billion). As a result we need somebody well networked into these communities already. That’s why Greg Bettinelli has become such a successful partner addition to Upfront. Kara has worked in finance in Boston, NYC and Silicon Valley. She has been in operations in Seattle and Los Angeles. Her network from her educational institutions alone has friends in all of the top tech, media & banking institutions.

As I like to say (and as Kara humbly hates when I do so in front of others) … she has a much better resume to a venture capital partner than I do. But she also has the temperament, which is important. She is a coach and mentor to team members. She rolls up her sleeves and helps get tasks done rather than just directing people. These are all of the intangibles we were looking for.

As a firm we start by wanting to attract future partners who have worked at startups before and have developed a competence which might be marketing (Greg) or product and CEO experience (Kara) plus amazing Biz Dev experience (Hamet). But there are tons of great startup folks so you need a narrower filter. We not only need to be able to help in the trenches with our teams but we also need to have good investment judgment. That turns out to be much more difficult than non-investors often imagine. In Kara’s case I got to see her work on deal structuring first hand having worked closely with her on her board at P.S. XO.

Having been at Battery Ventures for 5 years earlier in her career has given her the investor vantage point and years of seeing booming markets and contracting ones. And the contractions always come back. Many people say it doesn’t pay to be an associate or principal at a venture fund because so few VCs promote up to partner ranks from within. But Kara is the perfect example of somebody who built the skills early, hopped out to get operating experience for years before returning back to the Dark Side.

And then of course each venture firm must be careful not to add partners unless they know the chemistry will work with all other partners as our team unit and cohesiveness are so important. That’s why it’s rare for a VC firm to add a partner that they haven’t known through their personal networks for years and why many VCs come from portfolio companies of that venture firm (As an example, Upfront had invested in my first company, which is how I knew my current partners Yves Sisteron and Steven Dietz so well. They like to say it was an 8-year interview process).

So there you have it. We didn’t hire a recruiting firm — it was always going to come from our network. We have many, many entrepreneurial friends we could one day imagine working with but on the other hand the filters required make it really difficult to find such perfect matches as Greg & Hamet have been and we know Kara will become. Kara will have a few months of additional workload at Seedling so I’ve encouraged her to not feel pressured to look at too many investments in the next few months. That will coincide with her developing her unique pipeline and starting to get a sense of her focus areas.

And after that I’m sure she’ll be the unstoppable Kara Nortman I’ve known and admired for years.