Tech Forward

Welcome back once more, listeners! Finishing out launch week of the Tech Forward podcast, I spoke with Lisa Cuesta, a Principal at NextGen Venture Partners. An early-stage venture capital firm, NextGen’s goal is to bring a service mentality to venture. NextGen is made up of a core group of seasoned VCs along with a network of hundreds of part-time Venture Partners that drive the growth of portfolio companies. Prior to her work with NextGen, Lisa worked in strategy and product roles at Google as well as the ecommerce team at Pepsico. Our conversation focused on the barriers that female and minority founders face when fundraising, as well as different methods to make VC funding more widely accessible. Lisa had a lot of great insights to share about how to open the doors to more diverse groups of founders. So how does NextGen differ from other venture funds? Typical venture funds usually meet companies and entrepreneurs through the general partners network. This means they’re exposed to a relatively small pool o