Episode 119: Kimberly Smith of TechStars - On the Transformative Power of Listening and the Transformative Impact of Education

Kimberly Smith is Head of Capital Formation at Techstars.  She was previously Director of Marketing and Investor Relations at Owl Creek Asset Management and before that worked at Davidson Kempner and ABN AMRO.  She holds a number of Board Roles and is an active advocate for education.

Kim is already known as a force in the world of client development and client service in the hedge fund arena. We dig in to the factors that made her a success - how her belief in "listening to learn" has guided her through her career and towards the importance of building relationships first, long before solutions may be in hand.  

But first we focus on her fascinating back story - on a LinkedIn post in which she  mentioned her army veteran father and the path he embarked up on early in life to build a life of education and opportunity for himself and his own family.  We hear about Kim's grandmother, illiterate and employed as a domestic, who put her son on his path in life with $20 in his pocket and a generation's worth of expectations and hope.

We hear about Kim's passion for education and how her impact in this area takes many forms - from her work on non-profits and at schools to her insistence that a place at the table is accompanied by a voice at the table. 

Series 1 of the 2022 Fiftyfaces Podcast is brought to you with the kind support of Heard Capital, a Chicago-based asset manager invests in public equities in the technology, media, telecommunication, financial and industrial sectors.  The firm was founded in 2011 and manages assets via a long/short fund and a long-only fund.