Scribble Ventures Elizabeth Weil on the many roles of an emerging venture fund manager, building partnerships, and why network strength is a key differentiator

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.

This week I’m excited to bring you my conversation with Elizabeth Weil of seed-focused Scribble Ventures.

Elizabeth and her Scribble VC partners, Annie and Kevin, raised an oversubscribed $50M Fund I, all during the COVID Pandemic. Before starting the firm, she previously invested as an angel into companies such as Postmates, SpaceX, Mainstreet, Clubhouse, and Figma.

About Elizabeth Weil

Elizabeth is a relationship-driven fund manager and technology investor, startup advisor, and entrepreneur. She has built a reputation for accelerating growth by tirelessly helping her investments with introductions and advice around company culture and employee experience.

Previously she was a Managing Director at 137 Ventures, a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and an executive at Twitter during a period of hypergrowth as it scaled from 50 to 3000 people. Elizabeth has invested in more than 60 technology companies across all stages, including Slack, Whatnot, SpaceX, Coinbase, Clubhouse, Gusto, Digits, Envoy, Grab, Daily.co, Hipcamp, Titan, and Calm.

Elizabeth graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Economics and a Masters in Engineering. She is also an entrepreneur having started Paperwheel (paperwheel.com), a design and letterpress company.

A word from our sponsor:

Why does signing up for Robinhood take 2 minutes but investing in private funds takes hours? Meet Passthrough. 

The subscription document process is a nightmare. Investors receive 100-200 question questionnaires, answer the wrong questions, miss ones they're supposed to answer, and spend hours on revisions.

How can you effectively manage your raise when you don't know where your investors stand?

Passthrough takes any subscription document and builds a custom workflow so that your investors only see the questions that matter to them, shrinking the time to completion to minutes instead of hours. 80% of investors don't even require revisions. Plus, you can see where your investors are and coordinate them, your law firm, and fund admin to close capital quicker.

At Allocate, we have used Passthrough for our various funds, which has significantly increased the efficiency of our closings while providing our investors with a delightful user experience.

Go to passthrough.com/samir to learn more about how to simplify fund closing.

In this episode we discuss:

01:48 What launched Elizabeth into the world of venture capital

04:21 The lessons from being an operator and early investing that led to Scribble

10:50 Why Elizabeth views herself as a hybrid between a super-angel and an institutional investor

14:07 How Scribble scales internally to help its founders

16:37 Working with founders in sprints on specific needs

18:41 How Scribble gets into competitive deals

22:04 Strategies around consensus versus non-consensus investment decision making

24:48 Best practices around conviction based investing

29:01 Building a healthy culture of effective risk-taking

31:36 How her first fundraise went and lessons learned

36:59 The difference between pitching institutional investors versus high net-worth individuals

40:01 The most impactful investing advice she has received

I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Elizabeth. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.

Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com