Fiftyfaces Focus - The Last Frontier: Diverse Founders and VCs

Isabella Mandis has just finished her freshman year at Harvard College and the founder of “Girls who VC” an industry affinity group which offers resources, content and community to women interested in pursuing careers in Venture Capital. 

Isabella came to my attention through the industry grapevine and it is a fitting end to the first 2023 Diverse Founder and VC series to amplify some of the extraordinary work that ...

Courtney McColgan is founder and CEO at Runa, a Mexico City based firm that offers a complete cloud-based HR and payroll software solution designed for small to medium-sized companies in Latin America. She previously was Chief Marketing Officer of Cabify a transportation services platform with operations across Latin America, Spain and Portugal.  Prior to that she was CEO and Founder of Yellowsmith a venture backed start u...

Courtney Russell McCrea is co-founder and Managing Partner at Recast Capital, a platform supporting and investing in emerging managers in venture.  She was most recently a Managing Director of Weathergage Capital a boutique fund of funds that provides its clients with access to premier venture capital growth equity and micro VC partnerships, where she also led the co-investing partnership. She is a Kauffman Fellow, class 3...

Andy Ayim, MBE is an investor and founder based in the UK, and runs an Angel Investing School designed to “teach people how to invest small tickets in start-ups effortlessly." He has run the School since January 2020, and is a venture partner and board member of numerous technology companies. Passionate about financial education and entrepreneurship, he has held been entrepreneur in residence at accelerators such as Entrep...

Betsy Cohen has built financial businesses for her whole career. She is the Co-Founder and Chairman of Cohen Circle, a growth stage investment firm focused on the fintech and impact spaces.  She was previously CEO at The Bancorp Bank, which she founded in 2000 and previously worked at Jefferson Bank for 26 years. She sits on numerous boards and has received several awards being named a Forbes 2022 Most Powerful Self-Made W...

Laura Sage is CEO at Chill Anywhere, and Co-Founder of the Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Foundation.  She has previously held a series of advisory and business development roles at different financial institutions including hedge funds. Our conversation starts with her financial career, and the grueling travel schedule that accompanied it.  She describes her pivot to wellness and what led her to think about a solution for employ...

Adam Demuyakor is the founder and managing partner at Wilshire Lane Capital, a venture capital and private equity firm that focuses on PropTech solutions based in Los Angeles California.  Born in the US to a family originally from Ghana, Adam started out on Wall Street in investment banking and held a number of private equity and venture capital roles before found in Wilshire Lane.  He also holds a number of Board roles an...

Constance Freedman is Founder and Managing Partner at Moderne Ventures as well as Moderne Passport – an early stage investment fund and industry immersion program which is focused on investing in technology companies in and around the multi-trillion dollar industries of real estate, finance, insurance, hospitality and home services.  It has just closed its (over-subscribed) second fund at over $200 m. She sits on numerous ...

Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes is the founder of Aruwa Capital Management, a growth equity impact fund investing in untapped opportunities across Nigeria and West Africa.

Founded when she was only 29, Aruwa Capital Management aims to change the narrative for women as capital allocators and entrepreneurs by investing in businesses that make an impact on addressing the gender gap. She previously was Partner and Managing Direct...

Frans van Eersel is the CEO and Founder of dopay, a payments company headquartered in London but with a primary market of Egypt, where Frans lived for 4 years.  He has had a long career in industry, and is also CEO of Driver’s Seat Investment.  

Our conversation starts with his upbringing in the Netherlands and the interesting coincidence that payments and banking played a role in his career from the very beginning....

Ahryun Moon is Founder and Head of Company Strategy at GoodTime.io a company designed to boost employee productivity by making scheduling meetings easier. This is not her first time founding a company – she also founded Etch Keyboard and previously worked as a financial accountant and financial analyst. 

We start with her upbringing and the hackathons that awakened her interest in tech and problem solving.  When she...

Ashwini Asokan is the founder and CEO of Mad Street Den, an Artificial Intelligence company, powering Retail, Education, Healthcare, Media, Finance & more with its image recognition platforms, Vue.ai and Blox.ai. Headquartered in the Bay Area, California, the company has offices around the globe. She previously worked at Intel, where she led IXR's Mobile Portfolio, which explored the future of mobile technology and des...

In our second series focused on founders, allocators and investors on the Frontier – we hear from a diverse group of professionals who share their vision for investing, impact and change.  From venture capitalists focused on the burgeoning world of Prop-Tech, to investing with a gender lens, developing a network to change the black narrative in the professional world, to harnassing the power of music royalties, to payment ...

Sherrese Clarke Soares is the founder and CEO of HarbourView Equity Partners, a global investment firm focused on niche markets and esoteric investments in the media and entertainment space.  She previously was the founder CEO and Board Directly of Tempo Music. 

Sherrese has had over 20 years experience in leadership roles across corporate finance with a particular focus on the communications, media and entertainmen...

Kike Oniwinde Agoro is the Founder and CEO of BYP Network, a platform that connects Black professionals to each other and corporations. She is a BSc Economics graduate of The University of Nottingham, a University of Florida MSc scholar, and an ex-Great Britain javelin thrower. She previously worked in investment banking, and then in Business Development at a fast-growing financial technology company for two years because ...

Yvonne Bajela is an investor in early stage companies at Impact X Capital, which invests in start-ups across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. She has worked across the globe in investment banking, corporate venture capital and in academia, and is a frequent speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and female empowerment. She was listed as a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30.

Our conversation covers Yvonne's early...

James Norman is CEO at Pilotly, a market research platform for creative content, based in the Bay Area. He is a Partner at Transparent Collective, a group of founders dedicated to increasing exposure and access to Silicon Valley for African-American and Latino/Hispanic men and women. He is a serial entrepreneur, who built his first company at the age of 16.

Our conversation traces James's exceptionally early entry ...

Shruti Van Dyke Gandhi is General Partner and Founding Engineer at Array Ventures which invests in enterprise deep tech early-stage companies. Shruti is also a professor in the computer science department at Columbia University. She spent her early career as a developer on mainframe security, collaboration tools, and data analytics. Post engineering, she invested in early-stage companies at True Ventures and Samsung's vent...

Mark Mwangi is the founder of Amitruck, a Kenya-based company which connects transporters (whether a motor-bike, pick ups, van or even a large articulated truck) directly to clients, and aims to ensure convenient pricing and cut out a large part of the costs of goods. He is also co-founder of Dalwyn, a natural gas exchange, based in London. He was previously a senior investment manager at Pictet Asset Management in London,...