Planet Positive Podcast with Investor Adrianna Samaniego

Join Bhuva Shakti, Founder & CEO at Wallet Max, as she speaks with investors looking to leverage inclusion and impact without compromising growth of investments.

​This month, Bhuva's guest is Adrianna Samaniego, a Partner at Cherryrock Capital, venture firm focused on leading an and co-leading Series A & B rounds in underinvested founding teams. 

​About Adrianna Samaniego:
Adrianna Samaniego is a Partner at Cherryrock Capital, venture firm focused on leading an and co-leading Series A & B rounds in underinvested founding teams. At Cherryrock, Adrianna applies her extensive experience to support the best emerging technology startups in scaling from $1M to $100M+.

​Prior to Cherryrock, Adrianna was a Partner at Female Founders Fund, a leading early-stage fund investing in female-founded technology companies across B2B, Healthcare, Climate, and Enterprise Saas. In this role, she managed the investment team and led over twenty-five investments in rapidly growing female-led startups. Additionally, Adrianna was instrumental in establishing and managing the FFF Scout Program, which targets early-stage Black, Latine, and Indigenous female founders, as well as the FFF Entrepreneur in Residence program and the FFF MBA Program. Her investment acumen and dedication to fostering diversity in tech drive her approach to building category-defining businesses.

​Her expertise in scaling businesses is complemented by an eight-year tenure at Google, where she co-founded Emporium within Area 120, Google’s startup incubator, where she led the rapid development and launch of a B2B marketplace aimed at enhancing procurement opportunities for diverse-owned businesses. This complemented her leadership and creation of Google's Global Supplier Diversity Program, which generated over $2B in opportunities for diverse-owned companies.

​Recognized for her trailblazing efforts, Adrianna has been honored with distinctions such as Fast Company Queer50, Business Insider Rising Star in VC, a Kauffman Fellow (Class 28), University of Georgia's 40 Under 40, an Alumni Society Class of '22 member, and receiving the Top Latinas in Tech Giants award.

​A proud Mexican-American from Douglas, Arizona, Adrianna received a B.B.A. in Finance from University of Georgia and a Master of Business Administration from Columbia Business School.

​About Wallet Max:
​Wallet Max is an inclusive global community of corporate executives and venture capitalists with a mission to expand fundraising access for high-growth startups in the technology, AI, fintech, and climate sustainability sectors.

​​About Bhuva Shakti:
​​​​Bhuva Shakti (she/her) is the futuristic founder and CEO driving sustainable innovation at Wallet Max, a global community of corporate executives, policy leaders, and venture capital investors expanding fundraising access for high-growth impact startups. She is also the founder of Bhuva’s Impact Global, offering board and enterprise risk advisory services for public and private corporations.

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Transcript

Bhuva:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Wallet Max Planet Positive podcast. I'm Bhuva Shakti, based in New York, and the founder of Wallet Max. We are a global community of startups, investors, and executives focused on increasing sustainable funding actors, especially in climate tech, FinTech, deep tech, and AI sectors. We interview one impact investor every month for our podcast. We invite them to share their background, but more importantly, what differentiates them from the crowd? How do they prioritize impact along with profits and planet? We deep dive into their personal and professional journeys and their mission to uplift. Today, we are speaking with Adrianna, a partner at Cherryrock Capital, which is a venture firm focused on leading and Series A and B rounds in underestimated founding themes. At Cherryrock, Adrianna applies her extensive experience to support the best emerging technology startups in scaling from $1 million to $100 million and plus. Prior to Cherryrock, Adrianna was a partner at Female Founders Fund, a leading early stage fund investing in female founded technology companies across B2B healthcare, climate, and enterprises. In this role, she managed the investment team and led over 25 investments in rapidly growing female-led startups. Let me now hand over to Adrianna and invite her to say a few words about her background and career path. Over to you, Adrianna. 

Adrianna:

Amazing. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm excited about the conversation. So just to add a little bit more background, I'm, as you could tell, from the Hat, based in New York, but I'm not from here. And so very proud to be here. But my story is, I actually grew up in I'm between two worlds. I'm born and raised on the Arizona-Mexico border. And the reason I start with that is because I think it really formed my view of the world and early awareness of what access and opportunity and inequity looked like coming from a border town and ultimately really shaping my worldview, but also what I wanted to pursue. I think I'm a first generation in my family to go to college and always knew and firmly believed in terms of my background that talent was equally distributed, but opportunity was not. And that became my life's calling. I pursued a degree in finance, but I ended up going and working in tech after interning in investment banking. I decided I actually didn't like that. And I cut my teeth at Google, and it was incredible in terms of really understanding and having opportunities to truly know what scale looks like and building in places that were scaling, really thinking through systems. Also, just my leadership and growth there as an operator. I was an intrapreneur turned entrepreneur. I ended up working across both sales, marketing product and finance, and then shifted after six years. Left Google, didn't go too far, went into Area 120, had a startup that they backed called Emporium. And it was through that experience that really led me to pursue venture capital and ultimately start angel investing. And I spent four and a half years at Female Founders Fund. And I think that era was incredibly important in terms of my growth and just view at that point in time, diverse founders, female founders, And one of the areas that we focused on, women's health, for example, was still considered fringe categories. And of course, that's not the case. It shouldn't really have been the case then. And it has all of those experiences have led me now to be on the founding team of Cherryrock Capital. And as you said, we focus on leading at the Series A and B, specifically focused on founders that are building software companies that we believe are truly changing and category-defining and focus on under-invested founders. 

Bhuva:

Thanks so much, Adrianna, for sharing. And I can relate to quite a few things you mentioned. First generation, definitely, and also focused a lot on women-led investments. And that's one area I focused also. And like you, I also spent quite a lot of time on Wall Street and investment banking and led me to my purpose that today where I'm angel investing and also helping women-led startups. One quick question I had when you found, I think, hopefully your unique secret sauce at Female Founders Fund is, would you consider that journey through Female Founders Fund, helping women-led startups as a pivotal moment in your life that really established you into the Cherryrock Capital world? Or was there anything else before that?

Adrianna:

Yeah, I think before that, really, when I think about my secret sauce, it comes down to a couple of things, but one of them in this role is operator empathy. And really having that being set in that seat, I think, is important. I think nowadays, especially, there's no one size fits all for what a VC looks like in terms of experience. And for me, the operator empathy, it comes out every single day. And I think it's incredibly important. It has allowed me to be successful as well as just pattern-breaking investing discipline as well, and just the authenticity that I bring to ensure that when founders meet with me, that I'm immediately connecting and seeing what they're doing. I love connecting the dots and seeing big vision. I tend to be a big concept thinker, and that does incredibly well with founders and trying to just keep up with them and understand what they're building, why they're building it, how big can this get? And so I would say even before full-time investing at Female Founders Fund, the angel investing in some of the lessons there, but more importantly, the Google days and starting my own company and having operator empathy.

Bhuva:

Got it. Yeah, no, definitely. And you have been an intrapreneur, an entrepreneur, and an operator. I find it really amazing where you mentioned operator empathy as your unique secret sauce. Can you elaborate a little bit more, especially at Cherryrock Capital, where you focus on under-invested founding teams? I mean, why does it matter? 

Adrianna:

Yeah, it matters so much because when we look at...Well, step taking a step back, Why do we, as a firm, need to exist? And it came down to a couple of points. But when you looked at the landscape of firms started in the last decade or even 15 years, there was an explosive amount, massive amount of new firms created, which is fantastic. And there are over 3,000 plus VC firms. Most of the firms that were created specifically with a thesis of backing being, as we'd like to say, underinvested, but you can..."Women and minority," you could say "underrepresented,"et cetera, but underinvested founders. It was an explosion that was focused on the pre-seed and seed stage, which is incredibly important, especially as we needed to ensure that we were building a really healthy funnel of founders creating new businesses. And that point became very clear. And then what you saw and what we all know is about a third, best, I would say, like why see a third of those businesses end up raising a Series A. And so there's this massive chasm, a little bit of a death valley that happens from seed to A, and the risk profile also changes. But what we saw is that a majority of firms that were created to focus on this thesis were all focused on seed and pre-seed.And the most critical, hardest point, and obviously, if you're at your C, you're saying it's your Series C, but the hardest point that we see is getting to that Series A capital, proving product-market fit, and that does change over time. And we wanted to be able to build a portfolio of high conviction bets focused on leading at those rounds where we believe there was opportunity and the best of the talent was rising. And then the last thing in terms of, again, our ability to compete and win, but more importantly, why this is a space that can generate alpha is when you looked at the funding gap, I don't think we need to hit on it, but there is a very clear funding gap in terms of who is getting the majority of dollars at the earliest stage. And ended up happening is not only are we seeing that less than 2% of capital is going to women and minority-owned founders, but within that, they're actually, specifically, black and Latino founders are 10 times more likely to build a unicorn business. And so you're saying the fact that they're raising less money, but yet they're 10 times more likely to create a billion dollar business, and they're more capital efficient, so more revenue per dollar. So they're doing more with less. It became really clear that this is a mispriced opportunity, and we wanted to lend our skills and talent in finding the very best founders building in interesting spaces that we could do the one to 100, not the zero to one. And I think going back to the operator mode, the role from seed to A and A to B is constantly changing, and it's changing, too, at a rapid pace, more rapid than we could keep up with right now. And having a sense of just all the hats that you have to wear every single day as a lean team and as a CEO and a founder. It's important as one of the advisors or board members to be able to recognize that, to be able to advise on what could potentially be around the corner and help drive just more learnings and efficiency for those founders, just because it is constantly changing. I think when you've sat in that seat and you know that at the end of the day, at least where we're focused on, we're trying... The playbook is mostly figured out, meaning you know who you're selling to, you know that there's value in what you've created at this point. It's like, what lovers can we pull and how do we get to scale? How do we get to the one to $100 million in revenue or the one to 25? And we want to be the partners to support you. 

Bhuva:

I couldn't agree more. Definitely, there is a lot of for support for pre-seed and seed. And as you go up to Series A, especially seed to Series A, I've seen also so many times, getting the opportunity to be in front of an investor and trying to scale is the biggest challenge, not necessarily that you have an opportunity. You need to get an opportunity before you can raise to scale. I've seen that challenge also so many times. But within this context, especially in the current economic landscape with technology-based startups, especially under-invested founders, where do you see some opportunities? And of course, everyone knows the challenges, but what are one or two top challenges you see that these opportunities can maybe override?

Adrianna:

So at first, I'll start with the opportunities. It's no better time to start a business. I think you could do... The bar is higher. So I think it's an opportunity and a challenge. It's a challenge for those that are not building AI native businesses who maybe started and have legacy tech or legacy even point of view and perspective, that is going to be hard as you continue to scale, and there's just so much disruption. But I would say on the optimistic side, we're seeing leaner teams, your ability to do more with less as it relates to product development. And so three, four years ago, it wasn't always necessary for you to have an MVP. I think now, if you haven't built something, I think most investors at that early stage will look at you and question, is this the right team? Fittest? Are you moving fast enough? I think where we focus, and I would say higher concentration and our focus is Series A and leading those Series A investments. Oftentimes, some challenges as it relates to some of the founders that we focus on. But I would just generally say that this is across the board as companies raise smaller seeds.

Not only are we seeing that only call it a third of companies are going to make it to an A, within that, the bar for an A raised considerably higher, meaning It used to be that you could get to a million dollars in ARR in 12 months, and you had a line of investors who are willing and ready to talk to you around your Series A and how do we scale? Now, that's not the case. I think we're seeing the clip right now of zero to four million, three to five million in that time frame. And there are a bunch of questions around the defensibility and scalability of that, but the bar is higher. One of the key challenges I'm seeing is founders who may have raised smaller rounds.

You went to market and you raised a two and a half million dollar round. Well, that two and a half million dollars, now you need to be to be able to showcase four and generate four in terms of a top line. That's really difficult to do, especially when talent is at an all time high in terms of engineering talent. I do think I'm not by any means recommending people raise these mega seed rounds, but ensure that you are raising a healthy enough round that is going to get you to the milestones that are Series A in today's market. And I think that that has just changed dramatically.  

Bhuva:

I'm so glad that you mentioned no better time to start a business, but also you mentioned that the bar is high. No longer it's okay to just have an MVP or a non-AI native solution because today every company is trying to become an AI company, or you're not competitive enough if you don't have AI for efficiency and productivity. So we also see a lot of political challenges both in US and rest of the world, with your experience from Female Founders Fund and also from Cherryrock Capital. Why do you think this is still a good investment for the long term? What are you focused on in terms of profits and return on investment? And especially, I don't know if you are sector-focused by any means because you are more focused on software companies. So help me understand, good time to start a business, but where do you see ROI? Are there any industry-focused investments that you'd like to do in the current landscape?

Adrianna:

Yeah, absolutely. I'll start with our focus. I shared stage focus, the founders that we're focused on. And then in addition, we take a thematic approach across five key verticals, including Fintech, enterprise SaaS, B2B2C, healthcare, and future of work. And so we're going within each of those. And as we have a conversation, I know probably one of the areas is we could talk about what I'm excited about within some of those areas. As it relates to that geopolitical US, just general climate as well, I would say, yeah, priority shift with politics. We've seen that in every cycle. But demograph, I think the thing that we get back to is first principles. Demographics I guess, if anything, they're becoming more diverse, which is more of an emphasis to ensure that, again, talent is equally distributed. We've seen that even from across the board of companies in Europe, just that are, whether it be the founders of Lovable. So the US is, by any means, not creating all of the best companies. And so you have to go back to, again, the data. The data speaks volumes, demographic, whether it's the percentage of female founders, the percentage of women that are driving 80% of health care decisions, the fact that climate risks do drive trillions in losses, there's a massive opportunity. And I think long term returns come from founders that are ultimately building where the world is going, not necessarily where policy temporarily sits. And so for us as investors, we absolutely take stock into, especially from a regulatory standpoint, for example, with a lot of health care companies, with changes to the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, the "Big Beautiful Bill."

A lot of health care investors, we were waiting to understand what are the implications for our own companies, but also for our investment theses and where the world is heading as it relates to services, solutions, products that are geared towards this and will have heavy implications regulations as to those regulatory changes. But I really do think that all of these things are not impact categories. They're macro population scale markets. And at the end of the day, I try not to shift too much with some of the swings in politics.

Bhuva:

Yeah, that's very well said because we've seen these changes both in the corporate sector and in the VC and private sector constantly coming up every few years. So we can keep shifting based on policy changes. But also some of the challenges in terms of regulations affect your companies or your investments it's real potential to scale, especially in terms of privacy, security, accessibility, and so on and so forth. US is very different from Europe and the rest of the world. If things are changing constantly, How do you really make a bet? If you can tell using a case study or example, that's also fine. Where do you find the balance?

Adrianna:

Can you say the question one more time?

Bhuva:

We have challenges in terms of regulations, and by changing policies or governments, we don't want to keep shifting our investment focus, which is what you rightly mentioned. But also considering US, Europe, and the rest of the world has different regulations, different concerns, considerations in terms of privacy, security, accessibility, inclusion, and so on and so forth. So if you're investing in a company, regardless of the policy challenges at the moment, but if they are being restricted to scale due to regulations in the country that you're operating, how do you balance your investment so you get the better return, but also you're not really focused only on the current policy?

Adrianna:

Yeah, it's interesting. I think everybody has a different risk profile. We'd like to put it into a couple of buckets in terms of what are the risks that we're willing to take and what are risks that we're not willing to take. And so, for example, in the case of business model risk, that's something we actually don't want to take at the Series A. We would want to... So if for some reason your business model is hinged on some regulation going in your favor, it would be a really difficult decision for us and something that we would be assessing. I think the first thing is really just taking stock as we're looking, whether it be deals in general, but then the ecosystem and understanding what regulatory risks, what risks exist in general, whether it's team risk, and that's something we don't like to take, whether it's product risk, business model risk, market risk, and just understanding, again, where When we look at it, there's going to be one area we're willing to take, like operational risk. That's where we could be helpful, but there's some that we don't. I think the big piece that I would look for, especially as you're saying, again, the privacy and trust, I would say is becoming harder, and it will continue to become harder, especially with proliferation of AI and just understanding what is created by AI, how are they using our information And so what we would look for, though, we don't invest in direct to consumer models, is that there's trust by default. And so that founders who are designing, whether it's an enterprise level product, an SMB level product, or a pick and shovel type of software, we want to ensure that the founders are thinking of the risk from a privacy, from a security and access, and that it's baked in.

I think that is actually one of the areas that we're really excited about in terms of companies and specifically founders who are thinking about this in the new world as it relates to agentic AI, because there's quite a bit of Security is different. The provisioning is very different. And so we look for founders who have a propensity to be thinking of that and are aware of it. And it doesn't have to be figured out. But if you're, if your model swings in any positive or negative direction as it relates to government regulation or just shifting macro, micro, geopolitical, then it's absolutely like you.

We would want a founder to have a very thoughtful view on that. And then the other thing as it relates to just regulation, inclusion across the board, whether it's US, LATAM, Africa, EU, is really having founders who are thinking about inclusion, thinking about doing the right thing early. It should be baked into the foundation, not a initiative. Security is not an initiative. Your enterprise privacy is not an initiative. We need to make sure that those things are thought through and it's not an afterthought. It has to be foundational. 

Bhuva:

Exactly. It should be trust by design or inbuilt into the design of your product or service, whatever you're trying to offer, so that you are not trying to plug in when something changes. Because I know one founder who was really successful in one state in the US, but was unable to scale in another state, the same product, same service, because a lot of local regulations and other challenges. So it's really important if your basic business model is reliant on a local regulation or a government regulation, then you might have to think twice before scaling into a region that might not support you. I totally agree with that. And in terms of success stories, I wanted to check in with you if you have a success story from Cherryrock Capital that you're personally invested in. Of course, all investments are equally good for you, but. 

Bhuva:

Yeah, no favorites. I also wanted to check in along with the success story, any mistakes that you made, anything that you regret not investing, any lessons that you have learned? So a success and a mistake or a lesson. Absolutely. So at Cherryrock, we are still early, but it's been off to the races. We announced our Fund One $172 million Fund One in February of this year. And it's been fantastic building, but also investing a couple of early wins that we're really excited about. One company Vitable Health. And they're rethinking benefits from the ground up, both from employer-sponsored care, but also preventative and ensuring that right now, 90% of Americans who don't work with these large group plans or aren't employed by Google, that how do you have access to affordable health insurance, but then even more so rethinking this model. And so they've launched And now they've launched and now work with what they call ICRA, which is individual health care coverage accounts. And really putting back the ownership back on or the agency in choice back to the consumer where it should have been in the first place. Because a health care plan that I need for myself and my family may not be the exact same one for you. And ultimately, the way that it works right now is You have these large group plans, and it's like, I work at this company, and that's the plan. I get two choices, and that's the one that I have to choose. Or when you work at a really small company, oftentimes even more limited choices. And so this gives the opportunity for employers to provide a stipend and then the agency to the individuals to be able to choose the right health care plan. So I'm really excited about what they're doing.

And then another company is Certiverse that is building out AI native certification and testing infrastructure. And when you think of the world right now, how are we going to continue to qualify skills, whether you're going into Higher Ed or Higher Ed, and just in general, skill development and being able to say, I know the latest in terms of AI prompting or evaluation, how do we quantify, qualify really those individuals? Well, now they have the ability, then they have a software system that whatever you're trying to to certify, qualify, whether it be those who are specifically building or in a health care regulated industry, restaurant service to engineers deploying a particular type of software, any program they could build. So they run programs from NVIDIA to Alacian, DocuSign, down to the Restaurant Association or the Nursing Association. And so I think it democratizes access to qualifying and quantifying in a allowing more people to become certified in any type of modality. So we're really excited about that, that space and those companies, just to name a few.

And then right now, mistakes. There's so many. I think the role of being an investor is really hard. I think we don't talk about it enough because you don't know if you're good for a pretty You have a pretty decent grace period, but you start to see some lessons along the way, and they compound, and it's fantastic. I think it makes all of us better in identifying the right opportunities and founders to back. And we all have unique deal taste, which I also think is important because a deal that's meant for me, somebody else may hate it, and it's totally okay. I would say for a couple of lessons that I've continued to take away is I've had the right founder. I've made some mistakes where it was the wrong founder, but there's times where you pick the right founder. They have founder market fit off of the charts. And I'm thinking one company in particular, but the market timing was really off. And we essentially were building a product that the market didn't need or didn't demand. And we were a little too early, a couple of years ahead of the curve. That has actually happened twice. And so I think there's just something in terms of really understanding.

Bhuva:

Sometimes you can get the team really right. You can get that founder right. But the market also timing in particular has to be right. And then sometimes I think the other lesson I've seen is we have a really strong team, and maybe the market timing is not right or you need to pivot. And exceptional founders move fast. They stay self-aware. They are able to quickly separate ego from direction and go in that new direction.

I think seeing a couple of times where both from a board member perspective, but also seeing those early warning signs of like, "Look, we've tried everything, and this what we thought was going to happen is not happening." Conviction is important, but we need to have speed and clarity and move in a new direction. I think finding people that are self-aware enough to take stock of the data and move in a new direction quickly. So I would say those two lessons stick with me. 

Bhuva:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more on the founder investor fit and the founder market fit, because you may have to pivot more likely. But if you are able to have a good fit with your investor and take the data and pivot as needed, then you have an idea that can definitely fit the market in a potential time frame. So couldn't agree more on that.

And in terms of venture capital as a field where someone wants to enter into it, let's say there are a lot of professionals today or graduate students or even someone who's either trying to shift their career path laterally. How does someone get into this field? Do you have any advice or resources?

Adrianna:

Yeah, I would say so First, I think it's changed. I believe, with me in this seat and so many others who have been successful in breaking in, that it's no longer just insiders who are breaking into VC, and there's no linear, there's no one size fits all, nor linear path, which I think is fantastic just to see who's coming into the industry and the different type of backgrounds that we're seeing.

So first, it's like proximity in doing the job before you have the job. That is one of my beliefs. I always thought to myself, if I could get my foot into the door, that's all I needed. And so in these cases, it's like, get your foot into the door, meaning show up. We are an industry that is incredibly external. Conferences, happy hours, all accelerators, incubators, scout programs, venture studios. It comes in every flavor that you could think of. And for somebody who's really eager, and if you love and you're curious, and you want to invest in technology and in the future, which is what drives me, then get yourself into those spaces and proximity. And so join a scout program or there's all these fellowships now, whether it be like Somos VC, We have a fellowship that brings you closer into the fold.

We provide you not only the knowledge, but network as well to break in. And then the other thing I would say is doing that job. So it's like proximity and doing the job. For me, me, what that looked like is building a thesis and publishing that before. And I leveraged it in my interviews, but it was doing the role. I would develop theses, whether they're full thesis or mini theses all the time. And one of the things that we love as investors, most of the time we get it with founders, which is why I love talking to founders, is learning something from them. I love that I know a lot about, or a little about a lot, essentially, and meeting with founders, they're experts.

And so in this case, if you have a perspective, build a thesis on it, go around really, really pressure it, meet with experts. It's easier now than ever to identify the right people and start publishing that and leverage that work in your point of view to find the right firms and to educate and drive awareness to your thinking, because I think that that is probably one of the most important things that could showcase what type of investor you're going to be, what you're looking for. And again, what is your unique POV on the world? I think your point of view is your currency in this industry. You have to be able to see the future or at least bet on oneversion of it and what needs to exist.

And then I mentioned them before, but just these communities, there are a lot of communities that exist, whether it's Somos VC, VCInclude, there's VCUnleashed. There's all these incredible communities. Join one of them, VCFamilia is another one. Those are some that became important and are still important to me. And I would encourage those who are interested in breaking in or learning more, get proximate, start doing the work. And if you have the ability to join a syndicate and source or again, do the job without formally having the fund or the title, it also give you just perspective on, do you really love this work? And you no longer need permission to do any of those things before you get into the role.

I think the most important thing is just showcasing raising your thought, getting some reps in to evaluate companies and show how you would be an investor and what type of investor you'd be. Yeah, we really need to rely on communities and networking because regardless of the policy change or the geopolitical or economic challenges we see, that is never out of style. In terms of venture capital opportunities also, should someone be only an investor or are there other roles where they can come in, learn, and maybe apply their experience from a prior role? More like there are platform roles, there are non-investor roles at venture capital. Is that something that you have a pathway for someone if they are interested, or is it more on a demand basis?

If there is an opportunity, you'll get to know about it to apply at it. Every firm is different. Some firms, again, a decade plus ago, platform didn't exist in venture, which is also just goes to show in creating new opportunities. Some firms have, like at Cherryrock, we don't have a platform team. At Female Founders Fund, we had a platform team. I would say, if you're interested, there's two things. If you're interested in that work, absolutely. And it's everything from firms that have "platform" could mean, how do we show up in the ecosystem, events, marketing, the communication? It could also mean, how are we supporting our portfolio in driving value, connecting them to the next customer? So supporting them on hiring, supporting them on go-to-market. And there's individuals who sit in those seats. And so if you're curious and you want to be at the center of the future investing in technology, but you're like, I don't know if I am interested in being an investor, but I do love working on, and maybe it's one particular thing, like talent, then highly encourage you. And I would say one of the most important things that I tell people is they come to me and they're like, I'm interested. I want to be a VC.

Just pressure test it and figure out what flavor?

If we're Baskin Robbins and there's 33 flavors, which flavor are you? Because there's stage, sector, investing roles, non-investing roles, venture partners. It will be different for you and for me. And so I would say just figuring out what type of flavor of VC do you want, both from a stage perspective, a thesis perspective, and then as well as these other roles, because venture is not just investing. And I would also say for us, as a partner at my firm, I do more than... We're an emerging manager, and so oftentimes we're wearing a lot of hats. I'm writing a newsletter, but I'm also sourcing, diligencing, and supporting our founders from a board-level perspective. And that was something that I really valued. And so when I was going into venture I'm sure when I asked myself what flavor I want, one of the pieces and the answers for me was I wanted an emerging manager. I wanted to be an elite team, to wear a lot of hats because I thrive in those type of environments. And so you have to ask yourself, what side of the house do I want to be on?

But those are incredibly valuable roles and sometimes are just as strategic, especially from on the portfolio side in helping those companies scale. 

Bhuva:

Yeah, very well said, because what happens is sometimes when you think about venture capital, it may not be just an investing role. And also, as an emerging manager, you are a founder yourself trying to run your fund and also source and create a fit. So if someone wants to break into your field, first, like you rightly said, find your flavor, what fits. You may not be an investor all the time, or maybe there is a pathway to that to explore. And while we are speaking, I just noticed we are coming off time. I wanted to check in one last question. What are some emerging trends that you are looking forward to, regardless of whatever the policy and other changes are? And how can people get in touch with you?

Adrianna:

So I'll answer the last one first. So LinkedIn, Please stay in touch there. Feel free to send me a message there. I'm on pretty much everything, but I tend to be pretty good about that connection and staying on top of that community. In terms of emerging trends, one that I've been spending a lot of time and I'm excited about and still forming and researching, but it's just the agentic infrastructure. It's a really big one. We're seeing companies and these massive shifts away from pure SaaS models towards usage-based and AI agents. And that shift required. And we're seeing it for, again, companies used to have high fixed costs, but nothing variable. 

Now it's like Lovable. Their variable costs are, and they were trying to figure it out, is massive in terms of compute. And so I'm really excited about these shifts and what is required required from AI native payments, the real time billing, understanding approvals, the plumbing within what is required to be successful, as well as the security layers in order to be successful. And so these are things, there are companies that I'm excited about that are building in this space, again, from the payment side, but also the identity access audit frameworks to ensure, again, that if we're moving towards agents doing all this work, and it's not necessarily a seat-based system, how do we tie that to usage, but ensure that there are strong margins, and that we are doing the right level of security provisioning because they're being deployed faster than we can really keep up with. But the security piece is still... There's a gap right there.

So I've been excited about that space around the pics and shovels for AI agentic infrastructure.

Bhuva:

Yeah. I heard from someone recently at a conference, if I'm not mistaken, that you have a biological human workforce And then you have agentic workforce, and you have to ensure security and privacy, and how do you manage these two different workforces in your organization. So that conversation is really happening, but also not everyone has answers. So I'm also very much aligned with the trend that you mentioned. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we wrap up?

Adrianna:

I love this.

I love the podcast.

I love the conversations you're having. If there are founders that you want to put on our radar, if you want to connect with us, please send me a message on LinkedIn or hello@cherryrockcapital.com. And it was It's just wonderful to have this conversation.

Bhuva:

Thanks so much, Adrianna. I learned quite a lot also, and we had a lot of synergies and a lot of exciting things. All I know as a takeaway is this is a good time to build a business and think like an operator as an investor while you're also building your fund and founder market, founder investor. It is also really important to invest on. Thanks so much, Adrianna, for taking time to speak with us.

Adrianna:

Thank you.