Laela Sturdy is a Partner @ CapitalG, Alphabet's growth investment fund that have invested in the likes of Stripe, Snap Inc, Airbnb and many more incredible companies. As for Laela, she has made investment in category leaders such as language learning platform, Duolingo, payroll and benefits provider, Gusto and jobs site, Glassdoor. Prior to investing with CapitalG, Laela was a Director of Sales & Business Operations at Google where she helped start, scale, and lead teams in several emerging product areas including video and display advertising, local and SMB services, and mobile commerce.

 

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Laela made the transition from an operator at Google to one of the industry's rising star investors with CapitalG?

2.) Market size is fundamental to CapitalG decision-making process so; what is a large enough market? How does Laela look to evaluate market size; bottoms up or top down?

3.) How does Laela look to assess product differentiation? Is brand significant enough IP to be classed as product differentiation?

4.) Why does ownership not play such a pivotal role in investment decision-making process? How crucial is unit economics to Laela at this stage of investment?

5.) With Google's obvious operational value add, does Laela believe we will see the further rise of operational value add within VC? What does this mean for entrepreneurs?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Laela’s Fave Book: Americanah

Laela’s Fave Blog: Dan Primack: Axios

Laela’s Most Recent Investment: Care.com

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