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Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of

startups. I'm Rebecca Boulon, and today we're sharing an episode from TechCrunch's newest podcast,

Build Mode. In this interview, host Isabel Johansson sits down with Ross Fabini of XYZ Ventures

and Leslie Feinzig of Graham and Walker Ventures to pull back the curtain on how VCs build their own go-to-market

strategies. They dig into what it's really like raising a first fund, why founder market fit

applies to investors too, and how the best investor relationships start years before you ever need

the money. Let's take a listen. Hi, Ross and Leslie. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Build Mode. I would love to kick

things off by each of you introducing yourselves and telling us a bit about your firms. Thank you so much

for having me. It's lovely to be here. Leslie Finds. I am the founder and general partner at Graham and Walker

Venture Fund. Spent most of my career in tech, but fun fact, I was born and

raised in Costa Rica. I moved to America with a life-changing scholarship to go to Harvard Business

School. I've been in the tech industry ever since about a decade ago. I decided to quit my job

and start a company, and that company didn't go anywhere. But the little meetup of women who were raising venture capital that I started when I was raising capital for my company became the largest community of venture-backed female founders in America.

And I have been supporting founders and advocating for founders ever since.

Yeah, and going, Leslie, thanks again for having us.

My name is Ross Vivini. I run a firm called XYZ. We're about a billion and a half in her management doing investment in early stage companies, quite a lot in the public sector. Companies selling to the government, a lot of enterprise software, a lot of fintech software. My own background is I trained as an engineer

working at companies like Netscape that nobody's going to remember anymore because I'm a thousand.

I don't remember Netscape. We remember Netscape. I started a company, sold it success factors into SAP,

and being venture stuff for about the last 15 years before starting these funds in 2017.

Okay, so you both founded your firms around the same time, but I'm sure your paths were very different.

Can you talk about what it was like to raise your very first fund?

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