The Hi everyone welcome to today's edition of Scouting for Growth. Today I am meeting with Elisa Valérique, a partner at 9.5 ventures, the venture

capitalist dedicated to corporate venturing. What I love when I read Elisa's profile is that Elisa loves

removing syntax complexity from the proverbial crap, applying creativity and execution to everything she does.

So welcome, Elisa.

Thank you, Sabine. Thank you for this poetic words.

I love reading that about you on your profile on the website.

And I understand that you are the most comfortable with complexity and the boner is in the accent.

So I'd love to hear a bit more about you and what drove you to become a VC?

Actually, I have a non-VC profile.

Used to be an M&A lawyer, worked at a big law firm for a long time, then went on to doing an

in the age to sort of broaden the scope because I couldn't imagine myself

writing contracts for the rest of my life.

I did that and then I went I continued in the M&A space for a few big corporates and went on to joining an investment fund and

by chance I met the team and I loved the idea of

corporate entry which differentiates from, let's say, traditional, you know, we see activity in the sense that you have the power or the leverage of a corporate to go faster, to scale faster, to have what we call an unfair competitive

advantage in the market.

And that really attracted me. And so there were a team of three already when I met

my colleagues the other partners and they were desperately looking for a woman to

join the team or at least for some diversity and they didn't have

anyone with a sort of financial legal background case for the team either. So this

fitted perfectly with the other let's say the other profiles.

One of the founders is an ex-interprener, founded his own company,

...