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Ashley is a Partner at Social Capital, whose mission is to advance humanity by solving the world’s greatest problems. Prior to Social Capital, Ashley held product management leadership roles at DocuSign, Optimizely, and SurveyMonkey. She’s also held product and marketing roles at Amazon Web Services, oDesk (now UpWork), and Shutterfly. Ashley has a BA in Economics, an MA in Education, and an MBA from Stanford. As an undergraduate, she was a member of the varsity track and field team and the symphony orchestra. As a graduate student, Ashley was a tutor for Stanford’s Athletic Academic Resource Center and a member of the business school’s High Tech Club. She is an avid runner and classically trained cellist.
What did you do before Venture Capital?
I spent a decade as an operator, working mostly for VC-backed companies (SurveyMonkey, Optimizely, DocuSign) in various product management roles. It was a great opportunity to see the different stages of growth — from $1M annual revenue to several hundreds of millions — with quite different go-to-market strategies — self-serve SMB through sales-touched enterprise.
Why did you invest in mPharma and Sempre Health? What separated them from the pack of other investments you were thinking of making?
Both mPharma and Sempre Health, though in different geographies and with different approaches, address the major problem of healthcare access and affordability. I got to know both of the founders through working with them as an informal advisor. And with Sempre Health, the cofounder and CEO actually came from another Social Capital portfolio company (Propeller Health), so we were familiar with her ambitions and work. In terms of traction, at the time of Alchemist Demo Day, mPharma already had a product in market and was earning six-figure revenue from a major pharma manufacturer with a few others in the pipeline. Sempre, on the other hand was pre-launch and pre-revenue, but had academic study results that were near-published and multiple letters of intent from major pharma manufacturers.
What are your thoughts of Alchemist in general?
It’s a great program for companies that plan to have sales-touched enterprise go-to-market approaches. Especially for technical founders, sales can be unknown territory and there are definitely existing playbooks. Alchemist offers a great crash course, especially for first-time founders. Additionally, Alchemist is familiar with the pre-seed/seed venture market and does a good job of preparing companies for their first round of fundraising. Specifically, the program drives companies to get product-market feedback sooner vs. later by going to market, even if just for letters of intent or paid pilots vs. booked revenue. I’ve definitely seen teams overbuild products before going to market only to find they’ve missed the mark for product-market fit once payment comes into the picture.
What is the approximate size of your fund? How does that compare to other funds in the Valley?
Our current venture fund is $500M. Overall, Social Capital has $2.5B in assets under management, which span venture, our “opportunities fund” (follow-on investments in portfolio companies) and our public fund. We also raised a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) last fall, with the goal of providing an alternative path to becoming public for technology companies.
At what stage do you as a fund usually prefer to enter? Seed, series A, series B?
Social Capital supports entrepreneurs throughout their company’s life cycle, so we are stage agnostic. In terms of lead investments, we’ve historically been most active at series A, though we’ve also led several rounds at the seed and series B stages.
Does your fund have a specific vision or focus?
Our mission is to advance humanity by solving the world’s hardest problems. This is inclusive of many sectors (e.g., some of the most transformative companies we know fall into the consumer sector), but we ask ourselves questions such as, “Why does this matter?” “How much of the world could this company touch and in what ways?” etc. Ultimately we want to build durable businesses supporting long-term common good.
How does your fund differentiate itself from other funds?
As Social Capital has evolved, we’ve become more of a technology company that makes investments versus a traditional VC fund. This means we have a Platform team composed of experts in areas such as user acquisition, data science, and business operations as well as talented engineers. This team has two goals: to find the best companies, and then to help make those companies better. Some Platform team members are portfolio-company facing and will do in-depth engagements where they work closely with founders and their teams to analyze the performance of their business, spot new opportunities, and scale up existing strengths. And others are focused on building proprietary software to help our portfolio and entrepreneurs more broadly.
What is the number one red flag for you that would make you pass on an investment?
Obviously something ethically questionable would be number one, but that’s pretty rare, so I’ll say negative customer feedback about the product and/or lack of product use. Both of these are predictive of likely subpar revenue trends in the future. A decent sales team, especially combined with the annual (or longer) contracts we see a lot in the enterprise sector, can mask product-market fit struggles.
Which investment were you most proud of and why?
I’m equally proud of all our investments. However, one that stands out as unique is mPharma, because it was very non-consensus. Very few VCs, especially those in Silicon Valley and NYC, will even consider investing in an Africa-based company. (Worth noting that many of the VC-backed “African” startups are actually operated by Americans, often times from a US-based headquarters). Beyond region, mPharma is attacking a large problem with lots of complexity, so there’s a lot that could go wrong, but at the same time there are great opportunities to build defensible moats.
About the Alchemist Accelerator
Alchemist is a venture-backed initiative focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises (not consumers). The accelerator’s primary screening criteria is on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. We give companies around $36K, and run them through a structured 6-month program heavily focused on sales, customer development, and fundraising. Our backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley — including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, and Salesforce, among others. CB Insights has rated Alchemist the top program based on median funding rates of its grads (YC was #2), and Alchemist is perennially in the top of various Accelerator rankings. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures / year. Learn more about applying today.