Ann Miura-Ko is a founding partner at Floodgate venture capital firm. Some of her investments include Ayasdi, Xamarin, Refinery29, Chloe and Isabel, Maker Media, Wanelo, TaskRabbit, Modcloth, and Lyft; Floodgate’s investment in Lyft led to a nearly 10,000% return on investment for the firm.
In 2010, Forbes referred to as “the most powerful woman in startups.” Two years prior, when she founded Floodgate, she gave birth to her first child and worked on her PhD dissertation.
“For people who believe that women juggling a career and kids are a liability, I would posit that there are few people in the world who know how to multitask and ruthlessly prioritize like a mother of young kids,” she said in an interview with Women of Silicon Valley, as reported by 500. “It’s been the key to my success.”
She is also a lecturer at Stanford in the field of entrepreneurship. Her students have pitched her hundreds of startup ideas.
Along with Kirsten Green and other successful women in the industry, she is one of the founding members of All Raise, an organization aiming to boost women’s success in venture capital. She is an advocate for increasing diversity in VC.
“If you want to have great discussions within a partnership, it’s the diversity of backgrounds that makes that happen,” she told Fortune. “Gender is obviously one aspect, but we should be looking for people of color and a variety of different ways that we can enhance diversity and perspective. It’s the things you see, but it’s also the things you don’t see, that make diversity so important.”
Ann received a bachelor’s in electrical engineering at Yale University and a PhD in quantitative modeling of computer security at Stanford University.
Tags: Diversity and Inclusion, Investment and Funding, VC, Women in Tech, Women in VC
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