Season 2, #7: Resilience: Journalist to Venture Capitalist

On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with Genevieve LeMarchal about Resilience: Journalist to Venture Capitalist. They speak about Genevieve's "Phoenix Manifesto", and what journalism and venture capitalism have in common. Genevieve LeMarchal is the Managing Partner of Suncoast Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund specializing in healthcare impact and equity funding opportunities in medical AI, digital health, health tech, medtech and select therapeutics. She launched and ran Expert Dojo's healthcare program and ran 3 full cohorts of health tech and medtech companies, becoming one of the most prolific early stage vc investors in Southern California (Crunchbase, 2022) and winner of the 2022 Biocom Lifescience Catalyst Award. She loves to innovate financial models and find better ways to structure and fund companies and deals. She previously served as Partner at a science focused advisory and fund in formation, was a General Partner at Oregon-based FoundersPad VC Fund II and she is co-founder of the XXcelerate Fund. She is the host of the AdVentureous Podcast. Genevieve writes and delivers talks, keynotes and training programs to groups all over the world about venture capital and entrepreneurship, impact and equity investing and more. You can find out more about Genevieve and Suncoast Ventures at: https://www.suncoastvc.com/ adventureous podcast linked in Transcript: 00:04 Welcome back to the Founder's Sandbox. The Founder's Sandbox is a podcast now in its second season. It's a monthly podcast that reaches entrepreneurs, business owners, and business owners. 00:30 who learn about building resilient, scalable, and sustainable businesses with great corporate governance. I am Brenda McCabe, your host on the Founder's Sandbox. And here my mission is very simple. I want to assist those entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in building those scalable, well-governed, and resilient businesses. Guests to this podcast are either founders, business owners, players in the VC, 00:59 private equity, ecosystem, professional service providers who like me want to use the power of the enterprise be that small, medium or large to create change for a better world. Through storytelling with each of my guests, we're gonna touch upon their own personal and professional journeys. And I always tease out topics around resilience, purpose-driven businesses and sustainable growth. My goal with this podcast is to really 01:29 create a fun sandbox environment where we can equip one founder at a time to build a better world through great corporate governance. Today my guest is Genevieve LeMarchal. It's an honor to have Genevieve today with me. Thank you Genevieve. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. You know Genevieve is the managing partner of Suncoast Ventures. 01:56 an early stage venture capital fund specializing in healthcare impact and equity funding opportunities. I'll go a bit more into your background in a moment. Genevieve and I go back probably two years when you were at Expert Dojo and their healthcare fund. And recently we met again at an investor summit and got to have dinner with Genevieve. 02:25 and discover kind of her journey to what she does today as managing partner of a venture fund. And in that dinner discussion, I discovered actually the theme of that. So very near and dear to my heart, which is around resilience and her own personal and professional journey is all about resilience. And the title for the episode today is resilience on journalist. 02:54 to venture capitalist. So thank you again Genevieve for joining me today in the Founder Sandbox. I'm gonna give a bit more color to your very deep expertise in healthcare. You're fun today, invest in digital health, health tech, med tech and select therapeutics. You also launched and ran 03:22 at Expert Dojo, a healthcare program running three cohorts of health tech and med tech companies. Shout out, quite a few of those companies are women owned. You become one of the most prolific early stage VC investors in Southern California as per Crunchbase 2022. You also were the winner of the 2022 Biocom Life-Size Catalyst. 03:50 Life Science Catalyst Award. You have a strength in developing innovative financial models, and you find better ways to structure and fund companies and deals. We all know that life sciences has a really long time to market. A lot of patient money has to sit behind that. You also previously served as partner at a science-focused advisory and fund information. You were a general partner at an Oregon-based 04:19 Founders Pad VC Fund 2, and you are co-founder of the Accelerate Fund. And you also have your own podcast. So this is not new to you. She is the host of Adventurous Podcast, and she writes and delivers talks, keynotes, and training programs to groups all over the world. You're a Pacific Northwest native, and you now reside in San Francisco Bay Area. 04:49 Genevieve, thank you. Thank you. After the dinner, where I had the honor to sit beside you, I came back and took a look at Suncoast Ventures website. And digging through it, I landed upon the Phoenix Manifesto, which is on your landing page. 05:15 And I want to read it here because I think it so encapsulates before you tell us what does journalism and BC investment have in common. I'm going to read this. Again, this is on the website of Suncoast Ventures. I am a phoenix. I am shakeable, not because I have never had setbacks. I am intimate with pain and failure. I stand tall. 05:43 and look it in the face and I have always pushed through. I always show up and I never give up. I believe anything is possible no matter the odds. I have faced the odds my entire life, fighting for my place in this world, for my right to walk the pathways to achieve greatness. What makes me resilient has nothing to do with what you see on my surface and everything to do with what lies. 06:13 within. Science and technology for betterment of society is how I choose to contribute to the world. I have dedicated my life. This is how I live and love. I'm willing to bend, but I'll never break. And the darkness can't get me because I burn on my very own. This is how I create my own light. 06:43 I have risen from the ashes many times. I am forged and fired full of grace. I am unshakable. So with that, tell us your story Genevieve. What does journalism and VC investment have in common? Yeah, well, so I started out my career for a short period of time as a journalist. Straight out of college, I went to school for journalism, all of that. 07:11 And journalism school is actually very difficult. You have to be very, they teach you to be very precise and they teach you to have extremely high standards for your work because if you mess up or if you have an incorrect fact or something that's inaccurate or whatever that might be, it can't run on paper. It does, you're gonna make the paper look really bad and you're probably gonna get fired. So. 07:40 So that's really ingrained. But then the next thing that's really ingrained into journalism students and eventual journalists is just this insatiable ability to tell a story and the desire to find one, to seek the truth, find out what's really going on. And so even though I had to report as the youngest and new reporter in the newsroom on the really boring story is things that no one could do. 08:08 talks about, no one wants to read. I had to write about the squirrel that was going rabid on somebody's roof and they called the police, just turned out it was a squirrel. It was a small town. News was limited, but things like that. And then, but I was always, I had this dream, I wanted to break a story, and I really idolized the great journalists like Edward R. Murrow. 08:35 of course, Anderson Cooper. I really thought that he was like a really revolutionary journalist of our time and all these different things. And so I was always looking to dig past what I was being told on the surface and get down to the truth. And that is something that you have to do every single day as a venture capital investor, because unlike investing in... 09:02 later stage deals or even like public markets or things like that, the information is not readily available. So you have to dig for it and you have to look for it. And you're also making bets on really nascent things that don't really exist yet. So you're always looking for information to piece together to try to determine whether or not an area of investment is viable. 09:31 Is it a gap we should be focusing on? Is it not a gap we shouldn't be focusing on? And that doesn't just come from one person's single observation of what they see on the surface. It comes from lots of information gathered and aggregated over time to create a story. And then we hope, as investors, that the story is true. So I would say those are the parallels. And that's a great segue to the next question. 10:00 around you hope as investors that the story that you've been able to weave together jointly with the company your funding does come true. There are parallels with running a fund, setting up a fund VC fund to that of being a founder, right? Yeah, not not all of them. Right. And so you know, what has you you? 10:30 have been through a couple funds. And the most recent is, is you are the fund manager. You know, what does staying true to your purpose, right? And your fun mean, you know, we've we've coming up for you raise this fund in June of 2022. Yeah, you bring in some of the companies from the cohorts coming up about expert dojo, you're really centered on the thesis of 10:59 of health care. You know, what is it that allows you to stay true to purpose? 11:06 That's such a big question. Like you can write a whole book about that. I need to talk about that. I think that the thing that allows me to stay true to purpose is the fact that I've been burnt out so many times and a lot of it has to do, had to do with the fact that I wasn't being true to myself. I w