Work Life Ventures
Brianne Kimmel is a newly minted venture capitalist. She didn’t join a venture fund: She started her own. Her fund — Work Life Ventures — invests in new technologies and services for your work life.
Work today has a whole new meaning: it’s social w/ Slack, flexible w/ Zoom and approachable through low-code and no-code tools for anyone with an idea to build something. Brianne’s recent investments range from enterprise software (i.e. developer productivity tools) to creator tools that help anyone launch their own course, jewelry line or creative business.
Brianne has been an angel investor on evenings and weekends, had a YC company, and scaled Zendesk from a single product to multi-product platform.
She started her career building influencer programs for Nikon, then scaled into Head of Social Media at Expedia — in Sydney, Hong Kong and Silicon Valley.
But Brianne’s path to Silicon Valley wasn’t obvious. She started out in northeast Ohio, started attended Kent State while she was in high school and started her career in Australia.
Not the typical path for a Silicon Valley Venture capitalist. Nevertheless…here she is.
In this podcast we cover a range of topics and ideas. We discuss why she started her own firm, rather than joining an established VC. We have some fun with the emergence of ‘celebrity angels”, and take a more serious look at the future of distributed workforces.
She also surprises me – as it always happens – with what it’s like to be a high profile woman in the tech industry. She honestly shares what it’s like to get unwanted attention at, for example, conferences where, sometimes, security is called.
Please enjoy this episode with…Brianne Kimmel.