#25: How technology helps investors in search of startups - Penny Schiffer
Imagine you are invited to give a talk at Stanford about your work as an investor. Excited, you board a plane to cross the Atlantic. And a conversation with a seat neighbour on that flight changes your whole life trajectory. You are now adamant about building your own business.
That’s exactly what happened to Penny Schiffer, CEO & Co-Founder of Raized.ai. After 10 years in venture capital, Penny decided to launch a startup to make this industry more intelligent. A psychology major, she had to ‘go back to the roots’ and re-discover her technical background.
Career pivot high in the sky
On her 11-hour flight from Zurich to San Francisco, Penny’s neighbour was talking about the power of artificial intelligence in business. This led to an a-ha moment for Penny on how venture capitalists (including herself) could be more efficient using technology. By end of the flight, she was thinking not about her speech at Stanford but about starting her venture.
How your academic knowledge can help you in building your business
Unless you’ve studied data science, you won’t be able to understand the intricacies of machine learning. Or at least so it seemed to Penny. She quickly realized though that much of what is now labeled with the fancy term ‘data science’, used to be called… statistics. And that’s precisely what she studied at the university. She simply had to ‘translate’ the statistics terminology into today’s data science terms. This knowledge helps Penny to lead the team and understand all aspects of their product.
“At the start, I worked with two machine learning engineers. When I asked them, “What did you do? How does it work?” They responded, look, you will never understand what we are doing.”
Startup evaluation, according to Raized.ai
While looking for startups to back, investors rely not only on their own skills and judgment but on technology. For does it mean for founders? To be accurate, algorithms need data. It is hence essential for startups to share certain information online, for example, on their website or Crunchbase.
Raized.ai is not replacing humans in the startup evaluation process completely but offers investors an extra toolkit to cast a broader net. Thanks to such tools, underrepresented founders will have higher chances to be noticed.
“Some manual processes can be replaced. This allows analysts to screen more companies.”
About Penny Schiffer
Penny is on a mission to transform startup investment with artificial intelligence, to make more fair and efficient, and generate higher returns. Before Penny launched Raized.ai, she worked in corporate innovation and as a strategy consultant at Accenture. Penny got into programming at the age of ten but only made the step into the tech industry later. She was awarded “Seed 10 - the Best of Europe’s Female Early-Stage Investors” by Business Insider in 2022. Penny is based in Zurich, Switzerland.