 Let's just make sure we get the slides up here. OK, well, my name is Megan. I am the founder and CEO of Gen Z VCs. And today, we're going to talk about how age is just a number for VCs and founders. I think in the VC industry in particular, I mean, obviously there's 26,000 plus Gen Z investors, founders, students, operators in my community alone. But this idea of young people really making their way in this industry is fairly new, right? You didn't typically see funds hiring young investors out of college. There is, for example, in the recent downturn earlier in the market earlier this year, you saw a lot of VCs maybe retracting to back more experienced second time founders versus first time founders because there's this assumption that there's more risk if you don't have experience. So my hope is that today you can really see, especially if you are a young VC or a young founder in the audience, that there is a lot of power that comes from being young, seeing the world from a very different perspective, and bringing people into a new way of thinking. Oops. So yeah, so my name's Megan. And my entire career really stemmed from being an investor. So starting right out of college, my freshman year, I said, I want to be an investor. I think that's where I can make a really large impact. And investing is in a career where you can do a lot of that. I now am also a content creator, so I have 140,000 followers on socials. I started creating content while I was in VC. And I also do a fair amount of press, really advocating for young people in our generation. But really quickly, I want to bring everyone back to when I was 19 years old. I don't think many people think about, again, investing from that age or that type of career path opening. And the first, if you're going to take away anything from this presentation, it's this, leaning into your interest to find strengths and really your purpose and what drives you. So, and the first part of that is just being in the right rooms. So if you're young and you are concerned about not having the right credibility or the right network, find communities and people and champions that will help you get into that room. So for me, I have always been really interested and motivated in following other women in the investment industry. And so as a freshman in college, I joined two organizations and communities that helped me learn about investing from the women's perspective. Girls who invest, their goal is to have 30% of the world's assets managed by women by 2030. And as a freshman in college, I spent four weeks at UPenn learning about investing concepts and then six weeks at a hedge fund. And then Girls Who Invest was the one that made the intro to GenerAtlantic for me. And I became, I was the only female analyst in my summer internship class and then their first hire from a non-Ivy League school. They didn't look in those pools. And so I had to put myself in there by advocating and leveraging these communities. Smart Woman Securities is another one at many college campuses all over the world. I had a chance to meet Warren Buffett, my freshman year. I had dinner with him in Omaha and got to meet with the CEOs of his portfolio companies. That was a huge driver for me to want to even become an investor because I got to meet these people that were creating these incredible companies and hear the man behind the screen that was saying why he wanted to invest in those companies. And then at each age, each job that you're in, you want to just make sure you're being really reflective about what you're learning about yourself that can help propel you in that next job. So I went to JPMorgan for my sophomore internship in college and at JPMorgan, everyone told me that you needed this big bank experience. You needed to be an investment banker. You needed to have the big credential on your resume. I think that's even less true today. Focus on the things that excite you. It could be a big product management position, for example, at a Google or a Facebook slash meta, or it could be a startup that maybe doesn't have the fancy title or doesn't have the fancy funding, but you're so passionate about it that you'll be able to get experience, listen to what is exciting you at the moment. And again, at each phase of me becoming an investor, I sort of learned those little things about myself. So at Jen Atlantic, when I was 21 years old, my job was to send 100 cold emails a week to founders, which I had never done before, and they would fly me all over the country to meet with CEOs three times my age sometimes and also build market maps. So every other week, I was creating a market map on a sector and we would be looking at companies from Series B to pre-IPO. What's really great about the experience that I had at Jen Atlantic as a young investor who was so young on the team was I really leaned into specifically market expertise. So I covered education. I was a recent student, right? So I was 21 years old, just graduated from college. I could talk to ed tech founders in a completely different way than my managing directors because I intimately understood the problem, the tools, and also customers. I had introductions to customers that they had never thought about or go to market angle that they had never thought about. So I really leaned into being the voice of the customer in a boardroom where I might have been the youngest person in the room, but it didn't matter. And then Lyra Hippo, same thing, except on the consumer side. And while I was at Lyra Hippo, this fund, they empowered me to start creating content. So when I was at LH, I started tweeting. I had maybe 50 followers on Twitter at the time. And when I joined, the first question they asked me during my onboarding was like, what are your social handles? Like all the young people are on Twitter, they're tweeting, they're creating content. And I was like, oh gosh, I hope this isn't a prerequisite because I've never done this before. But for all the folks in the audience who are not Gen Z, it is so important to really empower the young people on your team to lean into those things, building a brand, finding their voice so that they can help the companies in their portfolios or they can help the founders that they're working with. And so really quick actually, how many founders do we have in the audience here? Okay, good, we've got a good amount. And then how many investors? Okay, maybe a little bit more. So again, I think leaning into this voice of being young, being the voice of the customer can provide a lot of different types of value to portfolio companies. And it's not just consumer. I think that's a really important distinction. I think a lot of people conflate Gen Z expertise, Gen Z insights to just consumer companies, but any enterprise company that goes B2B2C or has that type of go-to-market motion, it can be extremely relevant too. Also, my operating experience stems from building a community. Guess what, developer tools, they're building communities, right? And so it's very interesting sort of skill sets that can be replicable across industry. So for example, AIR is an enterprise company. They do digital asset management for different teams, creative teams, and they started thinking about ways that they could find the everyday sort of like creative manager where they were spending time. And they thought that was on TikTok. They didn't go to my managing director to ask how to do TikTok or film TikToks in Washington Square Park, they came to me. And that was because I started writing about TikTok. I started interviewing younger founders that were building on TikTok, gathering those insights and helping those founders build in scale. And one of the concepts that we did because they're a digital asset manager, it was thinking about, okay, well, if you're managing a bunch of pictures, asking people, what's the favorite picture that they have in their phone? What is that memory? And how do you lose that memory if your phone disappears, right? It's like intimately tied to their enterprise product that they're using with their teams. And one of those videos got two million views. They gained 10,000 followers on Instagram and that became a core part of their go-to-market. Influenced by a Gen Z investor who didn't have experience building on TikTok, just an interest and insights. And content too. So you're seeing a lot of Gen Z investors, Gen Z founders in particular, writing and building content to get their voice out there. And so for me, when the metaverse was growing crazy last year, I wrote a 26-page manifesto that ended up getting read by a couple million people, which was really crazy, but this is how I sourced deals at my company. So half of the deals that I sourced when I was at Lyra Hippo came from content, building market maps, thinking about spaces from different lenses and putting in this Gen Z twist that people weren't currently considering. And so no matter what it is that you're thinking about building content and whether you're a founder building a startup or an investor, it's so important to put your ideas out there. And by the way, it's fine to test it with your different friends or even interview different people that are in your network, right? I think as a collective, you'll see this as we keep going. We have so much power together, supporting one another as we move up into our different careers. Hold on, there we go. And I also think too, part of being an investor or the appeal to being an investor or a founder, right, is the impact that you can have at scale. So I myself am, you know, like I can do all these different things to create an impact on an individual level. When you're investing in the founders that are creating the companies that are going to change the world, you're playing a role in what that looks like. And as a founder, it's even larger, right? And so something that I've learned and I've been able to harness is that for me, my operating experience, even though I didn't have operating experience when I started in VC, has come through my side hustle, initially, which was Gen Z VC and I was building part-time. And through that, I learned that it wasn't just startups that needed help building community, it was also corporations and massive Fortune 500 companies. And so I started doing some interesting work with UEFA where we're launching this Champions Innovate program in the spring where three startups will be selected to get in front of hundreds of millions of fans at one of the largest sporting events in the world. I didn't plan to go into sports. I didn't plan to do work even on the corporate side, but it stemmed from understanding community, understanding startups and being able to leverage that across industries. And so no matter how old you are, what your niche is or what you're passionate about, you can transition that into adding value across sectors, which is really powerful and creating impact at scale. And so I think another thing too, so for example, Gen Z, I think the buzzword sustainability comes up very, very often, right? Like you think Gen Z, you think investor, you probably think of climate, you probably think of sustainability. I like to think, again, there's this individual impact that you can have if you recycle every day. That's great. Or you could work at a company like Patagonia and launch their Warnware Correction and see millions and millions of people leveraging and using this technology to start thinking about the circular economy. And this is why I think you're seeing so many young people want to become investors and want to become founders because that impact really does matter at scale. So climate founders, they're building technology that millions of people are gonna use to decarbonize the atmosphere and things like that. Ah, hold on, sorry. There we go. And I think another thing too, right, is like when you think of young founders or when you think about founders that you want to be backing, you think deep industry experience, moats that this founder might have that'll help them succeed over anyone else in the market that doesn't have to come from years of experience. I think lived experiences and passion can really help drive that. So I'll give you a great example. This is my friend Eli. He's building a company called Footprint. Index led their seed round, it was a $6 million seed round and he raised it one year out of graduating from Stanford. What he, when he started building this thesis when he was a sophomore in college at Stanford and he would take cryptography classes on the weekend to learn more about data security and cyber, that was his passion project at first. He didn't necessarily take very explicit courses at it. And then when he joined General Atlantic and we worked together as peers, he became the go-to expert on all things data security, information security. And every company we spoke to wanted to hire him as their chief of staff because he knew the industry inside and out. He read everything, he talked to all the right people and he became an expert through doing that. And then obviously started a company, raised $6 million and they're continuing to do amazing things in the enterprise space again, not just consumer. And then my friend Sophia, she started climate cardinals when she was a teenager starting to translate different climate information into different languages, recruited 9,000 plus volunteers from all over the world and now she's working on her second startup as I think she's a sophomore in college right now, right? And so age does not matter if you're able to really harness your passion into building things, which is why startups and I think venture is so special. Hold on, sorry, the clicker's not working. There we go. And I think this holds true for VCs too. So for example, this summer we did an event series here in Europe where we hosted eight events in eight countries across Europe really to get a pulse on where young people are investing in building and what that looks like. For 75% or sorry, 75% of the cities, climate was the number one or number two trend that founders were building in and VCs were investing in. So again, VCs, young VCs, VCs in general really do care about where they're spending their time every day and where they're, all their intellectual capital is going towards and climate is a really big one. Here are some of those samples of some of the interest areas that young people are thinking about. Battery recycling, energy transition, green energy, the circular economy. When you ask, and again I think also something to keep in mind especially when you think about even talking to a younger investor versus a more experienced investor maybe on a team if you're a founder, the young investors are typically the first line of defense at every venture firm. They're taking all the meetings. They have the best pulse on what the ecosystem looks like and I don't think it's a coincidence that when you see a market map being built up by a firm it's not typically just the partner, it's the partner and an analyst, the partner and an associate because they're meeting all the companies, they're seeing everything and then they're also elevating things to their different teams. And so if you're ever looking for what's happening in XYZ industry, analysts and associates they know what's going on and obviously founders are building in these spaces as well. And again I think this is, it's really important to remember that like we build as a collective, this is something that Gen Z naturally understands because you're the first digitally native generation. We grew up with social media, with iPhones and so it's our inclination to want to share what we're doing with the world. And as a result you're seeing a lot more founders start building their personal brands in addition to the brands that they're building with their companies and even using that as a top of funnel or go to market. I think of my friend Nadia Okamoto who she is four million followers on TikTok and she's the founder of a company called August which creates sort of sustainable period care products and they've raised I think four million dollars they're at the seed stage. But this notion like her entire TikTok page is dedicated towards changing the way that people think about their periods. And again you would think of periods for example as something really really niche but if you really think about it 50% of the world menstruates, right? And so it's massive and she's changing the way that young women think about that side of their life where historically it's been hidden away. She kind of makes it a much more positive side of her life and inspires a lot of young women who then want to buy August versus the incumbents. It's making a really big difference in the way that she's building community not just for herself on social media but through the lens of her company. And also like yes, something really important to remember too is that Gen Z is max 26 years old. So this is, we're just getting started here. That means maybe max four years out of college if you decided to go to college more young people are opting out of education I think than ever before in favor of lived experiences. Again, just shows that you can really leverage the things, the resources at hand whether it's a community, a course, your friends to go after the opportunities that excite you and Gen ZBC is very indicative of that. It was initially actually it was an accident. I tweeted about the idea, hey are there any Gen Z investors out there investing in Gen Z companies? If so, I'd love to meet you. I started my job during the pandemic adventure and I didn't have many friends in BC because it was my second job out of college. And it turns out there were a lot of other people that were looking for that same need friendship in the VC industry. This transition from like, I think very transactional way of thinking into relationship building and helping one another grow as we expand in our careers. And so that was how Gen ZBC started. We're continuing to build together as a community to support our peers. And that's a big change that we're seeing in the industry, right? It's helping one another as we grow. And I think that might be, sorry guys, the clicker is not working. Okay yeah, so TLDR, age is just a number. I really encourage you to think about your niche whatever it is and how you can transition that into operating experience with your companies as a VC or as a founder into starting something really impactful. All that it takes is really just the interest, the time, the hard work, the passion and then building the community around you to create an impact. So with that, thank you so much and I hope to see many of you after stage.