Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2018: #21 Nisha Dua

Ever since Fairchild Semiconductor reputedly pioneered in the 1950s the practice of allowing its executives to invest, advise, and launch startups on the side that might benefit Fairchild the art of the side hustle or project has been part of the folklore of the corporate venturing ecosystem. 

But few side hustles have had the impact of Nisha Dua, partner at BBG Ventures, who co-founded the early stage venture capital fund backed by sole limited partner (LP), US cable group Verizon’s media subsidiary Oath (formerly AOL before its merger with Yahoo last year), and has done more than most to change the perception of coding and venture capital as a male-dominated industry.

She said: “I have had three careers so far. I was an M&A lawyer for a top Australian law firm [Blake Dawson, since merged with Ashurst], a management consultant for Bain & Co advising consumer packaged goods, media and tech companies.

“Third, I moved from Australia to New York to do strategy and operations for a 1,300-person content group at AOL [as chief of staff to Susan Lyne], where on the side I relaunched their millennial content site, Cambio, running editorial, product and sales to grow it from 2.5 million monthly uniques to 9 million uniques in just nine months.

“As part of the relaunch of the site, I hired five 17-year-old Girls Who Code alumnae to rebuild it with us. We watched these girls come in pumped to blog about the Kardashians, then learn the 360 degrees of running a digital media business and end their time with us set on becoming experts in cybersecurity or editorial analytics. This was the genesis of my side project – Builtbygirls [the inspiration for the name of BBG Ventures].

“The aim of Builtbygirls, which is also backed by our corporate LP, Oath, is to, one, expose young women to the countless opportunities for them in tech; two, arm them with practical skills to thrive in their first jobs; and, three, help them build their first networks in tech.

“From 2014 to 2016 we have reached over 5,000 girls with online content and high touch programs including the Cambio internship, Girls Who Fund internship, Builtbygirls Challenge and The Hashtag series.

“In 2017, we launched the beta of our new product, Wave. Wave is a mobile platform that matches high school girls with young professionals in technology, exposing them to three different connections in a year, each of whom commit to making two introductions for their match.

“This helps a young woman build her first network in tech of nine advisers – one she would otherwise never have going into college. The beta launched in February and we are now at 450 girls and 450 advisers who come from top tech companies like Spotify, RTR, Uber, General Assembly, WeWork, Snapchat, Oath, Verizon, Squarespace, Handy among others. In 2018, Wave will go national. Builtbygirls is building the next wave of female tech leaders and founders.”

This is handy for Dua’s main job of finding women-led startups. BBG Ventures invests in consumer tech companies with at least one female founder.

Dua said: “We invest in companies who are reimagining daily life, creating market-defining products and services that make our work, play and home lives simpler, better and more satisfying. Susan Lyne, Martha Stewart, president of ABC Entertainment, and I launched the fund in September of 2014 after we observed the convergence of several factors: first, women as the dominant consumer, and increasingly the early adopters and power users of new tech platforms and services; second, an a incoming wave of new female founders building companies to solve problems they faced, for a consumer that looks a lot like them; and, third, the hard data that shows female founders drive higher return on investment but have been largely overlooked by the traditional venture community – they get less than 10% of venture dollars.

“We decided to back the best of those founders and have seen over 2,500 companies since, and invested in over 50. As a small team, I have personally led or co-led all of these investments. Our investments are across four main categories – content, community and creators; new commerce; platforms and services for generation Z; and future of work.

“For us, and for Oath, it is a competitive advantage and a white space investing in high returning founders who understand their end user intimately, and who have been overlooked by venture.

“We are still only 3.5 years in, but we have created almost $1.5bn in enterprise value. We are seeing the number of companies in the portfolio raising follow-on capital at rates higher than the national average.

“While I cannot divulge multiples or valuations. Some of our standout stars that have all raised significant follow-on rounds include the Wing, which just raised $32m from WeWork, Glamsquad, Zola, Modsy, Beautycon, Lola, GoTenna, Pymetrics, Reaction Commerce, and Carbon38.”

Last month, Advance Publications, NBCUniversal, Comcast and Alphabet all joined BBG in backing interior design technology developer Modsy’s $23m series B round.

Dua added: “At a micro level BBGV aims to be the largest collection of transformative consumer brands in the country who just happen to be founded by women. We want to build the premiere brand for women-led companies in the country.

“We are on track to achieve that, with close to the largest single fund portfolio of female founders in venture – even after just one fund.

“At a macro level, the performance of our fund matters because it will increase investment in all women-led companies. And, ultimately, backing the next female-led unicorns [private companies worth at least $1bn] will drive some of the biggest change. We are aiming to be early investors in those companies over the next decade – of which we believe there will be many.”

An additional benefit will be if BBG’s success encourages a more favourable evaluation of the industry by entrepreneurs. Dua said: “CVCs need to lean into their roles as strategics for both value creation for their corporate owner, and for their startup.

“CVCs need to invest in internal stakeholder engagement and a sponsorship spine to build support for a culture of innovation within their companies so that when they need to connect their internal teams, or leverage their corporate assets for their startups they can do so nimbly.

“This will also set the stage for more successful post-acquisition integration. Working on this will help founders view CVCs more favourably as a source of investment.

“What was so appealing about CVC in this case was Oath’s belief in women as the dominant consumer, and the opportunity to apply a woman’s perspective to changing paradigms in a way we have not before – by funding them.

“We are the first CVC (and institutional) fund in America to really put a stake in the ground by backing women. That’s ground breaking. To do that with the strategic value a corporate can provide whether it is across audience development or distribution or as a customer – well that’s transformative for a startup. And these startups will be just as transformative for Oath (and now Verizon, our new parent company,) down the track.”

With plenty to work on there seems only one challenge limiting BBG, according to Dua: “Only having two people running the fund! There is a massive wave of female founders, and we are only limited by our own bandwidth. There are more founders to spend time with, and more resources we can provide them with to help them succeed.” Out of California-based Fairchild came Intel and effectively the modern Silicon Valley, but the history of Dua’s impact has yet to be written.