Is this the best you can do?

In 2020, I'll be sharing some of the 100 stories of women VCs from around the world from my book Women Who Venture. Message me if you want to get a signed copy.

Ann Miura-Ko, Founding Partner, Floodgate, United States

In the four months since I started working on this book in January 2019, a lot has happened to the investors featured in it. Ann Miura-Ko has had the largest exit for her firm, Floodgate, when Lyft went public in March. Floodgate was one of the very first micro VC firms in the United States that believed in backing companies at the seed stage before big checks come in. Miura-Ko invested in Lyft before it became such (initially, the startup was called Zimride), which brought a nearly 10,000% return to Floodgate on its roughly $1 million initial investment. 

Her partner, Mike Maples, says that she has consistently made at least one investment in each of Floodgate’s funds that has the potential to return the entire fund. He wanted Miura-Ko to become a star, teaching her all the wisdom he’d gotten by the time they launched Floodgate. ‘If you are going to be successful as a VC, I think the secret is to have a fast start in your first five years,’ he said. ‘You have to be associated with awesome companies immediately.’

Ann sees her relationship with Lyft from a different perspective. “We both grew up in the industry — I grew up as an investor alongside them growing up as entrepreneurs. So we both kind of needed each other in the moment. You hear so often about investors making a bet on entrepreneurs, and I really believe in this case, it was just as much John and Logan [founders of Lyft] taking a real bet on me.”

She thinks that Lyft is an excellent example of ‘intelligent growth’ because it was a highly disciplined company from its early days, that decided not to waste venture capital dollars until they got a product-market fit. Indeed, the team worked for two and a half years as the Zimride platform, where one could find carpooling arrangements, but the company couldn’t get enough drivers to show impressive traction. When they launched Lyft and gained the desired traction, they knew what they were doing and went ahead with raising a large round from Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz. “Hacking value and growth before you go out is something that I don’t see often enough in Silicon Valley,” Miura-Ko said. Her personal story reflects this principle, as well. 

Ann was so shy as a kid that she couldn’t even announce her performance when she played piano on stage — her brother was responsible for introducing her to the audience. In fifth grade, unlike all other kids, Ann picked a negotiations class during the summer school program. When her mom asked her why she had made that choice, Ann explained that the class was related to the book ‘Getting to Yes’ and she wanted ‘to learn how to get to yes’. Ten-year-old Miura-Ko was in a group with 30- to 50-year-old adults negotiating supply lines to create a real society on Mars during simulation. “I felt like I was taken seriously,” she recalled. 

Ann did really well in math and science, but speaking on a stage was not something that came naturally to her. She needed to step up her public speaking skills and decided to dive into speech and debate in high school. Miura-Ko said she was pretty terrible at it and wasn’t able to win any tournaments for quite a long time, but she loved the competition during debates. “I’ve always been that way. Wherever I can get points, I want more!” 

Ann grew up in a traditional Japanese family, and her parents wanted her to get into a great university. Although they were incredibly supportive, when her mom saw her losing records in debates, she got worried that it would decrease Ann’s chances of getting into an Ivy League college and suggested that she take fencing classes instead. Ann got the message but didn’t even consider a change of curriculum. She doubled down on her debates, and almost lived at Stanford’s Green Library during the summer, reading philosophy books and articles to prepare for the next tournament. After having had a losing record for the two previous years, she had a brilliant result in the next challenge. For Ann, this was a formative experience, because she felt that she could turn luck around and make her own. “I was very prepared to outdo every competitor who walked in through the door, and that became my habit over time.” She started pursuing excellence in everything after that, which was also what her father expected from her. 

He came to the United States speaking very little English, but got a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering, became an associate professor, and made his way out to NASA. Ann described him as a very passionate academic, who would wake up at five in the morning and continue working late into the night when he got back home from work. Since she was a small child, her dad used to ask her just one question about whatever she was doing: ‘Is this world-class?’ He expected her five-year-old writing to be world-class. He asked whether photocopying the documents that she was doing when she worked at the Dean of Engineering’s office at Yale, was world-class as well. His message was always: ‘Is this really the best that you can do?’ 

Ann remembered how she was standing in front of the photocopy machine with a stack of papers thinking, “What is world-class in photocopying?” She decided that she would make copies that were of such good quality, that one couldn’t tell that they were photocopies. She then continued doing everything in the same top-quality manner, so that the Dean or his executive assistant would experience a delight. It was another lesson Miura-Ko learned: have real ownership of the things you do and create opportunities for yourself.

This effort paid off big time when the Dean of Engineering, a legendary physicist working under George Bush Sr., and who barely knew Ann’s name, poked his head out of the office once and said, ‘I need you to go and give this friend of mine a tour of the engineering facilities. I know you’ll do a good job — Sarah [his executive assistant] has told me you’re great.’ Miura-Ko took the guest around, and at the end of the tour, he asked if she wanted to shadow him at his office for a while. Ann didn’t know at that moment that the guest was Lou Platt, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. She felt embarrassed that she hadn’t done her homework on the man, but was incredibly happy to take that opportunity. She followed Platt everywhere and met many Silicon Valley pioneers, including Bill Gates. 

Miura-Ko believes that mentorship is critical for personal and professional development and can mean many different things. She found that experience to be an incredible example of mentorship, because Lou Platt never asked for her resume but saw her potential instead. Reflecting on that, she said that potential is something that one has to find inside oneself, and that there are no tests or any other form of recognition for human potential. She knew what she was capable of when the test scores showed that she wasn’t, as well as when her parents believed in her, but she didn’t. 

That happened when she had a conviction that she was going to become a doctor. She took an organic chemistry class and was planning to go to medical school until she was about to start preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) with her friend. Before they got to open the books, Ann looked at her and had a sudden realization that she herself hated hospitals, didn’t like being around sick people and didn’t want them to always complain to her. That happened literally days before the test when she had constantly been observing her friend who seemed to become that world-class doctor, while Ann didn’t see herself becoming one.

Looking back, she admitted that she had probably known that she wasn’t going to become a doctor in her gut long before that epiphany. However, medical school seemed like a bullet-proof career path, where she knew every step of the way: which classes to take, what exams to pass, what school to apply to, etc. It was a predictable future, but the actual work at the end of the day was not something she was going to love and enjoy. 

At that point, Ann was uncertain of her future profession. Living in Palo Alto, she couldn’t avoid hanging out with entrepreneurs, but she had never considered doing business until then, so she didn’t have a plan. One of her friends mentioned venture capital as a possible career option, given Ann’s technical education. Although she knew what that was, she didn’t take that idea to heart and decided to go work for McKinsey to figure out what to do next. During that time, she met Ted Dintersmith, a partner at Charles River Ventures, and rather than formally interviewing her, Dintersmith was more interested in her tastes in literature and music. They had many things in common, and after a two-hour conversation where they didn’t discuss Ann’s previous experience, nor technological developments, Dintersmith invited her to work for the firm. This was another turning point in Ann’s life when someone recognized her potential and put it ahead of the formal requirements for a job again. 

Miura-Ko said that one of the things she learned from Dintersmith was his way of networking. For him, it was never just working a room, shaking a lot of hands, learning a few names, and moving on. He networked with a deep curiosity about the human being who was sitting across the table from him at that moment. 

She met her future investment partner, Mike Maples when she was teaching a course on entrepreneurship at Stanford, where he was a mentor to a group of students in her class. She wasn’t entirely satisfied with the work he was doing as a mentor and challenged him on the results of this group. He bluntly promised her that the students would all get A+ at the end of the day, and he delivered. 

The next time they had a serious conversation happened when Ann was contemplating starting a company in cybersecurity. She was doing her PhD in computer security when she realized how big the issue was becoming. She wanted to talk to some investors before jumping into deep waters and called Maples. He was kind enough to show her his deal flow and discuss some of the companies and investment strategy. Soon after that, he called Ann and suggested that she drops out of her PhD and join him at the new $35 million fund that he had just raised. He said, ‘It’s not the venture-backed startup that you’ve been thinking about, but it’s a backed venture startup.’ 

She had a lot of reservations about doing that. She knew that she didn’t have the experience to become an investor, and that should she decide to become a VC, there were a lot of large, established VC firms she could join. However, there was something in Maples that she wanted to learn from him — he had that mad genius of storytelling, positioning, and strategy that Ann was missing as an engineer who focused on the product instead. 

‘If you are going to be successful as a VC, I think the secret is to have a fast start in your first five years.’

Mike Maples

Miura-Ko accepted the offer, but decided to get her PhD as well, and that was the most intense time of her life. She was waking up at 4am in the morning to do the research until her one-year-old daughter woke up; taking her to daycare; working from 8:30am to 6:30pm at Floodgate; going home and cooking dinner; and then working on her PhD again. After half a year of this schedule, she got pregnant with her second baby and set up a date to defend her doctorate before her baby’s due date. However, it didn’t go as planned, and she ended up defending her doctorate weeks after giving birth to her son. The time between 2008 and 2009, when she managed to have a second child, to get her PhD, to make her first investments at Floodgate, and ‘to stay married’, Ann calls ‘the most creative and productive period of her life’. She would probably say that she wouldn’t do it the same way again if she could go back in time, if not for the outcome of all that hustle: that extreme level of chaos and multitasking made her much stronger. 

“I was very prepared to outdo every competitor who walked in through the door, and that became my habit over time.”

Her partner, Maples, couldn’t appreciate it more, as he thinks that the venture business clearly recognizes whiners from warriors. People who complain when they run up against a brutal obstacle, and those who just get it done. Women’s ability to remain warriors during the hardest times is one reason why he wanted more women at his firm.

If you think that Ann was welcome everywhere and her career was made of roses, it wouldn’t be true. But she learned to tune out the naysayers, knowing that although there were things that she wouldn’t be good at, there were also things that she could be great at. “My curiosity had me exploring a ton of very different paths in life, but self-awareness allowed me to close doors that weren’t a fit.”