What’s your startup genesis story? Rachel Yang wants to hear it

Rachel Yang is a partner at Giant Leap, the VC fund that backs “mission-driven founders solving the world’s most pressing problems”. Yang and the team invest in climate, health, empowerment and education startups.

On November 30, she joins SmartCompany as a guest judge at the Pitch, our early-stage startup competition. Here, she shares her “cautiously optimistic” thoughts on the startup and venture capital ecosystem currently, and how she’s hungry for founders who can tell a great genesis story.

What are your thoughts on the current shape of things?

I’m ‘cautiously optimistic’, is how I’d summarise how I’m feeling. It’s a challenging period in terms of tightening budgets and decreased spending, broadly. Startups are giving feedback that it is more challenging to raise in this environment, and I’m hearing from investors as well that they are being a bit more risk-averse and cautious with the deployment of capital.

But having said all that, we are finding that there are investors that have capital to deploy. Like Giant Leap, we did our final close earlier this year, and we have funds from our second fund, that we can invest in startups. We’re actively seeking startups to invest in, and we have other investors in the ecosystem doing the same. So it’s definitely a time when investors are still deploying.

And I also feel like the areas that we invest in… climate, health, empowerment, education? The problems that these founders are solving are not going away. So irrespective of the market conditions, these problems need to be solved, so founders are innovating and finding opportunities to capitalise on them.

What gets you excited about early-stage startups and founders?

So much, but I would say that the fact that they can be agile and adapt to changing market conditions means that we may see the greatest innovations of our time come out of this period. We’ve historically seen some of the biggest businesses come out of a recession. Microsoft, Airbnb, and WhatsApp, all came out after tough economic times. Startups have the ability to innovate and be agile in this environment. Also, I think, startups can look at things differently and disrupt industries and address some of these really pressing problems that we have that aren’t going away anytime soon.

What do you look for in founders and pitches?

I really love to learn about the genesis story of a business, to understand the founder’s ‘why?’ To know why this problem that they’re solving will get them out of bed each day. Then, having a really clear messaging is one of the key things that I’d like to see. And the messaging around things like the problem that they’re solving, the willingness to pay, the uniqueness of their solution, the market opportunity ahead of them, and their team and traction.

Rachel Yang joins the guest judging panel at the Pitch, in Melbourne on November 30. Want her to hear your great startup idea? Enter here.