SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1472 How She Raised Her Own $90m Fund at 29 Years Old
05 Aug 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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got a lot of experience in industry, had her own exit operating her own company, then said, you know what, I'm gonna go try this myself, raised a $17 million fund, won about a year and a half, two years ago, had a lot of success deploying that capital, then raised another fund, 90 million bucks, as she looks at scaling that.
Her biggest success, Grub Market, again, gotten to that company, and now on paper, that's grown over almost 100X, just that position alone. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich... or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines.
We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Lu Zhang.
She's the founder and managing partner of Fusion Fund. In 2017, she was awarded the Forbes 30 Under 30 as a featured honoree in the VC category. The same year, she was selected as Town & Country 50 New Modern Swans. Recently, she was awarded as the Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Lu Zhang to start her own venture capital fund?
So I kind of feel my background could be a good fit to really help the founder at the earlier stage and become their buddy in the dark side and help them to grow the company in the long term.
Now, a lot of folks that listen to this show are analysts or maybe even partners at other very large kind of firms, whether it's private equity, VC, etc. They look at what you do and they go, man, One day, I want to do what Lu did. I want to go out and raise my own fund. Walk me through where your head was at when you decided to go, you know, ask for your first capital for the fund.
And I believe it was, what, a $70 or $80 million fund, right?
Yeah. So, actually, my fund was a little bit smaller. It's a sub $20 million fund. And I did a second fund last year, which was a sub $100 million fund. So, I was working in another VC firm at that time. And I kind of feel like, okay, I saw the whole ecosystem and I found my passion is with early stage. And I found I'm pretty good at it with my background experience.
And I know people who are also awesome to team up with me in the near future. So what I start to do is I start to talk with lots of the family offices and also potential investors who are interested in tech and healthcare.
I tell them the trend that the innovation cycle is coming back in 2012, 2013, that's a business model innovation, and coming to 2014 and 15, that's more about how to really support innovation for fundamental tech and the technology application. So they really appreciate my insights on the industry and also feel the passion to work with me. So I have to say I have a relatively easy start.
for like fund my first fund. So I got the initial capital from Capital LP and start to do investment. And along the way, more and more investor came to me saying that I like your portfolio. I like your strategy. So how we could better work together. So I'm like, okay, I could launch fund two. So that's the fund two last year.
So far we have more than $100 million in the management for early stage technology investment.
Let's go back to round one. So what was the total raise? You said less than 20. How much was it?
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Chapter 3: How did Lu Zhang raise her first $17 million fund?
Okay, good. So you had a lot of new people coming as well.
Yes, yes.
That's very good. All right, Lu, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
Business book? The physics of Wall Street.
The fitness of Wall Street?
Yeah.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now?
CEO? You mean the CEO in the big corporation right now?
Just anyone that you're following or studying.
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