Last month, I celebrated my first Ada-versary (Ada anniversary)! 13 months since joining Ada Ventures as Head of Operations, it still feels a little surreal to be working with this team. I am grateful for this privilege every day.

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VC Operations

In the spirit of Open Venture, I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned about VC ops in a small VC fund. As Matt & Check (the Partners of Ada Ventures) have alluded to elsewhere, a new VC fund is in itself a start-up, and a VC fund could be seen as the sum of two parts — the FCA-regulated investment firm and the fund itself.

Our core business is investing into companies to get the greatest return we can for our investors, in line with our thesis. Together, Diarra, our Head of Portfolio & Brand, and I, support Check & Matt in delivering this core business. This backend support includes:

1. Team — hiring, culture, employment policies, benefits

2. Marketing — brand, communications with the public (like this Medium post!)

3. Investor relations — quarterly reporting, regular communications

4. Fundraising — for our fund, and for our portfolio

5. Portfolio support — supporting our founders, connecting them to our network

6. Community management — our scout & angel program

7. Supplier management — liaising with lawyers, administrators, accountants etc.

8. Investment processes — closing checklists, project management

9. Impact — due diligence processes, what this looks like for Ada as a firm

10. ESG — how we show up in the world, and how we help our portfolio navigate this

11. Finance — bookkeeping, fund accounting, tax returns

12. Compliance — FCA, data protection, insurance, annual audits

13. Legal — fund legals, investment legals, day-to-day contracts

14. General ops — offices, IT, merch

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There’s quite a breadth of work included in VC ops (or ops roles generally), and I’m learning more every day. If you’re new to this space and would like to discuss this more, please feel free to reach out.

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Career Change for Lawyers

I first met Check and Matt while working as a funds lawyer at Morrison & Foerster (then at Morgan Lewis). A massive shout out to Eliska, Oli and Rob, who made Big City Law a truly fun(ds) experience. My role at Ada Ventures is my first role outside of law.

At the time, navigating a career change out of law felt a bit like a black box. I’d met many lawyers who’d said they want to leave the profession but hadn’t met anyone who’d actually done it. The most obvious paths out of the City seemed to be working in in-house legal teams, or as professional support lawyers, still in big law firms. Few seemed to have moved beyond these options.

If that sounds familiar to you, here are a couple of things I’ve learned in the last 13 months:

1. Those transferable skills people tell you you’ll gain as a lawyer? They exist. I found it so hard to see this while I was in private practice, but being a lawyer gave me an incredible foundation of essential skills.

Checklists, processes, making a completion work — these are all skills that every junior lawyer has to learn. That closing that you ran with the World’s Most Annoying Signing Matrix? Those are similar to skills you need to maintain, update or work with many other databases, run projects or develop processes — you just need to recontextualise them for a new environment.

2. Common sense will get you very far. As lawyers, we’re used to being the technical experts in the room, to pay attention to all the minutiae. This is a super skill that will be very handy, but it must be paired with common sense — getting hung up on every minor point will leave you paralysed.

3. It is not (really) a competition. What I’ve enjoyed the most about VC so far is that it is an incredibly collaborative industry. Everyone is learning as they go, and people are very willing to share what they know. Within days of joining Ada, I had already been invited to join multiple VC ops groups, and the compassion and generosity with which everyone shares their knowledge continues to wow me every time I log on.

4. Take your time. Things will move quickly, and perfection rarely happens. Sometimes, being ‘busy’ is less important than taking your time to think something through. If, like me, you are used to long hours and busy nights, where each hour was aimed at producing an end product (document), this is a definite adjustment (and one I’m still working on!). But if you’re trying to work out the best way to do something new — like how to implement a fair hiring process, or what’s the best way to optimise a currently inefficient process — it’s OK to take a pause, think it through, before jumping into the busy work — as uncomfortable as that might feel.

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It’s been a pretty steep learning curve! Thank you as ever to the Ada team, and everyone who has supported me throughout my career. I’m excited to see what the next year brings. Onwards!

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