From Norwest to starting Roble Ventures, Sergio Monsalve on equity and diversity in tech, adapting from large VC to a small, solo-GP, and investing in heated markets.

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Today’s episode is with Sergio Monsalve, founding partner of Roble Ventures, a seed firm based in Silicon Valley that invests in solutions that help human progress. Their portfolio includes Kahoot, Mosaic, and Dragonboat, among others. Prior to Roble, Sergio spent 14 years at one of the longest standing VC firms in the world, Norwest Venture Partners, where he led investments in companies such as Udemy and Adaptive Insights. Before he started his investing career, he held various roles in high-growth technology companies like eBay and Portal Software. He currently teaches at his alma mater, Stanford, on education and entrepreneurship. We chatted with Sergio about equity and diversity in the VC world, adapting to a smaller GP model after so much time at a large partnership, and how he thinks about investing in human enablement technologies. A message from our sponsorAnduin is revolutionizing fund management with streamlined fund operations, digitized fund subscriptions, and real-time status updates. Traditional, paper-based subscriptions are costly, tedious and error-prone, with up to 80% of submitted documents being incorrect and considered not in good order.Fund managers lack real-time visibility, facing manual processes, endless back-and-forth and a mountain of emails, documents and spreadsheets.Anduin’s investor onboarding workflow improves the investor experience, bringing clarity, guidance, and efficiency to fund subscriptions which drastically reduces error rates.The Anduin platform allows GPs to perform fund operations simply and efficiently with improved data accuracy, freeing up time so they can focus on what they do best... investing.For more information, or to arrange a demo, visit fundsub.io/ventureunlockedIn this episode we discuss:02:19 Why Sergio decided to get into venture and the unique challenges he faced 04:47 Sergio’s departure from a large shop in Norwest to starting Roble07:45 Transitioning from a partnership-driven ethos to being a single operator10:23 The meaning of ‘human-enablement’ investing13:27 Post-pandemic predictions16:46 Why you must bring diversity on a team20:31 Diversifying the decision making process and identifying implicit bias24:44 Investing in highly competitive markets with discipline 28:19 Sergio’s parameters for investing32:01 Capitalizing founders in the appropriate way in today’s market36:19 What did Roble Ventures look to accomplish in the early days39:58 The most counterintuitive thing Sergio ever learnt41:27 Dominant trends coming up in venture43:22 Investors he is inspired byMentioned in this episodeRoble VenturesI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Sergio. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com