TLC Collective (Terri Burns, Lauren Stephanian, and Casey Caruso)

We started #ANGELS (“Hashtag Angels”) six years ago as an investment collective to collaborate, pool our expertise and networks, and learn and grow as investors together. Over the years, we’ve often been asked the collective model and how it works. On today’s episode, Jess dives into this topic with the TLC investment collective, to learn from co-founders Terri Burns, Lauren Stephanian, and Casey Caruso. TLC was started in early 2020, and just one year in they’ve made 11 investments and designed a robust set of processes for tracking deals, evaluating founders, and writing investment memos. Terri, Lauren, and Casey each have technical backgrounds and pride themselves on “making and breaking” alongside founders. The best way to learn about NFTs? Why not design and drop one? To learn in public, they open sourced their investment memo for one of their first deals, Watershed Informatics. We talk about each of their paths into venture, where Terri is a partner at GV, Lauren is a principal at Pantera Capital, and Casey works part time as an advisor to Bessemer while also a full time engineer at Google working on research systems. Each week, we wrap up with a Shoutout to people who’ve inspired and helped us along the way. Terri highlights Freia Lobo and Dave Municello; Casey thanks Stanford professor Andrew Ng, as well as her whole Bessemer team, and Lauren shares how she’s been inspired by the peers around her. The #ANGELS Pod brings you conversations about the latest tech trends with the people inventing and shaping them in Silicon Valley and beyond. Hosted by the co-founders of #ANGELS, an investment collective: Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Jana Messerschmidt, Chloe Sladden, Katie Stanton, and Vijaya Gadde. We cover personal stories about breaking into tech and scaling up, and inside looks at the most interesting startups, from the people building them. This podcast is just getting started and we’d love your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter @HashtagAngels and thanks in advance for listening! The #ANGELS Podcast is a production of Haitch Industries. Our theme music is by Tobey Forsman of Whipsong Music. The episode was produced and edited by Matt Herrero.