Fund: Swizzle Ventures
Thesis: Advancing women’s health and wealth through the pivotal stages of their lives.
Fund size: $6.6 million
How she’s making the world a better place: Applying her skills to make women’s lives healthier and richer.
Jessica Kamada: “I have a skill set that can be applied to this huge market that 87% of VC check writers do not understand.”
If there’s one word to sum up Jessica Kamada, it’s performance.
Kamada spent a decade as a growth marketer helping companies like Uber, DoorDash, Turo, and the New York Times rapidly and exponentially grow their mobile app audiences. In particular, she excelled at performance-based marketing: She got paid based on hard, measurable outcomes, not feel-good, unmeasurable brand stuff. And at the agency she co-founded and ran for a decade, she was one of the best people in Silicon Valley at it.
But long before that, she was a competitive figure skater, where performance meant something quite different. From the age of six to 16, she was on the ice with her Russian coach before school, after school, on holidays, and early every Saturday morning. She didn’t have much of a childhood.
“One thing that figure skating taught me was how to be gritty and graceful at the same time,” Kamada says. “That sport is unrelenting. You have to really love it to do it for as long as I did. It taught me determination. You are going to get kicked and get a lot of bruises, and you have to get up and try that thing again.”
Today, Kamada is a solo general partner at Swizzle Ventures - her $6.6 million fund named after a figure skating term that involves multiple pivots.
There aren’t many former competitive figure skater VCs. And it’s not the only thing that makes Kamada stand out in the industry. She didn’t go to one of the handful of Ivy League feeder schools, she didn’t come from a tech startup, and she doesn’t have an engineering or finance degree.
“I think on paper I have kind of a weird background to be a VC,” she says. “But not only have I done the work of an operator [helping grow] twelve different unicorns, across the consumer landscape, but I built [my agency] business. I’ve been doing bizdev, I hired and trained 80 employees, I’ve managed a P&L, I’ve been dealing with multiple stakeholders, and it just feels natural. I’ve realized that running a venture firm is just running another services company.”
You Don’t Have to Look the Part
This is what VC Lab and Start Fund were created to enable: People with all the skills to become VCs who don’t fit the arbitrary pattern of what a VC looks like. Because Kamada had more than the skills to do the job.
While co-running her growth agency, Bamboo, she and her partner had already started investing in startups on the side. And they built an enviable track record: Out of seven deals they backed between 2019 and 2021, one is already worth more than $1 billion. Kamada and her partner have worked with over 100 companies, 12 have grown to more than $1 billion in valuation, and five have gone public.
“We clearly know what good looks like,” she says.
That track record aside, if Kamada was going to do this job full-time, she was going to have to start her own fund. So she quit her agency to start her own fund. Her focus: Advancing women’s health and wealth through the pivotal stages of their lives.
This wasn’t just a mission that was important to her as a mother of two kids under two, trying to balance an ambitious career herself. With so few women in the venture world, she would have unique insights into massive markets that were mostly going unfunded, because the “type” of people writing checks didn’t get the magnitude of the problems to be solved for women.
“I have a skill set that can be applied to this huge market that 87% of VC check writers do not understand,” she says. “That is a golden opportunity.”
She quit the agency she helped build in 2022 and started to fundraise in 2023.
Kamada had no idea where to start. She saw a banner ad for VC Lab. It was a free program. It seemed to check the boxes. She didn’t have anything to lose, so she applied and got in.
“I saw it as my chance, and I was not going to fuck it up,” she says. “It’s a doing program, not a learning program. I was at the point and I was ready. They gave me the direction on what not to waste my time on, and for me as a mom of two, I didn’t have time to waste.”
Kamada’s goal was to have as small a fund as possible, while still being taken seriously as an investor.
“I asked myself, what is the minimum viable product to get me into this business for real? My first target was actually $3 million, and then I hit it. I was like, ‘I think I could keep going.’ I upped it to $5 million, and I ended up at $6.6 million. I decided to cut it there. If I ended at $10 million, I would have had to alter my strategy.”
The first million was hard, she says. But she attacked the problem with that same performance, getting back up after your kicks and bruises with the endurance she’s had since she was a six-year-old on the ice.
“I ran it like a sales process,” she says. “I was using 20% conversion as the benchmark, and when I was under that, I was like, ‘What is it about my pitch that isn’t there yet?’ So I just kept refining and optimizing to get it right. When I got it to 20%, it was burned and turned. I was consistent. I constantly did everything I said I was going to do for six months. And by the time of the final call, people who said they weren’t quite there yet when I started were ready to jump in.”
Without Decile, she would have still tried it on her own, she says. She’s not a Sand Hill Road kind of VC who would have gone after a job at a big existing firm. But she expects her journey would have taken years longer, if it came together at all.
“I came from the middle-class suburbs of Detroit, back when there was a middle class,” she says. “I don’t have a backstop. I don’t have a trust fund.”
While Kamada certainly has her share of stories coming up in the bro-world of Silicon Valley, she has advice for women trying to raise a fund.
“This is what kills me about female fund managers and female founders in general,” she says. “There is the added cloud over you, that someone tells you, ‘It’s going to be harder for you.’ And like, what if it’s not? What if it actually is not? Going into it, for me, I knew I was going to raise a small fund, and I know I’m going to over-perform it, and I know institutions are not going to give me money, so where is my best shot at getting money? And if I am just able to find pockets and look where other people are not looking, it doesn’t have to be harder. I know it was easier for me than a lot of my other peers, because I was targeting like a fucking laser on the people I wanted.”
“Nothing to Lose”
When Kamada saw an ad for VC Lab, she figured she had nothing to lose, so she applied, and it was exactly the structured environment she needed to get this fund off the ground as a new working mom.
“I saw it as my chance and I was not going to f**k it up,” she says. “They gave me direction on what not to waste your time on, and for me, as a mom of two, I don’t have time to waste. Raising a fund is really hard, especially if you have a family. I don’t have a backstop. I don’t have a trust fund.”