LA Venture Podcast

EPISODE 042

Aditi Maliwal — Upfront Ventures

May 6, 2020

Seed
Series A

One of the newest partners at Upfront, Aditi Maliwal, tells us about her path to partner, her investments in Chime, BetterUp, and her time in Google corp dev.

Full transcript

Great. Hey, Aditi. Hey. So we're here with Aditi Maliwal. You're one of the newest partners at Upfront and before Upfront you were at Google both in Corp Dev and as a product manager. And prior to Google, you were at CrossLink Capital and you led the investments in Chime and BetterUp. Well done.

Those were exciting. Yeah. Still are very exciting. Yeah. So, you know, we had Kara on the podcast and we talked about some of the basics about Upfront being a $400 million dollar fund. So to three to five million dollars sweetspot for a check size. But I'm super curious. You've had these great successes, great experience. Great experience. How did you choose Upfront?

That's actually a very fun question for me to answer. So Kara, as I like to say, was on my personal board of directors before I even was thinking about coming back into venture. So when I was at CrossLink, I met Kara at South by Southwest. And so over time, I'd come to Kara to talk to her about a variety of things from job opportunities I was looking at or investments I was looking at, or friends who were starting companies that I wanted to send her way.

And it was actually spending time looking at a couple of ideas in the women's health space. And Kara said to me, you know, I've spent quite a bit of time in that ecosystem looking at a couple different companies. Are you if you are interested, instead of having instead of building a company in the space, like why don't you come and join upfront and potentially think of funding some of these companies?

And she was like, why do you come down to L.A. and spend some time with Mark, spend some time with the broader team, came down, spend time with Mark, spend time with Greg, Kobe, Kevin, Eve and Michael. And then ultimately there were a couple of key things that sort of got me hooked onto the the front story here.