Announcing Nyca’s Investment Partners and Advisors
When we announced the creation of Nyca Partners in March, our goal was to build a distinctive venture firm. Nyca focuses solely on financial technology, working with entrepreneurs who are addressing big and challenging problems facing financial services in innovative and informed ways. To do this, we want to provide the best group of partners and advisors any young company can have, people with deep expertise in technology, financial services, and scaling businesses.
We’ve been busy over the past five months. We’ve made nine initial investments that we’ll be announcing in coming weeks. Today we’re focusing on the diverse, talented and experienced team we have brought together -- four investment partners and three advisors. The investment partners help us evaluate investments and strategies, make investments, and work closely with our portfolio companies as board members and advisors. The investment partners are:
- Osama Bedier, who previously led Wallet & Payments at Google, and ran product development at PayPal for 8 years
- Brian Finn, who was President of Credit Suisse First Boston, and earlier Co-head of its Mergers & Acquisitions Group; he was also a Partner at Clayton Dubilier & Rice
- Max Levchin, who is CEO of Affirm and HVF Labs, Chairman of Yelp, and was co-founder and COO of PayPal
- Charlie Songhurst, is the founder of Katana Capital, and previously was Head of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft
We also call upon our advisors on a regular basis to be a source of knowledge, relationships and judgment for our investment process and portfolio companies. The advisors are:
- Susan Athey – The Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business; Advisor and former Chief Economist at Microsoft, recipient of John Bates Clark Medal
- Stephanie Dimarco – Chair of the Board, former CEO and founder of Advent Software
- Frank Yeary – Chairman of CamberView and Level Money, previously Vice Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Global Head of Mergers and Acquisitions for Citi
As you can see from their backgrounds, each of these individuals is highly accomplished, and we believe as a group they are unmatched in this sector. We also think the range of complementary experiences reflects Nyca’s promise to bridge innovation in California with institutional financial knowledge in New York. Why does this matter? Because while expertise and experience is clearly a big deal for any company, in financial services it can be the difference between a good idea and a successful idea. Nyca can help address such key problems as developing strategies for funding a balance sheet for a credit intermediary, determining what applications can and cannot work well in complex financial institutions, and assessing what key regulators and policy-makers really think about sensitive issues.
We also believe how we interact with our companies is different. We tend to dig in on the substance of issues with management teams, both to challenge their thinking during the planning stage and to help improve execution. Like most VCs we make critical introductions – to customers, suppliers, partners, regulators, and other decision makers. But selling to, or partnering with, a large financial institution is different - the usual email introductions from a venture capital firm aren’t likely to accomplish much. For example, let’s say an entrepreneur has a great idea that can add real value to a global bank’s enterprise risk process. This entrepreneur can probably have an unlimited number of interesting meetings with global banks. But without guidance on how to communicate the idea, how potential partners make decisions, and to whom the idea should be directed, there could be a huge amount of effort wasted. We focus on working with our portfolio companies to think through issues like these.
In the next few weeks we will discuss some of the new investments we’ve made in companies that we believe are very exciting. We will also blog on a regular basis regarding our thoughts on key areas of financial services innovation. Finally, we expect to add one or two more partners and advisors in the next several months, so stay tuned.