My guest for Episode 113 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Elicia McDonald, the Investment Principal at AirTree Ventures.

Elicia started her career in investment banking at Credit Suisse, but her passion for the technology sector and drive to get more hands on operational experience made her take the plunge and immerse herself in sales and growth roles at a B2B SaaS startup in Sydney and in enterprise sales at LinkedIn.

She then joined AirTree Ventures in 2016. AirTree is an early and growth stage venture capital fund managing over half a billion dollars of funds under management. AirTree backs technology entrepreneurs who are solving some of the world’s most ambitious problems and their investments have clustered around sectors such as machine learning, energy, fintech, healthcare, and enterprise software.

Elicia played a pivotal role in many of AirTree’s early investments into successful startups including Huddle Insurance, :Different, Pet Circle, Expert360 and Drone Deploy. She also led investments into Flurosat and served on the board of TidyMe, seeing it through a successful exit in 2018.

In 2019, Elicia was promoted to her current role as the Investment Principal at AirTree Ventures.

We covered a range of topics in this interview including:

• How to do due diligence on potential investors
• When and how to nail your first meeting with an investor
• Characteristics of investible founding teams
• A deep dive into AirTree’s due diligence and investment process
• What metrics you should focus on
• & much more!

Show notes:

• Diligencing your investor – a checklist for founders
• Open Source VC
• AirTree’s Investor list
• AirTree
• Qwilr
• Ep112: Mark Tanner (Co-founder of Qwilr) podcast interview
• Point Nine Capital
• Andrew Donald (Head of Talent at AirTree)
• Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson (book)
• Elicia McDonald (email)

Join our next live podcast interview with the Former Prime Minister of Australia and Investor, Malcolm Turnbull!
Date: 2nd June 2020
Time: 8-9am (AEDT)
Registration link: https://tinyurl.com/Ep114MalcolmTurnbull

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Credits:
Music: Joakim Karud – Dreams

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