Growing the MaC Family — Welcoming Zhenni Liu
Our mission at MaC Venture Capital is to invest in visionary founders building the future we want to see. We view this as a long-term mission and are working to build MaC into a multi-generational franchise. We fully believe that the next great cohort of venture firms will look different than those from previous generations. The next household VC brands will have teams whose majority will be women and people of color. Their portfolios will have the racial and gender makeup that reflect the world in which we live, not that of just Silicon Valley. The problems being solved by those companies will be problems felt by the 99% not just the 1%. This is the type of firm we are creating at MaC.
Adding exceptional individuals to our team is one of the most important things we can do in pursuit of that goal. We are therefore incredibly excited to announce Zhenni Liu as MaC’s fist outside hire. Zhenni joins us today as Partner.
We have no doubt that Zhenni will grow to become one of the best VCs of her generation. Her background has provided the foundation for Zhenni to be an outstanding investor. She possesses qualities that make great seed-stage investors: an entrepreneurial spirit, insatiable curiosity, an innate desire to help, operational expertise, lived experience, and an appetite for risk.
Zhenni was born in China and grew up in Silicon Valley. After graduating from USC, she returned to SF to work as a management consultant at Bain. In 2016, Zhenni started working at Sephora in a Chief of Staff and strategic projects role with the SVP of Digital. As the Company adopted Omnichannel, Zhenni was recruited to support the EVP of Omni-Retail in shaping and executing on Sephora’s new strategy of innovation and experiential retail. Zhenni is an expert in retail — she’s even had on-the-grounds experience, working at Outdoor Voices on nights and weekends, restocking and selling clothes.
Like all great entrepreneurs, Zhenni again felt the pull to be closer to the business creation process, so she took the biggest leap yet of her career and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah to start work as an Associate at Peterson Ventures where she worked on deals including Bonobos, Allbirds, Lucid, HireVue, Ethos and more. In 2019, wanting to double-down on her expertise in retail, Zhenni moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and joined Commerce Ventures.
One thing we loved about Zhenni is her desire to build community for diverse founders and funders. Outside of work, Zhenni launched not just Utah Female Founder Office Hours, but also the Salt Lake City chapter of SoGal, the largest global platform for diverse entrepreneurs and investors. She went from knowing literally no one in Utah to being named one of Utah’s 30 Women to Watch in 2019 for her contributions to the Utah startup ecosystem.
We feel Zhenni will be transformative at MaC and help us to continue to level up as a firm. She shares our passion for investing in early-stage technology startups leveraging shifts in cultural trends and behaviors, and she has the expertise to help dynamic entrepreneurs on the verge of their breakthrough moment. We are thrilled to welcome her to the MaC family.
