Loren Straub is a partner at Bowery capital.
Loren Straub knew her career in investment banking wouldn’t be long. “You work in this box,” she said of her experience working at Goldman Sachs in the mid-2010s. “I looked at it more of a two-and-a-half-year MBA program.” She missed the excitement of the startup experience, like the time she booked a one-way ticket to Chicago at age 23 to build and run the investor relations department at Groupon, helping shepherd the e-commerce coupon marketplace through its IPO process. So when Mike Brown, founder and managing partner of seed-stage Bowery Capital, offered her an associate position in 2015, she jumped on it.
Now, six years later, she’s the reason Bowery’s eight-year run as a solo-partner VC shop has come to an end. The New York-based firm with 43 software-as-a-service portfolio companies, and $94 million in assets, has promoted Straub to general partner. The news was first reported in the Midas Touch newsletter on Sunday.
Straub is stepping into that role as Bowery expands its geographic footprint and is investing a fresh fund. “I certainly feel a level of responsibility to do my part as a female in this industry that is obviously still dominated by males, particularly when you look at the partner level,” Straub told Forbes. “Some people have to fight way harder to get to the same title as a male does and I hope that with each one of these promotions, [the advancement of women] becomes more common and less noteworthy.”
Straub, together with Brown, deployed Bowery’s $60 million second fund as a principal. She now joins a small but growing group of women partners in venture, and the even smaller group of women who achieved that role through internal advancement. The latest numbers from All Raise show that less than a quarter of women who become partners do so through promotion, with most being hired from external operating roles. Some years, like 2019, saw only 17% of new women partners come from within.
Straub is diving headfirst into her new role at the firm’s second location, representing Bowery on the West Coast and building out an investment team in the new local She moved back to her native California last year, a move Bowery’s CEO says helped solidify her role at the firm. “When she made the call to move to San Francisco to test out if that made sense for us, that is not an easy thing,” Brown tells Forbes. “And all of that was almost helping cement or helping push the ball forward on this promotion.”
The firm already invests in Bay Area startups and counts companies like Select Star, an intelligent data discovery platform and Cerby, a cybersecurity company, in its portfolio.
Bowery’s new partner is starting this role with a fresh batch of funding to pull from, too, as the firm just closed on a $70 million third fund from a mix of foundations, endowments and venture fund of funds. The firm raised only a modest boost from Fund II’s $60 million. Despite Straub’s promotion, she and Brown are still the only two in charge of all the firm’s fundraising efforts and sourcing the four to five deals that Bowery does annually. “We like being small and we like being picky. We are a small team; we didn’t see the rationale for raising more than $70 million,” she says.
While many investors have moved up the capital stack as early-stage rounds get larger, the firm remains committed to its seed-stage focus. Straub says she is particularly interested in opportunities in areas like B2B marketplaces and vertical stack software both of which are areas that have only accelerated during the pandemic.
