The offices were on the forty-seventh floor of a building in midtown, and they were impressive in the way her father’s things tended to be—substantial without being performative, the kind of impressive that comes from long-term quality rather than immediate display. Her office had been prepared for her: a desk, a phone, a clean whiteboard, and a view that took in a wide arc of the city, the parks green in the distance, the river bright and steady beyond the buildings on the east side.
She stood at the window for a minute. Then she turned, sat at the desk, opened her notebook, and went to work.
The first month was about understanding. She met everyone in the organization whose work touched technology investing, which was more people than she had initially mapped—research analysts, relationship managers, two economists, a data team, a risk assessment group. She listened more than she spoke. She asked questions that surprised people slightly, because they were not the questions they expected from someone in her position—they were not the questions of someone managing impressions, but the questions of someone genuinely trying to understand how things actually functioned versus how they were described. There was a difference, she had found, in almost every organization. Understanding the difference was where the real work lived.
She identified three things in the first month that needed to change immediately. The first was a structural issue in how deal flow was sourced—the team was relying too heavily on established relationships and missing early-stage companies that were moving faster than the relationship network could track. The second was a communication gap between the research team and the investment committee that was causing good analysis to arrive too late to inform decisions. The third was a cultural one, harder to name but clear when she looked for it: the team had developed a habit of agreeing with each other in meetings and disagreeing quietly after them, which is the habit of a group that has learned to manage upward rather than think forward.
She addressed the third one first.