Shruti Van Dyke Gandhi is General Partner and Founding Engineer at Array Ventures which invests in enterprise deep tech early-stage companies. Shruti is also a professor in the computer science department at Columbia University. She spent her early career as a developer on mainframe security, collaboration tools, and data analytics. Post engineering, she invested in early-stage companies at True Ventures and Samsung’s venture fund. She is also the recipient of Chicago Booth 2021 Distinguished Alumni Award at Chicago.

Our conversation traces Shruti’s experience in computer science and high growth industries and how this motivated her desire to launch a venture firm focused on high growth companies in the B2B world. We speak about the skills need to be successful in venture – from decision making (which needs to be fast) to knowing one’s own strengths and weaknesses and supplementing gaps by surrounding oneself with the necessary skills.

We discuss the experience of some female founders in attracting venture capital and the issue of confidence, and the importance of thinking sufficiently “large” when it comes to check size and opportunity set.

See the following article for some positive news about increases in the numbers of women in venture, despite starting from a very low base. https://www.fastcompany.com/90567387/women-in-vc-growth

This podcast was supported by Speaking with Images, a company focused on motivational speaking, focused on increasing resilience, improving communication and building better workplace culture. https://www.jennysegal.co.uk/