Well, I'm now in my sixties, so this is a very long story. The short version is, I was very fortunate. I'm the child of immigrant parents, but I was born and raised in Silicon Valley, which is a pretty good place to land. And I graduated from Stanford right, during the dawn of the personal computer era, 1980-ish timeframe. So, in a funny way, I was in the right place at the right time. I was not a technologist. I was actually a creative writing major in college and wanted to be a writer. And yet what happened to me is, I fell in love with technology not as a technologist but as a user. It's very hard to go back in time 40 years and think about what it felt like to use a word processor for the first time. If you'd gone through college using a typewriter and white-out, it was sort of a magical experience, and I really got a lot of passion about bringing technology to other everyday people like myself. And so, I also went to business school at Stanford and was going to go into the tech industry and had been in the tech industry, my first job out of college, I worked at a company called tandem computers. But interestingly, my brother, who is a brilliant programmer, was writing a software program for personal computers, and I got super excited about working with him. So instead, he and I started a company together called T/Maker, and it was early personal computer application for spreadsheet, word processing database type stuff for CP/M and then PC DOS, MSDOS and ultimately also Macintosh computers. I did that for I think it was 14 years. So a very long time! We ultimately sold the company. I went to Apple for a year as VP worldwide developer relations. It was super interesting to learn and to see the world at that level and also understand that corporate life was not my calling. I was much more of a small company person, so then I became a venture capitalist and I've been a venture capitalist now for 20 years. So really, I would say, incidents and experiences shape your career path. It's funny. I was talking to my daughter yesterday and she remarked that I have actually had very few jobs in my life. I think today people are much more fluid about how often they change careers and roles. And I've really only worked four places, five places. I mean, in my life and for me, every one of those changes was an opportunistic thing. It was somebody calling me the right place at the right time. I certainly didn't have a master plan about things, but I think because I was a CEO and had grown that company into something that had a moderate level of success, that put me on the radar for people in venture capital and for board work. So I have also been on a number of boards, a lot of private company boards (over 40), and eight public company boards now, and I think that was something that I did intend to do. I had looked at it and I said, I think governance is very interesting and I wanted to learn how to do it. And so I volunteered for things like trade association boards and other places where I could get experience and was, of course, on my own company board, a private company. And then I was recruited to join a public company board in '97. And so I've been doing it now for well over 20 years. As I say, most of my career has been very opportunistic. It wasn't by design, but I think I prepared myself to be able to capitalize on the opportunity. I went got an MBA, and I put myself in front of the trade associations, and I built networks of fellow CEOs of software companies, many of whom were much larger companies than mine. And so I got to know a lot of people who could open doors for me and who I could be helpful to. And so I do think there was a fair bit of luck, luck favors the prepared mind. I think I was a prepared mind in many ways.

Today I'm a partner at Threshold Ventures. I've been with that firm for nine years, and it was formerly called DFJ. We were a spin-out from DFJ about two years ago. We're an early-stage technology venture investor, so we really are the Series A check, which today is usually around seven million dollars, give or take a few. Usually, there's a minimum viable product. They may not have a lot of customers, but they're probably not just in the thinking stage. There's usually a handful employees, maybe 8, 10 12 up to 20. Something like that. We very often are the lead investor and take a board seat, and our goal is really to be with that entrepreneur and be through the entire life cycle of the company, which is usually 5 to 7 years. We have specific areas we focus on. I think most venture firms do what we do, which is you pick certain sectors and you have certain theses around what you think is changing right now. We think machine learning/ artificial intelligence applied to a lot of things is creating some new and interesting opportunities. We're looking a lot at its impact on manufacturing and robotics. We do a fair bit in health care because we think that the health care, the whole health, the way health care is delivered, administered, paid for is problematic, there's a lot to be fixed in that. And so we've done a fair bit in what I would call tech-enabled healthcare. We're doing a fair bit in telehealth right now in remote health and in areas that are, we think, underserved -- youth mental health, women's health are a couple of places where we have made investments. We also do enterprise SAAS companies. For me in particular, I've had the good fortune of being our firm's shepherd for some of the more unusual, sectors that we call Moonshots -- maybe one per fund we will do something that is very aspirational. One of my partners says there are deals that let you sleep at night, and there are deals that let you dream and I work on some of the dream deals. One of the companies I'm involved with is a company called Planet, which is the largest constellation of satellites assembled, and we imaged the whole Earth landmass every day. One of the companies I'm involved with is called Memphis Meats, where we are trying to end the animal slaughter and grow meat using animal cells. And then I was involved with a company called Zoox, a Fully Autonomous vehicle Company that I was involved with for almost six years, and it was recently acquired by Amazon. These kinds of companies are a lot of fun because you're working on really out-there stuff and really some, I hope that will change the world. And so I'm very lucky, a good day at work for me is still better than a good day on vacation, so I'm very fortunate. As for what we look for in making an investment: Number one, we usually like to invest in sectors we already understand something about. I think it's dangerous to get an opportunity and suddenly have to learn the space. I think you make better investments when you really understand the space. We look for a big TAM- Total Available Market. You can only make as much money as the size of the market the company can address. So, when you look at something like the meat industry, which is a multi-trillion dollar a year global industry or the mobility industry, those are some very, very big markets. And then we try to understand why now, why is now the time to make an early-stage investment? Are we too early? A lot of times, VCs will be too early. We're optimists by nature! Sometimes we make an investment in a company that it turns out it's going to take a lot longer than we thought. And I'll say, honestly, I think autonomous vehicles is one of those things. We thought when we made that investment in 2014 that by 2020 we would be done and we're not! But nobody else is either. And then, we also ask, why is this the team the right team? What is it about the background of the people and their motivation? Because when you pick a big market and generally when you're an early-stage investor, you're not playing the whole field. You're picking one, and that's your bet. And so you want to make sure that you have a team that is passionate about what they're doing and has some background and experience to bring to the table. In terms of revenue, most of these companies are not at all big, if they're doing $100,000 month, that's a good clip for a small company, right? I mean, usually, they're they're down in the very early stages when we invest.

I often make the point to entrepreneurs that the job of the first email is to get you the second email and then get you the meeting. It's not to, as I say, carpet bomb with everything on your first shot. If you can give me a paragraph that says, "This is why I'm doing this, this is the market I see. And this is why I'm the person who is able to do it.", a lot of times people will send us an introductory deck, maybe it's 10-12 pages and it lays out this is the problem, this is how we're solving the problem, this is the background of the people, and here are a few of our pilot customers and again because we're usually not the first money, they have usually raised a couple of million dollars from angel investors, so they can also articulate this is what we've done with the money we raised so far. I do, by the way, I have a blog post called Help Me, Heidi, It's on Medium, and I have written about things like what should you have in a pitch and what VCs are looking for. So, if anybody wants to further information, if you go look at heidiroizen.com and you click on Help Me Heidi or blog post, you will find this information.