Title:Alumni Spotlight: Soraya Darabi (C’05), Co-Founder & Managing Partner, TMV

Meet Soraya Darabi (C’05), Co-founder and Managing Partner of TMV!

Please introduce yourself.

I’m Soraya Darabi, Class of 2005. I studied at Georgetown College. Today, I am the Managing Partner and Co-founder of TMV, an early-stage venture fund based in New York City, with $200 million in assets under management across 3 funds, and kicking off our fourth imminently.

Was there any specific aspect of your time at Georgetown that influenced you to pursue entrepreneurship?

I held a lot of unusual jobs as an undergrad. I was juggling off-campus interning for amazing institutions like Sony Music and TheWashingtonPost.com. I remember being on the metro a lot as an undergrad. I waitressed on M Street while a student at Georgetown, and then in the summers,worked in retail. For kicks, I would give tours to international students. A lot of my friends at Georgetown were international students and I’m still very close to them. I think that by the sheer nature of holding a lot of different roles and responsibilities outside of being a student was a de facto introduction into becoming an adult. I learned to balance many things, and I had a portfolio career by age 20 – possibly the best introduction to entrepreneurship one could imagine.

Additionally, my work at Sony Music my sophomore and junior year was pretty entrepreneurial. Sony at the time was trying to introduce new artists to undergrads across all the DC campuses, and so I would go, by bus, bike, cab, or foot to Howard University, American University, and to GW. I would pass out CDs to different college radio hosts, set up mini exhibitions for new artists in the different student centers or local record stores. Sadly, many of them don’t exist any longer, but I would create displays for those artists or sometimes host meet and greets for the artists when they came through town to perform live at the 9:30 Club or at the Black Cat. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was really the makings of learning how to manage my own schedule, monitor my time, hand in assignments on a deadline, put together insight reports, and come up with entrepreneurial ways to introduce music to a young demographic. This was right at the overlap between the end of the physical CD era and the beginning of mainstream streaming. It was a very cool experience in life to understand how convergence was changing everything in real time, while earning meaningful income as a college student – doing something I loved! And that’s one definition of entrepreneurship.

What inspired you to found TMV?

I founded TMV 10 years ago this summer with a fellow class of 2005 Hoya, Marina Hadjipateras. A lot of things influenced our decision to start a fund, but first and foremost, it starts with the 2010 census data. This may be a really boring way to begin a story but I am the daughter of a demographer, and I was taught as a kid to grow up reading about statistics because they inform our understanding of the world. Marina and I banded together in 2015, and venture funds are on 10-year horizons. You must have an informed thesis as to where you believe the world is headed, and an ability to see around corners. We looked at that census data and realized a few particularly interesting data points: in 2010, Census data predicted women would be 51% of the workforce by 2020, and do you know when that happened? On January 4th, 2020. 4 days to the start of the year, perfect timing. The early census data was also predicting that women, by default, as the majority of the workforce, would be delaying things like starting a family. As angel investors and builders ourselves, Marina and I pondered, “what industry will find this trending line opportunistic?” The answer? Family planning, reproductive health and IVF. If women are now the majority of the workforce, and they’re delaying starting a family because of their ambitions, but certainly didn’t want to rule out the possibility of having a family, surely there would be fertility opportunities in healthcare to pop up to meet that demand. Our first unicorn backed at the Seed at TMV was, in fact, an IVF company.

Our first fund had the thesis of the future of living well. Honestly, I think it was a statistics fund at the end of the day, whereby “future of work” and healthcare investments were largely based on educated predictions. Our investing considered that more people are going to be working from home or working remotely so they may also balance family life. What new services will pop up to be able to meet those workers where they are? In the early days, we backed an AI business manager allowing mid-level employees to upskill from the comfort of their home. All to say, our first fund was really around that thesis that the world is changing rapidly, and it’s our job as investors to stay ahead of the curveballs technology throws at us.

Flash forward 10 years, and we’ve become much more refined as a firm based on the partnership’s subject matter expertise and our institutional LP base – those are our investors.
We invest across AI & Automation into port, maritime, and transportation technology, due to Marina’s extensive experience in the industry, as well as healthcare thanks to our health and bio team. I tend to focus on investments into cutting-edge AI which includes foundational models like Anthropic, Resultid, AMI and Slingshot AI. The latter is the first democratized access to free therapy, using a foundational model for psychology.

We are also investors in companies like Lovable, which is the fastest growing AI company in Europe, and Cityblock Health, a massive healthcare company focused on affordability and quality in care for low income Americans.

We are so fortunate to be early-stage investors in 5 unicorns and investors in 10 unicorns broadly, out of 80 companies. Mostly, though, we are proud to invest alongside our values that I think honestly began when we were undergrads at Georgetown. What’s that Walter Cronkite quote? “Success is more permanent when you achieve it without destroying your principles.”

At TMV, we say we believe good people can create extraordinary outcomes. We often tell folks we invest in founders who operate with integrity, because we operate with that integrity ourselves at a firm level. A lot of the language that you’ll see on our website now is language that we became familiarized with as Hoyas.

 How does creativity show up in your investing process?

TMV thinks of itself first and foremost as a company. Now that we’ve made it through a decade and four funds, I believe that we should not call ourselves a startup anymore, but still maintain that energy and hustle mentality. Brick by brick, Marina and I built this firm ourselves. That’s pretty cool, because as investors across tech-infused innovation, we can truly rethink the status quo. Creativity begins with reimagining what’s possible, both from an investment lens and also internally – looking inwards at our organization.

In terms of creativity, it’s a daily practice. We have a meeting that’s just time set aside to talk, and there’s no agenda because we have to bat ideas back and forth with one another and flesh them out through conversation. In addition to bringing rigorous and prepared memos into a discussion, we also need a lot of free-form time to be able to offer checks and balances to predictions and analysis. Early stage venture capital is often called “the riskiest stage or the riskiest asset class,” but it’s our duty as fiduciaries to mitigate that risk. But before you mitigate a risk, you have to find something worth risking capital for.

That’s where creativity enters into the equation. Creativity in how we meet founders. Perhaps it’s on a university campus, where Google began. I’ll be speaking soon at Georgetown. I’m really hoping I can give that talk on the roof of Village A, where so many of my dreams for what I wanted for myself were formed, watching the sun set over the Potomac. I lived in Village A D301, and that rooftop will always be my most vivid memory of time at school.

Anyway, creativity is a daily practice at our firm. It comes in the form of reading voraciously, constant curiosity, unstructured and structured meetings, and through careful time orientation.

Can you tell us a little bit about a day in your life? What does it look like?

I wake up at 5 AM. I do my best to be present in the morning for myself and family. I have a 50-50 chance of not looking at my phone before 7. Sometimes I work out, sometimes I just allow myself time to sip coffee and read, because the day goes by really fast after that. Why? I have a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old, two little girls, so it’s a mad dash to get them ready for school on time. Then, I’m off to the office in Manhattan, and I usually arrive a little bit before the rest of the team, around 9:15. 45 minutes of emails and reading fly by. By 10 o’clock, there’s All Hands, a daily stand-up meeting to go through the investments and priorities of the day. Then the best part of my job arrives: meeting with founders. How lucky am I that the most cerebral and bold minds of the world may walk through our doors on any given Tuesday?

We receive pitches in 45-minute sprints, with approximately 15 minutes afterwards to debrief and to schedule next steps.

By 1 o’clock, I’m usually having lunch with the team or an LP. I follow the Warren Buffett mindset system– writing down a lot of priorities and then scrapping the ones that are not the most important and sticking to the top three to five.

My afternoons are for getting through one key initiative. Just one. Right now, that’s working on our new website for TMV, on another day, it could be finalizing a deal memo or interviewing a prospective associate.

I only go to work events if they’re between the hours of 5 and 6:30, so if there is kind of an after-work event worth going to, I’ll do that on the way home. Otherwise, I make dinner 5 nights a week, read to my children, catch up with my husband Bertrand, and really just have a relaxing few hours of analog time. The girls are in bed by 8:30, if we’re lucky. They’re half French, and little rascals, sometimes they go to bed even later than that. Then the work “night” begins around at 8 o’clock. I go to bed once my inbox has hit zero.That’s a normal day. Every now and then, there’s something else, like a yoga class or catching up with a friend. I’m smack in the early childhood years, and I don’t want to sacrifice time with my children, so parts of my former self have been de-prioritized. But I have to say, the most beautiful thing about managing your own firm is that you get the best of both worlds. I can be a workaholic, and a hands-on mom.

Is there something that you could pinpoint as maybe the hardest part of your job?

Making strong decisions and getting to that decision in a concrete period of time takes discipline. It’s a practice, like learning a language. We have an incredible success rate of companies we back early raising meaningful growth capital – roughly 80% of our companies grow successfully. Our team must first predict trends well, separate the wheat from the chaff. Our due diligence process begins from the moment we meet a founder and shake hands, through countless reference calls, versions of memos, “IC” meetings, and post-investment. Then the job of adding value begins.

Venture rounds can be competitive and they often move quickly. Keeping up without sacrificing quality isn’t as easy as it sounds. At TMV, we take board roles, and check-in bi-monthly with founders to understand where they are in their journey and how we may best support them.

TMV tends to bring potential partners to young companies to help them create pilot programs, or early commercialization. For example, last week, we held a dinner for the Health and Bio portfolio. C-suite execs from health systems and insurance payers joined TMV founders and partners for dinner. We also invited journalists from The Financial Times, Axios alongside recruiters, banking execs, a curated room of industry experts. We host a dinner like this every two months. So often outsiders think VC is about writing checks and sitting back as a company takes off. More often than not, it’s patient capital, enabling a founder to find product market fit and responsibly scale, grow into their next valuation.

 Is there something that you could pinpoint as the most fulfilling part of your job?

By far, the most fulfilling part of my job is helping founders realize their visions. We often say we’re not the protagonists in the narrative, which is one reason why we named ourselves Trail Mix Ventures. Trail Mix is “the something extra” founders take with them on that metaphorical journey through the woods. And yes, we invest in trailblazers.

When you are able to do something for a founder that moves the needle forward for their company, even modestly, it is the most rewarding experience. For instance, we are investors in a company called HyperAI, which provides AI for police station call centers to offset non-emergency calls to AI, which allows emergency calls to be handled by the pros. Ben, the founder and CEO of Hyper AI, made it very clear that what he needs most right now are introductions to a variety of mayor’s offices and police chiefs around the country, because they are the key decision makers for his business. So we worked hard and connected him to two. A text message of appreciation is so validating when you take the time to listen to what a founder needs and to meet that need with a solution.

Is there anything you wish more people knew about your industry?

Venture capital can be fast and furious. What’s not shown enough is that it is also an industry that appeals to academics. Our work is disciplined, thoughtful, and at times quiet.

I often think about the old fable, the tortoise and the hare. The hares capture the attention, but the tortoises are the winners. I’ll take a confident tortoise over a flashy unicorn anyday.

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