Christina Quinn, General Partner at SSC Venture Partners, shares practical lessons from investing in first-time founders and supporting Boston College entrepreneurs through venture funding and accelerator programs. She explains how SSC Venture Partners combines community, mentorship, and early-stage capital to help founders navigate the difficult early years of company building. Christina also discusses the qualities she consistently looks for in entrepreneurs, including adaptability, resilience, initiative, and self-awareness.
Christina Quinn, General Partner at SSC Venture Partners, shares practical lessons from investing in first-time founders and supporting Boston College entrepreneurs through venture funding and accelerator programs. She explains how SSC Venture Partners combines community, mentorship, and early-stage capital to help founders navigate the difficult early years of company building. Christina also discusses the qualities she consistently looks for in entrepreneurs, including adaptability, resilience, initiative, and self-awareness.
[01:59] Christina Quinn’s unconventional path into venture capital
[05:36] How SSC Venture Partners supports Boston College founders
[10:30] Why SSC invests at the true pre-seed stage
[15:52] The founder traits Christina values most
[18:14] How to tell real founder obsession from startup hype
[21:01] The GiveCard story and mission-driven entrepreneurship
[26:07] Common reasons founders get rejected
[30:06] Advice for founders before pitching investors
The nonprofit organization Christina is passionate about: Artists for Humanity
Christina Quinn is a General Partner at SSC Venture Partners, where she focuses on backing early-stage founders connected to the Boston College ecosystem. Before entering venture capital, Christina built a career in marketing, communications, and private equity, developing expertise in storytelling, fundraising, and brand strategy. She previously worked with emerging venture managers through Coolwater Capital and has become known for her founder-first approach to investing, particularly with first-time entrepreneurs building mission-driven businesses.
SSC Venture Partners is an affinity-based venture capital firm and startup accelerator focused on founders connected to the Boston College ecosystem. Founded originally as a nonprofit accelerator program, SSC has evolved into an early-stage venture platform supporting entrepreneurs through mentorship, community, and pre-seed capital. The firm invests across sectors and emphasizes founder development, resilience, and long-term company building. In addition to its venture fund, SSC operates accelerator programs designed to help first-time founders navigate product development, customer discovery, fundraising, and team building.
Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode.
One of my initial questions I'll ask any founder is, "What made you wanna work on this?" Right? And we only live one precious life. We have limited time, no more than ever. Our attention is going a lot of directions. So I always wanna know, especially if someone's young and has a lot of potential and a lot of paths that they could go down, what drew you to this? - Christina Quinn
[00:00:21] Why are you so excited about this particular problem?
[00:00:29] Gopi Rangan: You are listening to the Sure Shot Entrepreneur - a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors, and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision
[00:00:51] Welcome to the SureStart Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Gopi Rangan. My guest today is Christina Quinn. She's a general partner at SSC Venture Partners.
[00:01:02] SSC is a venture fund, a startup accelerator, and they have a network for Boston College startups. What does that mean? Who are the kind of founders she likes to talk to? What kind of startups does she like to invest in? We're gonna find more about SSC and more about Christina's style of investing.
[00:01:22] Let's start the conversation. Christina, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
[00:01:27] Christina Quinn: Thanks, Gopi. So happy to be here.
[00:01:29] Gopi Rangan: Let's start with you, where you are from. And you now are in Maryland, but you grew up in Rhode Island, right?
[00:01:38] Christina Quinn: I did indeed. I grew up in Rhode Island, went to college in Boston, obviously getting the BC tie.
[00:01:44] Uh, lived in Boston for many years, and then during COVID, my husband and I actually, we were not married at the time, married now, but my husband and I ended up living back in Rhode Island for the last five years actually. So spent time both growing up there and time there as an adult.
[00:01:59] Gopi Rangan: Fantastic. You spent many years in advertising and in marketing and other roles, and eventually we met when you were at Coolwater, which was a fabulous community of emerging manager venture capital investors, and now you are a general partner at SSC Ventures.
[00:02:16] Can you walk us through that journey?
[00:02:18] Christina Quinn: Sure, yeah. So if you had asked me when I was younger, even when I was in college, I went to undergraduate business school at BC, but very much didn't think I wanted to work at a bank, didn't think I wanted to work in finance. My main activity in undergrad was the newspaper, so I had a bunch of friends that covered sports and news features, you know, different things, and I wanted to go into publishing.
[00:02:42] So in undergrad I thought, "Oh, I'm creative. This kind of brings together the interest I have in brands and how do you shape a narrative voice and how do you communicate important ideas to people?" I've always loved to write. Going into college I knew I wanted to be somewhere where I could study marketing and potentially communications as well.
[00:03:00] And so I really always joke, like I found my way into venture ultimately by volunteering my way in. But my background and where I landed in finance is kind of a funny path because I graduated from college in 2013. So if you think about that environment, it was kind of a weird time for the publishing industry.
[00:03:18] Digital media, the iPad first version came out when I was in college, and all of these different businesses were thinking about how do we translate our subscription model to a digital format and they fired a bunch of people. So I had interned at Condé Nast, which is the publisher that does Vogue, GQ.
[00:03:34] Devil Wears Prada being out with version two now, right top of mind for people. We all have a perception of that industry and that's where I'd done my internship junior year. And my senior year, the department I'd been in had maybe 15 people got let go, including the person that was my mentor. So I, my senior year, was very much thinking that the path I was going down ended up not being what I was doing anymore.
[00:03:55] And I actually found my first job on Craigslist, believe it or not. I ended up in a very small marketing studio in Newport, Rhode Island, where I was from, and it was a firm of eight people. So a startup in some ways, not in the tech sense, but in the sense that it was a tiny firm. And really being there, I had the opportunity. We did outsourced sales and marketing for boutique mutual fund managers. So we would take people who were leaving a bigger shop, had had an investing career, and were launching their strategies for the first time. And we were helping them raise capital and also build their deck, build their story, build their narrative, and position themselves. So applying the skills that I knew I wanted to do after school, but in an industry that I thought wasn't for me or I didn't belong in. And so that's kind of how I started. And from there, that same skill set, I ended up pivoting into private equity. I worked at a large private equity firm in Boston for many years doing product development marketing, and my goal going in there was just, I want to learn everything I can about how you build a great venture fund.
[00:04:51] And so there's a lot that happened in the interim. I'd say for SSC, like I said, I started as a volunteer. I knew that I wanted to be in early-stage venture, and I realized the best way to get into that was by helping to support entrepreneurs.
[00:05:04] Gopi Rangan: My entry into venture capital was also similar, by doing volunteer work.
[00:05:08] Christina Quinn: Really?
[00:05:08] Gopi Rangan: Uh, I did an unpaid internship at a VC firm, and I loved spending time with founders, and I found a way to make that my whole career.
[00:05:17] Christina Quinn: It's the best. Yeah. It truly... if you're a people person, if you like to be challenged by solving problems, I think being a venture investor at its core is really just intellectual curiosity and wanting to help people.
[00:05:30] It's those two things in spades, and if you like doing both those things, you'll never get bored with this job.
[00:05:36] Gopi Rangan: How is SSC Venture different from other venture capital firms?
[00:05:41] Christina Quinn: Yeah, it's a great question, and I think knowing our origin story, but also knowing just what we do, our focus, we're an affinity fund.
[00:05:49] And what I mean by that is our investment mandate has a focus on a particular ecosystem of entrepreneurs. For example, for us, we were started because my partner Tom started a company while he was undergrad at BC. A summer accelerator was a really critical part of what made him want to go from being pre-med and being pre-qualified to go to Tufts Medical School to wanting to build a business full-time that he ended up running for 13 years.
[00:06:14] And his thought, this is I think kind of a classic CEO in some ways, within a year of dropping out of BC, his thought was, "That summer program was so formative for me. Wouldn't it be cool if we could have that whole thing underwritten by the BC audience?" So we very much started out as an accelerator program, and we started out in that kind of grassroots community effort to build a great entrepreneurial ecosystem for Boston College.
[00:06:36] And I think when you look across the board, there are more and more funds now, and I think of even people who I met during Coolwater when I was working there who have a venture strategy and have that skill set and have realized there's this opportunity to add on a strategy around some group that they have affinity with.
[00:06:52] How are we different? I think there's a few points. Obviously, we have a specific mandate, so we're looking at a particular group of founders, and if they don't have a connection, then it's just a non-starter for us. It could be the best company in the world, but if it doesn't have that tie, we're not gonna do the deal.
[00:07:06] But separately, I think you also see a difference in terms of your LP base. Because for us, call it 98% of our investors are people who have some tie to Boston College, and those other 2% are people who have a tie probably to a co-founder of a founder from Boston College. So where that bucket of interest comes from, it's not a group of people who are saying, "How can I find, looking at every venture fund in the market, the one that's the fit for me?"
[00:07:32] They're saying, "I already have a bucket of capital that I maybe have allocated towards giving back to our school," in this case BC, "Let me carve out a portion of that and allocate it towards something that has a chance for some potential upside as well as a goal that's aligned with how and what I care about," right?
[00:07:48] So usually, folks that are coming to us and folks that have partnered with us over the years have some tie to entrepreneurship or finance, venture, private equity, so this feels like a really aligned place for them to put capital because it also means they're supporting the emerging people in that ecosystem without needing to do the diligence and the work that we all know goes into actually finding, sourcing, and nurturing great companies.
[00:08:10] Gopi Rangan: So you specifically look for founders from the BC community, and that's the only place you would invest?
[00:08:19] Christina Quinn: Sure. I can elaborate. I'm happy to explain the criteria. So the way we think about it is we're generalists, meaning we're not constrained to simply B2B or one particular sector of technology or even services.
[00:08:31] We'll look at a lot of different types of business models, but at least one member of a founding team has to have had a tie to Boston College. Sometimes that looks like a current student at the really early stages. Our summer program at Accelerator deals with really early entrepreneurs, usually pre-product, very often what typically pre-product market fit, although maybe a couple customers.
[00:08:51] So there are students, there's alums that can look like an alum who's a year out of school, that can look like an alum who's 30 years into their career, as long as one member of that founding team has the tie. And we also try to be broad-minded in the sense of BC doesn't just have one school, it has a nursing school, it has a business school, it has an education school beyond the arts and sciences and sort of the main body.
[00:09:13] But we also have graduate programs, and we don't discriminate. You could come to me having gotten your JDM at our Boston College Law School, and we would still consider the investment because again, it's already a narrow lens to say we're focused on Boston College. How can we have as wide an aperture as possible and really give the most people shots on goal to be successful building something, as long as that tie is there?
[00:09:33] And we're certainly not unique in this. There are lots of affinity funds with a bunch of different university ecosystems around the country, and there are some funds you see, like in Alumni Ventures, where they might have different strategies, and they're focused on a variety of ecosystems. But for us our team, our mentor network is majority Boston College folks. That's how we began, and that's who we serve.
[00:09:55] Gopi Rangan: Now, the purpose of university education has changed substantially in the past couple of decades, and the spirit of entrepreneurship is front and center of many people's mindset, at college campuses. Entrepreneurship has become a mainstream career choice for many of them.
[00:10:12] So it makes sense to have a supporting entity that is there from day one for these founders. It's great to see that SSC Venture supports VC founders. When you look at startups, what stage is ideal for you? How early is too early? How late is too late? And what kind of funding rounds do you get involved in?
[00:10:30] Christina Quinn: That's a great question. We're early stage across the board, and I think the best way to think about it is kind of those two buckets we already alluded to, right? There's the accelerator side of things. We do run a summer program. Every summer still we typically take around three to six companies a year. Those are always going to be the earliest stage companies we look at. And like I said, they're gonna be pre-product in some cases, definitely pre-product market fit.
[00:10:56] Almost always first-time entrepreneurs, as you'd imagine, in part because of the fact that the benefits of our program are most useful for someone who is really at that early stage. They're learning what it means to wanna start a startup. They're learning things like how to build a team or how to think about product, how to think about getting traction from initial customers, how do you get that first customer. So it makes sense for people that that's going to be interesting or helpful.
[00:11:21] The other piece, and I'd say the probably three-quarters of the capital we actually allocate tends to be this other bucket, which is student or alumni-led companies that don't want the support of an accelerator program, but just are raising a round and they need the capital. We don't lead rounds, which is interesting. So when someone comes to us, we sometimes happen to meet them whenever, but we're usually talking to them early days and waiting for them to get to a certain point in their raise before we're able to write a check simply because we are not a huge firm and our earlier funds were even smaller than our current fund.
[00:11:54] And so we knew a 50k check isn't going to be enough to get someone across the line usually for a first pre-seed round. And so, yeah, we are true pre-seed and when I think about with that is, and I tell entrepreneurs this all the time, you can ask that question of will you participate in a first round of financing where this person has raised no capital before, you're willing to be a part of that?
[00:12:16] Or there's others in pre-seed I think where there's actually more criteria they wanna see, and yes, it's still early stage, but they want there to be demonstrated revenue. They want there to be certain targets that are hit. I'd say we are true pre-seed in that we're happy to look at any deal provided there's a lead, no matter how early it is.
[00:12:33] Gopi Rangan: Finding a partner at the earliest stages is quite a challenge for founders. I see that you go quite early in supporting these founders.
[00:12:41] Christina Quinn: We try, and I think some of that ties into the ethos of why we exist. I always joke there's some other wonderful institutions in the Boston area academically, and at some of those other schools, there's a really deep bench of capital that's out there for you in terms of alums, in terms of dedicated funds that are focused on your ecosystem.
[00:13:00] And so when I was at BC, we didn't have-- And this was from 2009 to 2013, we didn't have an entrepreneurship center. There wasn't an entrepreneurship major. Those things didn't exist. And since then, the school's really done a tremendous job investing into it and putting dollars behind making it visible, investing in programming, investing in faculty, creating a major concentration as they say there.
[00:13:22] But I think for us, really our goal is how can we be a complementary check in sort of that early friends and family round that someone's bringing together, albeit there's plenty of folks at BC who do have that family member or good friend who can maybe write them a six-figure check. But I think to the extent that we can be that presence and also bring a network of people together around it and give them not just capital, but mentoring and support and a friendly person to ask advice from when they're going out and raising that next round or that bigger round, that's really where we try to play, and that's, I'd say, the spirit of why we were founded and why we continue to exist.
[00:13:59] Gopi Rangan: So you have the accelerator and you have the fund, and the accelerator takes three to six startups every summer. And those I understand they are quite early, and you create a mentor network for them to tap into, think about building a business thoughtfully. Now let's talk about the fund side. How many startups do you invest in on an average year?
[00:14:19] Christina Quinn: Yeah, that's a great question, and I'd say it's varied year by year, but I'll give you maybe aggregate. So we built out our venture fund side of the business in 2017, and at that point we had run the accelerator as a nonprofit for a few years, as you'd expect, raised some money from alums to give companies equity-free capital.
[00:14:37] But a few years into that, couple folks come to you and say, "Hey, I'd maybe give you double the money if this was a true venture setup." So that's sort of what prompted us to transition. That early fund was under 500k, so in some circumstances people would laugh and say that's not really a venture fund.
[00:14:51] That's a glorified syndicate. But for us, it let us start to build a track record, and it let us start to write initial checks, and we were able to grow over time. And so because of that, over the last, call it just under a decade, we've put about six million dollars to work investing in around seventy different startups.
[00:15:08] So we really do see a full spread, and I'd say the type of model that we are is not one where we're looking to have a really concentrated portfolio. Rather, we're trying to be present in a lot of early-stage rounds in promising entrepreneurs from our ecosystem so that we have a wide spread of potential companies.
[00:15:28] And as we know, early-stage venture power law, right? I think it works well for the stage that we're playing at to say, "Let's take a lot of medium-sized bets on a variety of people and see how we can support them and see how we can kinda give them a shot to hit that point of traction and growth."
[00:15:45] Gopi Rangan: So when you meet founders, you may not invest in all the founders, even if they come from the BC alumni community.
[00:15:52] You have a filter. What do you look for in a founder?
[00:15:55] Christina Quinn: Yeah, really great question, and I think something founders are always trying to learn more about so they can be well-positioned in a meeting. I'd say for us, given that early stage and given the fact that we're playing before there aren't as many metrics to observe or metrics to analyze. It often comes down to the people. It comes to our belief in the entrepreneur themselves. Are they the right person to be solving this particular problem? Are they the right person to be building this type of business? Do they have any competitive edge that's going to let them win in a different way? Do they have a passion for it? Do they care?
[00:16:29] But the thing I'd point to, I'd say on the personal side is we have kind of four qualities that we talk about during our accelerator program. It's the entrepreneur's mindset, and I'd say that's something that we certainly, when we're assessing a new founder are bearing in mind. And so adaptability, resilience, initiative, self-awareness. The idea being that you need the initiative because you can have a great idea, but if you don't have initiative, it doesn't come to fruition. Adaptability, when you're building a startup, you're gonna encounter difficult things and you have to pivot. It's a joke, I'd say a trope in our industry and all the pivots that occur, but it's real.
[00:17:06] If you're not adaptable, you're not gonna grow into where your business needs to go over time.
[00:17:12] The resilience piece, as we know, it's really hard to build a startup. It is not a glamorous job. Your best day and your worst day can be back to back or even in the same twenty-four-hour time period. So having that fortitude and having the ability to keep going when things are difficult is certainly valuable.
[00:17:26] And then the last piece, self-awareness, is just simply saying it's very difficult, I think, to go on that challenging journey or bring people together and inspire people to wanna work with you and get customers on board and wanna put yourself in the shoes of someone else if you're not self-aware. And we think great leaders really do have that quality and trait and are open to feedback and open to coaching and open to being different or better in the future than they maybe are today.
[00:17:51] Gopi Rangan: So you're quite active. You've invested in seventy-plus companies and deployed about six million dollars, starting with a small fund of half a million dollars in the beginning, and you have a very clear idea of what you're looking for. When you meet founders, what questions do you ask them? Can you give an example of a company you invested in? What happened in the first meeting? How did you assess these qualities through your questions?
[00:18:14] Christina Quinn: Hmm. It's top of mind for me because the time of year we're at right now is when we are recruiting companies for our summer program. So certainly in the weeds on thinking through new founders and teams that we wanna work with for an extended period of time. It's also very different now than even five years ago, especially dealing with young first-time founders. I think you see the influence of AI on interviewing contexts.
[00:18:37] It's become more difficult, I'd say, in the last five years to start to parse through who is excited to be an entrepreneur. I put that in quotes because it's something they wanna have on their resume, or it seems exciting. They've seen something about it on TikTok, right? They're inspired to want to pursue it versus people who wanna be an entrepreneur because they're sincerely obsessed with solving a particular problem for a particular group of people.
[00:18:59] Gopi Rangan: How do you assess that? Like who, who wants to be a real founder versus an entrepreneur?
[00:19:04] Christina Quinn: Yeah. Like I said, it's gotten harder to do. I think what it tends to come down to is the problem they're trying to solve and why they're motivated around it.
[00:19:14] So to answer your question, one of my initial questions I'll ask any founder is: What made you wanna work on this, right? And we're all very-- we've one wild, precious life. We've limited time now more than ever. Our attention is going a lot of directions. So I always wanna know, especially if someone's young and has a lot of potential and a lot of paths they could go down, what drew you to this? Why are you so excited about this particular problem?
[00:19:37] And I think when you ask that, you start to see who really cares about a problem versus who's just trying to retrofit a problem into this idea of, well, I really wanna be an entrepreneur, so I decided to build a company doing blank. A very different question that I think is equally important, especially for breaking through AI screening, right?
[00:19:55] Trying to figure out who's using AI to retrofit the answer to be perfect. I ask people, "What do you like to do for fun? Tell me about things you enjoy doing in your free time. Like, what do you do with your friends?" And as much as that has nothing to do with building a business, it actually has everything to do with who you are as a person and who I bet you might be as a leader to other people.
[00:20:17] And I think the other underlying bit of it, I started giving away the, the secret of the question here, so sorry if anyone's listening to this, I'm gonna ask you that. But I think the other aspect that's hidden in that question is if I ask you what you do for fun, presumably that's something you're kind of obsessed with and that you like to spend time on. You're not getting paid to do it. No one's forcing you. You do it 'cause you love it. And again, very much building a business. The best entrepreneurs build a business because they love what they're working on. In the early days, right? Maybe it changes. It gets complicated over time, but the ship turns in different directions.
[00:20:48] But at the heart of it, I think if you wanna do something for a decade plus, you have to like it. And knowing what draws you in now, what do you like now, kind of can get you there on what do I think you're gonna like this other thing 10 years from now?
[00:21:01] Gopi Rangan: Who did this well in the first meeting?
[00:21:04] Christina Quinn: So I've worked with a lot of different founders closely over time, but one that really comes to mind for me is a company called GiveCard.
[00:21:11] This is a founding team of two, Lurein Perera and Diksha Thach. They came up with the idea for this startup originally as a nonprofit their freshman year of college. I got to know Lurein because he did our summer program with a different co-founder, totally different startup idea.
[00:21:27] It was a pet care app that helped you collaborate. Like we have a dog, you and I might both decide to let each other know I walked the dog, I fed the dog. The idea behind it was they had a goldfish, a bunch of them living in a house. The day the goldfish died, all seven of them had fed it. And so that was-- he did our accelerator with that concept, which was this pet care app.
[00:21:46] In the background, though, he and quite a few other people freshman year had come up with this idea for GiveCard, which was a concept where you see someone who's unhoused maybe in a city, and sometimes they're looking for money. They're looking for people to give them cash. And there's sort of these two excuses people will give as to why they don't want to give someone on the street money.
[00:22:05] One, they don't have cash on them. More and more common, people don't carry cash as much. It's very easy to do mobile payments. The other piece is some people have this ethical concern of, "Oh, well, if I give it to them, what are they gonna do with it?" And so the original idea behind GiveCard was, what if we figured out a way to issue a card to someone who is in need, and that card provides a way for someone to give them cash as payment quickly and easily, gets rid of that problem.
[00:22:28] And the other aspect would be, what if you could be confident that when you're giving someone money that way that certain categories, sin industries, alcohol, gambling, those things are blocked. There's some ethics behind that idea that, you know, we could go down the path on, but at its heart, this was a group of young people who were motivated by a social justice issue that they saw and thought, how could technology be a piece of this?
[00:22:47] Where it ended up going was they got to senior year, Lurein was technical, and he ended up working at a card startup, like a credit card startup, got that experience, and was paying for Diksha to keep working on their nonprofit, taking a portion of his salary to keep her still doing their nonprofit.
[00:23:04] Fast-forward, as they kept trying to grow the nonprofit, find partners, enough people came back to them and said, "I would pay you for this service, like not as a nonprofit. Like I'm a, I'm a totally separate entity and I'd pay you for it." And that's what gave them the initial impetus to transition from a nonprofit to a startup where they're actually gonna start taking money for it.
[00:23:22] And today, they're a fintech company that I'd say most notably in the last year, both with the LA wildfires and also when Snap funding was frozen at the end of the year, they partnered with governments and nonprofits to actually issue funds to victims of natural disaster, to people who needed food security at a time where it wasn't available to them in the typical routes. And it's incredible. And it started off their freshman year with a bunch of friends thinking through a complicated social justice problem that they saw. So that's one that comes to mind for me of like It was so clear from the beginning that this was rooted in a care and a belief that they could make a difference in helping other people.
[00:24:02] The complexities of how you build that business and how you do the FinTech side of it, and how you get all the partnerships needed to get it off the ground obviously comes later, but they're still working on it a decade or so later because they care about the initial problem they set out to solve.
[00:24:17] Gopi Rangan: You could see the personal passion they had for the problem, and you also watch them adjust to the market and creatively find a way to build a successful business.
[00:24:29] Christina Quinn: Exactly.
[00:24:29] Gopi Rangan: You could see those, the hints of that in the first few conversations.
[00:24:33] Christina Quinn: Yes. And I think I might have not known when he was doing our accelerator program with the pet startup, which business of his was going to be the most successful one in the future. But he is the type of founder that had this positive infectious energy, had a willingness to go out and try different things, wasn't afraid to start, wasn't afraid to talk to people about the things he wanted to do.
[00:24:57] And also, I think the other piece is built a team, had friends. Even though they worked on this in college, they didn't do it immediately after graduation as a truly fully formed business. They were able to recruit back a bunch of their friends who originally built it with them freshman year, who had gone on to Google, who had gone on to other tech companies.
[00:25:15] And I think the reason those people left those great jobs to come back and build together is they had a team and they had an energy around their purpose. So I think that's something, again, I didn't know what Lurein would end up going on to build after, but it doesn't surprise me that it was both an idea that had the seeds planted in undergrad, and it turned out to be something that leveraged his skill set and a team that he helped cultivate way earlier.
[00:25:39] Gopi Rangan: Thank you for sharing. This is practical, based on real-life experiences, what you look for, what got you excited to make these investments. This is fascinating. Thank you for sharing. You don't say yes to every single startup you see. Actually, you probably say yes very few times. What's your most common reason to say no? Now, beyond the obvious, like this is not real startup. When you get close to, okay, this is interesting, but it just didn't cross the finish line for you. Why?
[00:26:07] Christina Quinn: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's hard. That's the worst part of being a VC is that you don't get to say yes actually most of the time.
[00:26:14] You have to get very comfortable telling someone no for a bunch of different reasons. Interestingly now, with AI tooling and email, it's gotten easier than ever for people to access. One of the biggest reasons from a very initial screen that I have to say no is people will reach out to me knowing we have a company in the portfolio that aligns with what their sector is, but they have no tie to Boston College.
[00:26:35] And that wilds me out because it's crazy to think that someone could go through all the effort of hoping to get in front of someone and get a check from them, even if you're using the tool to source the lead, to not look at our website and realize how distinct that focus is, to not look at my LinkedIn where it's right in my headline, it's obvious.
[00:26:53] There are blaring signs everywhere about what the remit is. It shocks me sometimes, but I guess the flip side of it all is people are busy and information's cheap. So that's probably if we're talking frequency, the most frequent reason why I have to pass is there's not the tie on the VC side of things if it's our criteria.
[00:27:09] But to maybe get at the heart of the question of when we're really deeper in that process and someone's coming down the line for us and we're thinking about it. I'd say one of the big reasons we might pass on someone tends to be the idea that they've got an interesting problem they're solving, but either they're a solo founder and we're not confident in their ability to build a team.
[00:27:31] We don't see that strength yet. That's not to say individual solo founders can't accomplish a ton, especially now. There's many ways to scale yourself. But again, thinking through what fundamentals make a great business, even if you do a ton as one person, at some point you have to hire more people. That's just a fact.
[00:27:49] A great business is not a solo. I mean, there's great sole proprietorships out there, but a good startup, high-growth business has to have a team. So I think if we don't believe that someone's able to get other people on board, or there's a really long timeline as to why they haven't brought other people into the fold, that might be a reason why we pass.
[00:28:07] I think a different reason that's worth thinking about is building on those kind of four qualities we talked about, the lack of adaptability or lack of coachability. If we can get a view early on that someone has a resistance to change or a resistance to recognizing that their assumptions about the business might not be right, that one's can be a showstopper for us.
[00:28:32] And I think it's just because at the end of the day, if you aren't willing to adapt, your business is never gonna improve. As we all know, my partner Duncan says this all the time, no one's first painting is a masterpiece. No one's first iteration of their company or their product or service is going to be the version that grows to be a multi-million, billion-dollar company.
[00:28:54] And if you can't be adaptable, if you're too hung up on that initial vision, then if you're like that today, how do I think you're gonna be in five years when things are totally different, when the aperture widens, when your scope expands, when you're serving a totally different customer than you thought was your ICP?
[00:29:10] So I think those two are maybe good reasons. And again, it's hard to tell in a short conversation, it's hard to get at how adaptable someone really is. But what's nice for us, again, because we don't lead rounds, is we get to know someone over time. We get to see them at multiple points in the juncture-- at multiple junctures.
[00:29:29] And so we get to see between meeting one and meeting two, how have things changed? How have they responded to that? What are they doing differently? They set some goals the last time we talked. Did they achieve them, or do they have to redefine what the goals are because they learned something new? So those are ways that more tangibly we actually try to test that.
[00:29:47] Gopi Rangan: You connect the dots, and then you try to form a pattern to see if you can form high conviction.
[00:29:51] Christina Quinn: Totally.
[00:29:52] Gopi Rangan: Great. A lot of things have changed in the recent few years, especially with AI, and the market has changed as well. What's your advice to founders before they come to meet you? How can they make that meeting effective?
[00:30:06] What's your advice for them to build a successful business?
[00:30:09] Christina Quinn: Yes. So for us particularly, and again, especially because we're working with young, almost always first-time founders in a lot of circumstances I think it's so important to be yourself. I think it's so important to, again, know what motivates you and to pick a problem that you actually wanna work on for an extended period of time.
[00:30:29] There's a young woman in our portfolio who did our summer program in 2020, and she runs a sandwich shop in New York now called Brown Bag Sandwich Company. Her original idea was charcuterie, almost like an edible arrangement but for charcuterie. It was called Cured. She's transitioned into the sandwich business full-time. But I remember talking with her that summer, and for the business she was building, the thing she needed to be obsessed with was meat and cheese, basically. That was the heart of it, and she was. And she would tell you, "I was that kid who would have a big foot-long sub as, like, a little kid. I loved it." She studied abroad in Spain. And it sounds so funny, but I remember talking to her and being like, "This is a great fit for you because you wanna discover new places that make great cheese. You wanna go to Vermont and visit some random dairy that has this really amazing goat cheese." And so whatever it is, it does really have to be something you're interested in and you care about.
[00:31:22] I think that's so, so important, and you can't figure those things out if you're not spending time personally before you get to the table as, like, "I wanna found a company," to say, "What is it I love? What is it that strikes my interest? What am I curious about?"
[00:31:37] I think the other thing is, and we talked about it a little bit earlier, being an entrepreneur is by no means the easiest path to being successful. It's actually a really hard one, and it's really frustrating. So I think it's being realistic with yourself about, "Why do I wanna be an entrepreneur?" And if the answer to the question is, "I just really care about building something that impacts people in a positive way, that makes people's lives better, that improves the world we live in," I think that path tends to be the one that has more legs to it and goes somewhere.
[00:32:07] If the only motivation is, "I wanna get rich," or, "I wanna be cool like this person I see on the internet," it's a lot harder to keep that one up for a long period of time. And our team always jokes, like, not jokes, it's actually serious 'cause it's true. The thing that kills a startup ultimately is that people decide to stop working on it.
[00:32:25] You can have really hard times. You can go have really dire financial situations. You can even lay off the majority of your team. But as long as someone wants to keep working and wants to think through the next iteration of the business, that business will still exist 'cause someone will be putting time, energy, and effort into it.
[00:32:40] It might be down the road, it might be a long time, it might not look pretty, but the company won't shut down as long as one person still has the heart to keep it going. And so again, you have to wanna build something that you'd be willing to resuscitate or keep going even when it's having a hard time, when things get difficult.
[00:32:55] Gopi Rangan: So be authentic, don't perform. Yes. Tell me the real story of who you are and what you're building. Have that reason for starting the business, very clear and deeply connected to your mission. It cannot be short-term incentives like making money and other things. It has to be more deeply connected to how you want to dedicate the next many, many years of your life building this.
[00:33:17] Uh, I can see how- I think that's right ... you're thinking about it. Yes.
[00:33:20] Christina Quinn: Thank you. Yeah.
[00:33:21] Gopi Rangan: Thanks for that advice. It's very helpful for founders to hear this. We're coming towards the end of our conversation, and I want to ask you about your community involvement. Is there a nonprofit organization you are passionate about?
[00:33:31] Which one?
[00:33:32] Christina Quinn: Yeah. Yes. So even though I'm in Baltimore now, I am moving back up to Boston in the fall, and I lived in Boston for seven years, and an organization that's been really close to my heart for a long time is called Artists for Humanity. And Artists for Humanity, AFH, is an after-school program for Boston teenagers, and it's paid employment. They specifically work with students in the Boston public school system who have high financial need and have an interest in the creative arts. And AFH brings kids in, they get paid to be there, and they start off in a painting studio. They get trained by mentors who are classically trained in art, and they get to create.
[00:34:09] They get to build a portfolio, but also there's a business side to it. So anything that they create while they're at AFH can be sold, and they get a portion of those proceeds. Beyond the painting, there's also a bunch of other studios. There's photography, there's 3D design, there's graphic design, and AFH will get contracted in by people within the Boston ecosystem, businesses and beyond, to create things. And again, students get to work on those projects. I think it's such a great example both of how important the arts are. I'm a big fan of the arts, visual, music. I care a lot about that, so I think it's so important to nurture it. But the other piece is I think it's such a great way to show that you can create economic development while stimulating supportive youth and create really great products that people wanna pay for anyways.
[00:34:54] So AFH is a cause that I care a lot about, and I volunteered there for six years when I lived in Boston and did after-school tutoring. I brushed up on my geometry skills and taught high school students math.
[00:35:05] Gopi Rangan: Christina, thank you so much for spending time with me. Thank you for sharing candid examples from your own experiences. The information you've shared is not only useful for BC founders, it's useful for founders of various types. I look forward to sharing your nuggets of wisdom with the world.
[00:35:22] Christina Quinn: Thanks, Gopi. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
[00:35:27] Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real-life stories about early believers supporting ambitious entrepreneurs.
[00:35:36] Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast. I look forward to catching you at the next episode.