February 3, 2022 by investor
On this episode of Investor Connect, Hall welcomes Sophie Liao, Founding Partner at Oyster Ventures.
Oyster Ventures is a seed-stage-focused venture fund based in San Francisco, New York, and Hong Kong. They target companies that bring liquidity and efficiency to antiquated industries and with massive potential to scale.
Since 2016, they have launched three funds and deployed capital into 80+ startups. Their checks start at $25k to $200k, from Pre-Seed to Series Seed. They typically continue to invest in their portfolio companies from Series A to C and beyond, and they can write checks up to $5M+.
Oyster Ventures generally doesn’t lead rounds, but when they do, they will invest $500k to $2M. When they lead, they join the board as a director or observer. They happily invest in companies anywhere in the world but have a preference for standard jurisdictions and structures (e.g., Delaware C Corps, Hong Kong or Singapore Limited companies, SAFEs, etc.) They don’t invest in markets they don’t understand well or markets that require deep specialization to evaluate. While they do invest in cryptocurrency and blockchain companies, they very rarely invest in crypto-tokens without an equity component. They don’t invest via SPVs, by mandate, they don’t invest in mainland China, and they don’t invest in uncapped notes and SAFEs.
Sophie is a three-time fund manager with a top-performing record by IRR. She was MD at Rothenberg and VP at Draper Dragon before setting off on her own to found Oyster Ventures as a solo GP in 2017. Prior, she co-founded and sold a VFX startup to a large media company in 2015. Before that, she ran M&A strategy and started her career by launching joint ventures for U.S-Asia cross-border businesses in the TMT sector.
Sophie discusses her investment thesis, advises entrepreneurs and investors, and describes some of the challenges they face.
You can visit Oyster Ventures at www.oyster.vc, via LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/oyster-vc, and via Twitter at www.twitter.com/oysterventures.
Sophie can be contacted via email at sophie@oyster.vc, and via LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/sophie007.
For a full transcript, click here.
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Hall T Martin is the director of Investor Connect, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to the education of investors for early-stage funding. All opinions expressed by Hall and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Investor Connect. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for the basis of investment decisions.
