Alphabet’s $4 billion growth-stage fund announced a major change yesterday in a blog post: David Lawee, the Google executive who founded CapitalG in 2013, was retiring.
In his stead, CapitalG has named general partner Laela Sturdy as its new managing partner and leader. Sturdy was one of Lawee’s first hires. She joined CapitalG in 2013 and shortly thereafter started leading some of its most prominent investments, including Stripe, Duolingo, and UiPath.
It’s a big change for CapitalG, which has been run by the same person from the start. And it’s a notable development for the venture industry as a whole, where few women hold general partner roles, not to mention at the helm of a multibillion-dollar fund.
I sat down with Sturdy to discuss the new role, what CapitalG founder David Lawee will do next, her career as an investor and operator at Google, and what to expect in the coming years for CapitalG. (Some portions of this Q&A have been edited or shortened for clarity and/or brevity.)
Term Sheet: Congratulations on the new role. How long have you and David Lawee been discussing this transition?
Sturdy: We've been discussing it for a while. We've been working together for more than 10 years. We are very close partners. David founded CapitalG, and he hired me a couple of months later…So as David thought about this transition, we talked it through and he decided he wanted to retire. I was really excited to step up into the leadership role and continue to build on the great team and great success we've had a CapitalG and lead it through the next phase.
So David is retiring? The blog post was a little vague.
Yeah. David’s an entrepreneur at heart, so I never want to say what he won't do next. But he had been with Alphabet 17 years, had been at CapitalG 10 years, and he decided he was excited to move on to the next thing, as I think a lot of founders do…It's been amazing working with him, and we're excited to take the mantle from here and lead it to the next place.
What initially made you make the move over to growth-stage venture capital?
Actually, [former Stripe COO Claire Johnson] introduced me to David, because David was thinking about starting CapitalG and I was interested in giving investing a try…I had been on the operating side prior to joining CapitalG 10 years ago. I helped start and build out the team for AdWords Express and a product called Google Offers. And after YouTube was acquired I worked on the team that was early on figuring out how to monetize and build up the sales and marketing team for YouTube.
What was the very first investment that you led for CapitalG?
The very first investment was Gusto [and later Glassdoor and Duolingo, which] happened within months of each other.
Where do you still hold board seats, and which companies do you continue to be most involved in?
I'm still on the board at Duolingo and UiPath, which are public. And then I'm on the board [or an observer] at Whatnot, Curated, Webflow, Unqork, and Gusto.
Few women sit at the helm of venture funds. How are you thinking about that as you step into this role?
I'm thinking we need more...I think the latest stat I saw is—what is it, that only 8% of venture capitalists are women and especially in larger funds, like CapitalG, where we have more than $4 billion of assets under management, I think I looked at the stats and it's something like 12% or 15% of funds that size have a female partner let alone a woman as the managing partner. So I would say I hope to continue to see more female investing partners and more women leading, and more people from underrepresented groups getting involved in venture and leading funds. So I'm excited for this to be a small move in that direction.
What do you hope to accomplish in your first few years as managing partner? Are there any immediate changes that we can expect to see?
One of the things I'm most proud of is how substantive our team is. I'll give you an example of that…The first meeting I had with Grant [LaFontaine], the CEO [of live shopping platform Whatnot, which we co-led the Series C], we had sent him a 30-page deck on all the research we had done and our view on the live shopping market—how we thought they were differentiated and where we saw the opportunities…And I remember him commenting to me just how much he appreciated how we showed up with such a strong point of view and had done so much of the work ourselves. And it wasn't up to the founder or the team to educate investors on what they were trying to do. And that is what we're building at CapitalG. We've invested a lot in really going deep on thesis areas that we think are going to build the next generation of transformative technology companies. We invest in ways to scale technology, ways to find [companies], and then we build what we think is the most differentiated way to support and advise them through the periods of hyper-growth through our growth and operations team that taps into all these advisors inside of Google. If we keep getting better at continuing to be thesis-driven, find the best companies, and then support and partner with them and keep getting better and better at that every day, then we're in a pretty good spot.
Who do you work with most closely on the Alphabet side of the house?
[CEO] Sundar [Pichai] and [CFO] Ruth [Porat] have been incredibly supportive of us throughout all of this. Ruth has been an amazing supporter of CapitalG and a supporter to me, and the board has been incredibly supportive from the beginning.
Has the CapitalG team incorporated Bard at all into your workflow?
No.
What has been the most impactful conversation that you've had with a founder thus far?
I invested in Duolingo when it was pre-revenue, which is unusual for a growth investor, but I was very passionate about the product, and I think that Luis [von Ahn], the founder there, and the team had built a truly unique educational product that was also fun that had this organic growth loop that was incredible. So I decided to make a bet and invest pre-revenue and a couple years into that investment, when they had to make the transition to developing a business model, we joke about this…but I had a series of very direct conversations with him around the need to begin to get very serious about testing the monetization model. And what's great is, again, our model is not to just give that feedback, but really trying to help. So I spent a lot of time connecting him and his team to experts at Google
in subscriptions and pricing and advertising, as we worked through the early days of the Duolingo team testing various monetization models. So that is what I remember so well because it was such a formative point in the company's history. And it's a company that I'm super close with and have worked with for nine-plus years. And now it had its earnings [Tuesday], and it’s incredible to see the progress.
What is your favorite book that you've read in the last year?
I have to give a shout-out to Claire [Johnson] because I read this book last night and I just interviewed her on it. So it's just Claire Johnson's new book called Scaling People, which is fantastic. Claire is a good personal friend and I used to work on her team and I invested in Stripe, so it was very fun. I told her I felt like a guinea pig as I read the book around all of the different learnings and lessons in there, many of which I've taken with me.
‘Crushing consolidation in the venture industry’...VC firm Lux Capital is warning their investors of a new phase in the markets: one where firms will experience “crushing consolidation.” Read their LP letter here.
See you tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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