Ulu Ventures partner Maria Salamanca’s family immigrated to the US from Colombia, and in her mind, no opportunity should ever be wasted. Studying government policy at UC Berkeley, Maria’s passion was figuring out how public policy and tech intersect. She believed Silicon Valley was where she was most likely to be judged for her work and not her background.
With a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, Maria landed a job while still in college that taught her about entrepreneurship and venture capital. Shortly after graduating, she was hired for her first job in VC and her career skyrocketed. While working at Unshackled Ventures in 2018, she was the first Latina nominated for Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in venture capital.
Maria has written numerous times about her path into venture, but we decided to break it down again. Maria’s tools to get into the industry illustrate how never taking no for an answer can yield amazing results.
How did you first get into venture?
While I was still studying at UC Berkeley, I discovered FWD.us, an organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and a group of tech CEOs focused on immigrant entrepreneurs and workers. I did some research and found the youngest person on the team—Emanuel Yekutiel, founder at Manny’s—and sent him a cold email. I pitched working with him while I was still at Berkeley. He accepted the offer and had me help him with donor engagement projects and fundraising. Part of my role was understanding the various Silicon Valley personalities, what they cared about, what they built, and many of their own immigrant stories. Through many meetings and months of research, it became clear what a massive contribution immigrant entrepreneurs had had in what Silicon Valley was becoming (and continues to be). Through this process, I was exposed to many tech CEOs and VCs, and fell in love with the culture of building an ecosystem and supporting founders in their audacious ideas.
I fell in love with the culture of building an ecosystem and supporting founders in their audacious ideas.”
I met Manan Mehta and Nitin Pachisia, founders of Unshackled Ventures, at a happy hour. They were looking for their first hire. Their Fund I was focused on supporting immigrant entrepreneurs from day zero; they wanted to be that first bet on these founders. I also saw a deep understanding of the unique challenges these entrepreneurs faced: access to capital, access to networks, and immigration legal support. I was speaking to other VC funds, but it was clear to me that what they were building was not just necessary but a huge opportunity. My bet on the fund was a lot easier than their decision to hire a nobody right out of college. The two of them were brave enough to take a chance on me and trusted me to sit alongside them as we defined our own approach to sourcing, investment, and portfolio support.
Together, we proved that there is an untapped pool of entrepreneurs, that these same entrepreneurs would trust us in the earliest part of company-building, and that a community of them would propel them further than their individual drives would on their own. The decision to move on from the firm was bittersweet, because the Unshackled family will always be a critical and beloved part of my career journey.
I met Miriam Rivera in November 2017, a few months past my one-year anniversary in venture. Aside from my own GPs, I can say with certainty that Miriam was the first GP to give me the time of day. During our first-ever conversation, I recognized her story. She was the first GP in this industry whose family, professional journey, and love for her fund did not feel foreign to me. Her story and where she came from drove her to envision a different future for venture capital as an asset class and she had the impressive resume to pull it off. Since that conversation, Miriam has been an incredible mentor and eventual peer as we built funds in parallel—she’s one of my go-to people for career decisions, LP advice, and fund building.
Clint and the team have developed frameworks for making high-quality decisions from a position of uncertainty and best practices for supporting entrepreneurs to take smart risks as they build companies. Ulu has a firm conviction that seed-stage investing generates the best returns over the long term and offers the highest leverage toward promoting a diverse entrepreneurship community.
What do you think are the biggest misconceptions people have about the VC industry?
People often think investing leads to getting rich quickly, but most startups take close to a decade to succeed, if not more. Venture capital involves frequent failures and requires comfort with failure; it’s difficult to do this work if you have a need for achievement and success. It’s a job requiring both curiosity and selling skills: selling skills because you need to “sell” your firm to founders as well as potential investors when raising capital, and curiosity because you are always learning about business models and technology that do not have any precedent. Love for learning is a core motivator because the wins are sometimes rare.
What would you say to those who think they’d like to pursue venture as a career?
It’s not for everyone. Venture capital is a very humbling job with failure built in.
Companies you have full conviction in may fail for many different reasons, so you have to be comfortable with ambiguity and failure.
It is also a career that benefits those with an insatiable appetite for learning, since, as I’ve said, your wins don’t come quick or easy.
While VC is an apprenticeship business, it’s a service business above all else. We are here to provide a service to both LPs and founders, and a lot of our time is spent selling this service. We constantly sell to LPs, entrepreneurs we want to invest in, follow-on investors for our founders, and portfolio company potential hires.
Make sure that the reason you want to be on this career path is less about the potential glamour of it all and more aligned with your enjoyment for innovating, building, learning, and selling.”
Reputation is everything and it’s often the preferred form of currency in this industry.
What would you tell someone trying to get into the industry?
You need to love technology and building relationships before thinking about pursuing venture.
Get involved in entrepreneurship centers and tech events as ways to prove you have made a proactive effort in building relationships in different interest areas.
Find people in the industry who you admire and figure out what inspires you about them. Go through your networks and see if you can make contact with them to have coffee or a conversation; successful investors will sometimes take time to give advice to aspiring VCs.
The best investors I have met spend time understanding the past and have a thesis on the future, but what really stands out is their ability to see the present clearly. This clarity provides them unique insights into current inflection points they can bet on in the form of companies.”
There are also several organizations to help underrepresented aspiring entrepreneurs and investors: AllRaise, SomosVC, BLCKVC, Venture Forward, and HBCUvc have all made serious progress in the industry.
Aim to do hard things well and understand that doing hard things well takes time. Shortcuts often rely on luck, and that doesn’t always go well. Be okay with leaning into what may be less exciting at the moment.