A Gen Z VC Associate Breaks Down Working in Venture Capital

• Madeline Lawrence is an associate at the Dutch venture-capital fund Peak Capital.
• She opened the fund’s first international office in Berlin and heads up its Germany operations.
• She told Insider about the realities of the job, how she invests, and how founders can contact her.

This is an edited, translated version of an article that originally appeared on May 10, 2022.

“Mom thinks I’m a valued member of the ecosystem. Young and naive. Making rich men richer.” That’s Madeline Lawrence’s bio on Twitter.

The 24-year-old is an associate at the Dutch venture-capital fund Peak Capital. She’s already opened the fund’s first international office in Berlin and heads its sourcing and networking in the DACH region — Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Generation Z has already produced many founders, but it’s still underrepresented in venture capital, Lawrence said in an interview with Insider. She said she believed that her generation sees investing differently.

“I can tell myself a nice story about how good and meaningful what I do is,” she said. “But it’s not like I can ignore the fact that there’s a problematic aspect to all of this.” 

“Our business model is to make piles of money into bigger piles of money,” Lawrence said. “A not-insignificant amount of that money comes from rich men in suits and goes to men in suits who will soon be rich.” She said that while this was true of many companies, it was more overt at VC firms.

She added that she hoped the VC industry would change and become more accessible to both partners and founders.

Lawrence is Italian and American. She lived in Barcelona before moving to Amsterdam, where she studied law.

Lawrence said she got into venture capital because she wanted to help founders with visions she believes in.

“My job is to listen to what people are really passionate about,” she said, adding that she couldn’t think of anything more fulfilling “except, of course, building something yourself.”

She began her career at Rockstart, a startup accelerator. Her LinkedIn profile said she started in the operations team and then moved to the funds team. 

She started her own fund, ASIF Ventures, in July 2018, which aimed to support young founders and was backed by universities and angel investors, her LinkedIn said.

Lawrence has been working at Peak Capital for two and a half years.

“Our oldest partner is 50. The others are in their mid-40s, and at 24, I’m the youngest on the team,” she said. 

When Lawrence looks for startups to invest in, she said, she tries to avoid what she called “dog sweater” companies. 

“Dogs don’t need sweaters. Yes, dogs in sweaters are super cute, and dog sweaters sell because of that. These companies are built to make money. You can also buy the company and sell it to make money, but it doesn’t solve any problems. Those are the companies I try to stay away from,” she said.

But she added that she didn’t see herself as an impact investor, and she questions what that phrase actually means.

She said: “Most of the impact investing is happening with millennials, in my opinion. That’s where I see a lot of second-time founders whose second startup is always sustainable or impact-driven. Maybe it’s a pattern: They make money with their first startup then make an impact with their second.”

Lawrence is dealing with a tough market and huge amounts of money vying for the best startups. “So much hype and so much FOMO,” she said. 

“Founders ask themselves, ‘Why didn’t we talk to these investors, too?’ And VCs think, ‘Why didn’t we have this deck on the table?'” She compared the investment market to someone throwing food into a pond overflowing with fish.

But she has a strategy to cope with the competitive market. 

“You can just fish somewhere else, of course,” she said, which is why she often looks for startups in Hamburg instead of Berlin. In Berlin, everyone is looking, and some funds work together, leading to everything becoming overpriced, she added. 

“If you only source from your own network, you run the risk of leaving certain groups out,” Lawrence continued. “That’s why I’m very careful to pay a lot of attention to cold calls as well. Founders who don’t have a network yet only have that avenue.”

But above all, she said, her company is fast: “When we find the founding team where everything is right — business model, background, charisma — you can be sure we’ll be the ones running, not walking.”

Ideally, there are only two weeks between the first contact and a funding decision, Lawrence said.