How Solo VC Brianne Kimmel Wins Deals in Hot Startups

• Brianne Kimmel’s VC firm, Worklife Ventures, has generated 7x returns from its first fund.
• Kimmel has gotten into hot startups by opening her network to founders even before writing a check.
• Worklife has backed unicorns such as Pipe, Hopin, Deel, and Public.

In just three years, solo venture capitalist Brianne Kimmel has landed deals in hot startups like Pipe, Deel and Public, which Kimmel says has helped generate sevenfold returns for her firm, Worklife Ventures.

Like many startup investors, Kimmel touts her ability to provide resources beyond sheer cash to founders — only she’s willing to roll up her sleeves even before she writes a check. That was the case when Kimmel started hearing buzz about a new startup called Pipe not long after launching her firm in 2019. 

The startup was poised to “disrupt venture capital,” she’d heard, by providing an alternative method of financing for software-as-a-service companies. Kimmel was intrigued. 

She asked around her circle of friends and colleagues until she got ahold of the phone number of Pipe’s cofounder and CEO, Harry Hurst.

But Hurst wasn’t interested in chatting. He’d already secured more funding than he initially sought and didn’t need any more. Kimmel was undeterred, calling and emailing Hurst several more times, offering connections to potential hires and customers.

Finally, Hurst agreed to meet with her over drinks at the Soho House in Los Angeles, where Kimmel had flown to celebrate her birthday. A few hours later, she became an investor in Pipe’s seed round.

“I ended up wiring the money from the parking lot,” she said.

It’s that hustle that’s allowed Kimmel to win the trust of founders such as Hurst and Johnny Boufarhat, the CEO and founder of virtual event platform startup Hopin, another one of Worklife’s portfolio companies.

Those investments, along with stakes in other unicorns such as Webflow, Public, and Deel, have created outsized returns for Worklife’s first $10 million fund as those companies have raised additional funding at higher valuations, Kimmel told Insider. She has recently raised a new $35 million fund from her original backers and plans to raise an additional fund later this year.

‘Finding ways to be helpful’

Kimmel first became interested in startup investing while working in growth marketing at Zendesk. There, she saw several of her colleagues take up angel investing and build nest eggs for themselves. She thought she’d try her hand at it, too and dipped into her personal savings to make her first investments.

One company that caught Kimmel’s eye was a startup called Webflow, which runs a platform for building design-forward websites without needing to code. She wasn’t sure if the company was raising money, but she wanted to get to know the founders.

So she sent them an email and invited them to a workshop she was running on growing SaaS businesses. Later on, she invited them to a dinner she hosted for founders working on no-code startups.

Webflow ended up becoming Kimmel’s first angel investment.

“As someone that was new, that didn’t have a track record and didn’t have a lot of money, my solution to making these investments in really competitive companies was finding ways to be helpful,” she said.

In September 2019, Kimmel launched Worklife Ventures, which invests in companies addressing the future of work. But her approach to connecting with founders hasn’t changed all that much from her angel investing days. 

When Kimmel sought to invest in Hopin, for instance, she contacted everyone she knew that had run an event on Hopin and asked if they could connect her with Boufarhat, the company’s CEO. The two eventually had a seven-minute phone call, followed by a series of conversations on WhatsApp. She connected him with several of the company’s eventual hires, including Sarah Manning, Hopin’s vice president of people.

“Her network is phenomenal,” Boufarhat wrote in an email. He told Insider he also appreciated her willingness to offer support in other ways, such as flying cross-country for one of the company’s happy hours: “She goes the extra mile,” he said.

The future of Worklife

By proactively building relationships with founders, Kimmel has gained access to early funding rounds of companies that now command steep valuations. Pipe, for instance, was valued at just $13 million when Worklife participated in its seed round, she told Insider. After the company raised $250 million last year, its valuation soared to $2 billion.

It’s also gained her a strong following in the tech community. When Kimmel raised her first fund, she decided to seek money primarily from the individual CEOs, founders, and tech executives she had met over the years, along with venture-capital-focused funds, rather than larger institutional investors. Worklife’s backers include tech founders such as Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan.

With the new $35 million fund, Kimmel is seeking to lead seed rounds, writing checks up to $2 million. 

Kimmel told Insider she’s especially interested in tools for small businesses, which she expects to benefit from trends such as the Great Resignation and remote work. The search for meaningful work will likely lead more people to start their own businesses, she said, and with more people working from home, they have greater occasion to visit neighborhood shops.

“I believe we are going to reconnect locally,” she said. “So I’m looking at restaurant tech, small-business tech, things more human in nature.”