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Gillian Muessig        

Managing Director of the Sybilla Masters Fund; Co-Founder of MOZ; Host of Podcasts VC Confidential & CEO Coach

Gillian Muessig is the General Partner and Managing Director of the Mastersfund™, a global gender-lens venture capital fund based in Seattle, WA. She is a co-founder of several tech startups, including Moz, the world’s most popular provider of digital marketing software. In addition to serving on dozens of Boards of Directors and Advisors worldwide, Muessig has served as a tech advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a business and program advisor to the U.S. State Department, German Marshall Fund, SwissContact, as well as government programs in Switzerland, Germany, China, Peru, and throughout the Balkans.

Muessig speaks globally on the future of work and life, emerging funding models in private equity and venture capital, and solutions to improve equality in entrepreneurship. Her audio podcast, "VC Confidential," focuses on the expanding venture capital investment opportunities for diverse investors and capitalization options for diverse tech company founders. Over more than three decades, Muessig has helped thousands of companies to launch, grow, pivot and thrive.

An acknowledged authority on both investing in the future of work and life and on emerging trends in Private Equity investing, Muessig has designed new, risk-mitigated and sustainable venture investment models to better serve the expanding diversity of tech founders. She has helped launch numerous emerging fund managers to launch innovative VC funds to better serve the startup and investor communities.

She is the host of "CEOcoach," a ten-year running podcast for entrepreneurs and now co-hosts the weekly podcast, VC Confidential. Over the course of more than 30 years, Muessig has helped hundreds of companies to launch, grow, pivot, and thrive.

Speech Topics

Keeping Your Head While Those Around You Lose Theirs: Positioning Capital for Success in the End Game

Audiences: Corporate leaders and Private Equity (PE) investors: asset allocators for Private Family Offices, corporate funds, governments, banks, NGOs

It is time to pay the piper. After 30+ months of battering from a global pandemic, coupled by trillions of dollars in expenditures to help buffer the impact for employees, SMBs, and entire industries such as travel and tourism, the bull is finally in retreat. The cost of capital is rising. The classic signals of >4% inflation and <4% unemployment rates are evident and investors are pulling capital from high risk investment structures such as VC Funds at breakneck speed. Economic storms are common. They have an impetus, a life cycle, elements of uncertainty and opportunity. What signals inside this particular downturn do we need to look for? Where can asset allocators strategically place capital to set it up for success as this storm transitions to its most important stage: the emergence of economic opportunities?

Illuminating Success Factors for Early Stage Tech Companies

Audiences: Entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, students or Early stage individual or corporate investors and asset allocators

As a speaker, advisor, board member, and host of the decade-long podcast CEO coach and now VC Confidential, I have helped thousands of companies to launch, grow, pivot, and thrive. For founders and leaders of early stage tech companies, as well as for potential investors seeking to understand the angel / early stage investment landscape, I speak often about Wizards and Executors. The Wizard is the 'idea person' often a technologist. The Executor executes on the ideas of a Wizard and builds a company around her/him. One famous example would be Zuckerberg and Sandberg. In this context, I am an executor. I build and optimize the value of tech companies.

  • Of Wizards & Executors: the Assets and Attributes of Successful Entrepreneurs and Startup Companies
  • The Capital Stack: On Beyond Venture Equity! How to Capitalize Your Company at Every Stage
  • Powerful Boards of Directors: The Secret Sauce of Successful Enterprises

Gender Lens Investing: The Power of Investing in Market Anomaly

Conventional Venture Capital is anything but a meritocracy. The numbers are well known: Women receive 2% of venture capital; men receive 98%. At the Series A, women are awarded an average of 16% of the valuations awarded to men. Women raise 44% of the capital raised by their male colleagues over the deal. Women exit at the same rates as men, but do so about 12 months sooner on average. And when they exit, women have been returning an average of 35% higher ROI to their investors for more than a quarter of a century! THAT. IS. NOT. A ROUNDING FIGURE!

News

‘Startup whisperer’ Gillian Muessig shares tips for scoring VC while juggling family life
Gillian Muessig seems to have acquired more than one life-time’s worth of connections, venture capital experience and insights into how to help women — and really anyone else — succeed in business, juggling family obligations and entrepreneurial endeavors. Her resume includes such skills as “startup whisperer” and “product visionary.”
Gillian Muessig unveils new venture fund to back women-led startups
Muessig’s new fund, the Sybilla Masters Fund, focuses on funding companies that have at least one woman on the founding team or C-suite.

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