Ep25 Lisa Calhoun—Earning Every Win: Grit, Innovation, and Knowing When to Venture!
Episode Summary
Lisa Calhoun, managing partner of Valor Ventures, discusses her journey from fourth-generation entrepreneur to leading seed-stage venture capital investments across the South. She shares insights on transformational innovation, the venture winter of recent years, and how AI is fundamentally changing software development and startup economics.
Key Quotes
"Venture is the hardest, most difficult, most vulture-like money you will ever take. Not every founder should even look at venture because it requires building companies that can scale to billion-dollar valuations and transform entire industries."
"Last year, 75% of all venture capital raised went to just a few firms you could count on both hands. A good 40% of smaller seed funds closed their doors, though many became zombie funds managing existing portfolios without making new investments."
"Coding per se is absolutely no longer the constrained resource that it was even this time last year. AI tools like Devon can now check out code, run trouble tickets, submit fixes, and recheck code into production autonomously."
Transcript
Hi, welcome to Tales From The Sky Lounge, it's a podcast about business consulting and venture investing. We get out there in the world and we talk to people who are making it happen and we get their stories. And today's guest in the Sky Lounge is Lisa Calhoun. Hi Lisa.
Hey Todd, great to be with you.
Yeah, welcome to The Sky Lounge. Lisa, who are you and what are you working on these days?
So I'm the managing partner of Valor Ventures. We're an Atlanta-based venture capital firm that does one thing: we lead seed rounds across the South. And we just launched our third fund and we are already putting that capital into the ground. We've led three deals in the last quarter and we're looking forward to an incredible 2025.
Wow, a seed investor that's writing checks. That's awesome, especially in the South.
Want to go deeper?
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