A Week In The Life: Gabby Cazeau (Harlem Capital)
What I Do
I’m a Senior Associate at Harlem Capital and work on the investment team focusing on sourcing and conducting due diligence for companies at the Seed and Series A stage. I’m often meeting with incredible women and minority founders to better understand their visions and the companies they are building. I work on supporting our relationships with accelerator programs and pre-Seed companies, like through Harlem Capital’s partnership with Techstars. I also help connect diverse communities in the tech ecosystem through Harlem Capital’s event series and planning our upcoming pitch competition, MORE EQUITY.
Week of 2/17–2/21
My agenda for the week
● Monday: School, Meetings, Workday on diligence
● Tuesday: Investment Committee, Weekly Partner Meeting
● Wednesday: Workday on diligence
● Thursday: HCP Team Meeting, Black History Month Event
● Friday: A few meetings
Monday 2/17
6:45 am — WAKE UP! Over the last few years, I’ve found I do my best and most creative thinking in the morning. I’m up early to make coffee, breakfast, and catch up with news on TechCrunch and a few newsletters I follow. I love starting my day with meditation and journaling using my Five Minute Journal to set my intentions for the day. After that, I’m on Slack checking in with the HCP team and getting through email.
10:00 am — School. In addition to Harlem Capital, I’m a student at the Yale School of Management, so by 10am I’m off to class. It’s been incredible to work at HCP and my MBA at the same time. I couldn’t ask for a more supportive and incredible community of people to learn from each day.
12:00 pm — Full team call with a startup. For HCP’s diligence process, once we get further along we like to have all the partners meet with a company’s management team. On these calls we continue to develop a relationship with the founders, dive in deeper on the business, and answer any outstanding questions that we’ve had from the diligence process. This is usually our last stage of diligence prior to moving to an Investment Committee meeting to decide whether to invest.
1–4 pm — School. Back to class for the rest of the afternoon.
4:00 pm — Call with one of the HCP Interns. We’re currently in the midst of Harlem Capital’s 7th internship class. It’s such a stellar group and they bring a lot of great insight into their work on deals and projects. Interns have been core to HCP as the firm has scaled and I started at HCP as an intern a few years ago. Every week we each pair up to chat and get to know each other beyond our work in diligence or projects. As a quick plug, applications will open up for the next intern class on March 4th!
4:30 pm — Call with BLCK VC. BLCK VC is an organization that works to connect, empower, and advance black venture investors by providing a focused community built for and by black venture investors. I’m on one of the committees that connects BLCK VC with tech company Employee Resource Groups and accelerator programs to put on events and programming ranging from education about VC, networking, or office hours for early-stage startups. We had a quick meeting to chat through one of our upcoming events this spring in NYC.
5:00 pm: Tomorrow we have an Investment Committee meeting to decide whether to invest in a new company. I got in the materials from the deal team and am taking time to review ahead of the meeting.
7:00 pm: Grabbing dinner with a good friend to catch up on school and life.
Tuesday 2/18
7:00 am: Wake up. I have the same morning routine every day, which helps me get settled and get to work quickly. Otherwise, this morning I’m working on diligence for a few companies.
11:00 am: Call with our partners at Techstars to check in on the partnership and ways we can continue to expand. We’ve invested in a few Techstars companies and are working on new ways to support their cohorts.
1:00 pm: Back to back calls with founders. I tend to do a lot of outbound sourcing, which means a lot of calls and opportunities to connect with founders.
3:00 pm — Investment Committee Meeting. The deal team brought forward a company for our IC meeting. As always, it’s a great discussion with lots of lively debate. They did a great job putting the memo together and getting through the team’s questions. In the end, the IC approved the deal and the team will move forward to close.
5:30 pm: Time to workout!
8:00 pm — Weekly Partner Meeting. Our team normally has our weekly partner meeting on Monday nights, but with the holiday we moved it to Tuesday. This is the time for everyone to get together (Partners, Associates, Fellows, Interns) to dive into team updates, chat through the current portfolio, and discuss new deals.
Wednesday 2/19
7:30 am: Spent the morning diving into a16z’s recent post on fast growing consumer marketplaces. Tons of great insight and important to keep up with category trends.
10:00 am: Off to a mixture of class, Slack, and email.
12:30 pm — Investor reference call. While we’re in diligence, it’s important for us to do reference calls with other investors participating in the deal, from the previous round, or with category expertise. This call was with a pre-seed investor to help us better understand the founder and how they’ve grown over time.
4:00 pm — Full team call. Another full team call with a company and their founders, this one in the media category.
7:00 pm: Dinner with classmates and then back to work on diligence, research, and putting together a deal memo for the next week.
Thursday 2/20
6:00 am: Up bright and early today to catch the train to NYC. The two-hour ride is both a great time for a quick nap and turning it into a mobile office with a hotspot. Get out a few emails and read through some notes for the day.
9:00 am: Meeting with a friend who works in VC at Salesforce Ventures. It was great to catch up on her work there and reconnect while in the city.
10:00 am: Monthly team meeting. Once a month the Harlem Capital team will have deep dive on different topics. This month we dove in on how our investment model has evolved and grown, upcoming events, and review of our deal process.
2:00 pm: After lunch, I had a quick catch up call with one of our portfolio founders and another with a new founder I got connected with on LinkedIn.
6:00 pm — BHM event with Facebook. This year we hosted our Black History Month Event with Facebook and Black Tech Meetup. We had a lightning talk with the managing partners, Henri Pierre-Jacques and Jarrid Tingle, and a panel discussion with Tiffany Dockery, a product manager at Instagram, Stacy Spikes, a portfolio company founder, myself, with Dion Ridley moderating. It was an awesome event, great food and energy. The panel focused on important attributes for founders to think about as they design and build their products. I’m an engineer and before HCP, worked in product development and engineering. I really find so many transferable skills between product-focused work and investing. In the coming year, one of my key focuses is to build more bridges between the diverse technical and investment communities.
Friday 2/21
8:00 am: Taking the late train back can be tiring, so a slower morning catching up from Thursday’s busy day.
10:00 am: A few more meetings with founders and internal calls.
3:00 pm — Pitch Competition check-in. In April, we’re hosting our inaugural pitch competition, More Equity. Once a week the team has a check-in on progress. Kelly Goldstein, also a senior associate at Harlem Capital, and I have paired up on the event along with one of our fellows and interns. Stay tuned for an upcoming announcement!
It’s a lovely sunny afternoon so taking some time to run errands before hanging out with friends this weekend.
