Hello, I’m Vanessa

I founded Electric Gems in 2024 to work with early-stage crypto, fintech and AI companies, generally at the point where a product or a category is entering a new market.

My experience spans venture investing, ecosystem partnerships, token launches, capital markets and strategic growth. The work has covered designing tokens for launch and running go-to-market for them, building the participant ecosystems that new networks depend on, and positioning products that do not fit neatly into any category that exists and securing partnerships for those new products.

Background

I co-founded Lattice Ventures, and at Ripple I worked on the investing side against a frontier technology thesis, sourcing and evaluating companies that fit it and then supporting the portfolio post investment. At Agoric the role was an operating one: identifying partners across the stack, developing the capital markets strategy and then implementing it, alongside the developer programs that an early network needs in order to attract anyone to build on it.

As Executive Director of New York Angels I ran what was in practice a two-sided marketplace, which meant improving the experience for founders and investors simultaneously, while building and maintaining partnerships across the New York startup ecosystem.

At Electric Gems I run engagements concurrently, drawing on experience as a sole operator, fund co-founder and strategic growth lead in new fields. That has produced partnerships for new products in new categories, complete end-to-end go-to-market documentation for tokens, and a good deal besides.

Writing

I publish occasional notes on ecosystem design, positioning and launches, usually a framework abstracted from work that has recently finished. They are written for founders in the middle of the problem rather than for people browsing.

Getting in touch

If you are building something the market has not caught up to yet, that is the conversation worth having. A short call is usually enough to know whether it is a fit, and if it is not, I will say so and point you somewhere better.