Allison Baum Gates is an early stage technology investor, author, and speaker.

 

She is a General Partner at SemperVirens, a venture fund investing in healthcare, fintech and enterprise SaaS. To date, Allison has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from LPs in the US, Europe, and Asia, and she has deployed capital into more than 70 companies, including nine unicorns, 24 exits and 10 board positions. She has been featured in major publications such as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Techcrunch, taught hundreds of business school students, and sold tens of thousands of copies of her book about how the venture capital industry works. 

 

Allison started her career on the trading floor at Goldman Sachs and was an early employee at Maveron and IVP-backed General Assembly, which sold to Adecco in 2018 for $413M. Subsequently, she co-founded Fresco Capital, a global seed fund, and was an investor at Trinity Ventures, a multi-billion dollar Sand Hill Road generalist venture firm. 

 

Allison has lived and worked in New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Paris, and Tokyo. She is a guest lecturer at Columbia Business School and UC Berkeley-Haas, and is the author of Breaking into Venture (McGraw-Hill, 2023), a comprehensive guide for navigating the VC industry. She holds a B.A. in Economics with Honors from Harvard University and is fluent(ish) in three languages.