At BCV, we work closely with founders on their most difficult decisions. How aggressively should a company forward-invest? What profile of sales leader will work best? How should we position against competitors? So when we recruit, we look for people who bring new perspectives to these questions, based on their domain expertise and first-principles thinking. That’s what led us to Slater Stich and Saanya Ojha, who we are delighted to welcome to the firm.

Slater started his career as a data scientist at Square after dropping out of the math PhD program at Berkeley. He brings product acumen combined with a commercial mindset, which founders find immensely helpful for everything from the product roadmap to pricing. As one well-known founder he works with told us, “Slater really understood our product. He logged in and used it, recorded me a Loom with thoughts so I wanted to include him in the beta. But he also had this ability to zoom out. He’d ask me ‘are you running up against this thing?’ He was jumping ahead to problems we’d face six months in the future.”

It’s hard to find someone with Slater’s domain expertise, intellect and generosity of spirit. So founders naturally gravitate towards him. After finishing at Stanford GSB, he led the data science team at Valor Equity Partners. He then started a data-focused seed fund, investing in early rounds of BigEye, Census, Equals, Hex, Preql and Replicate, among many other promising companies. He will continue to focus on early stage investing at BCV.

Saanya joins us from Coatue where she helped build out a stage-agnostic, global fintech practice and drove investments in Cloudwalk, Melio, Mercury, Bharatpe, Cred, Clara, Pinwheel, Silverflow, Luna Bank, Bond, and Meld, among others. After studying finance at Wharton, she started her career as a hedge fund analyst at Goldman Sachs, investing in sectors ranging from industrials to frontier tech. Throughout her career, she has shown incredible range and built expertise across both stage and sector because, above all, she is driven by her fascination with the core question of what makes a good business.

With her metrics-driven approach and keen understanding of business fundamentals, Saanya has played a pivotal role in helping her portfolio companies scale. While her deeply analytical mindset is an asset, it is her experience in company-building and relentless founder focus that stand out most. At BCV, she will focus on growth investments.

We couldn’t be more excited to have Saanya and Slater join the BCV team.