- Cristina Cordova is First Round Capital’s newest partner investing in seed stage companies.
- Before she worked in venture, she was the 28th employee at Stripe and also an early hire at Notion.
- Cordova is also an angel investor and has backed more than 50 startups.
Cristina Cordova has a nearly picture perfect resume for venture capital.
She graduated from Stanford, worked as an operator for unicorn startups like Stripe and Notion, and angel invested in over 50 startups before landing the coveted role of partner at First Round Capital.
But her path to success was anything but a given.
Cordova grew up as the child of a single mother in Los Angeles and spent much of her early childhood managing her own schedule.
“I was definitely a latchkey kid,” she told Insider. “I learned to be very independent and self driven and motivated.”
It was that drive that led Cordova to her first college internship at Tapulous, an app development startup. A friend offered her an internship there after she left for a study abroad program and Cordova jumped at the opportunity. It would ultimately change the course of her career.
It was at Tapulous that Cordova first heard the phrase “venture capital,” and realized that it could be a viable career path for her down the line. She became fascinated by the inner workings of Silicon Valley startup culture, and read as many tech blogs and news sites as she could.
After completing her internship, Cordova landed a job at Pulse, an RSS news feed application, which has since been bought by Linkedin. At Pulse, she became the vice president of business development at 22 years old.
It was a lofty task for Cordova, and she felt intimidated by the responsibilities at first.
“I had huge imposter syndrome,” she said. “I felt like I had to hide my age, because of how young I was.”
Cordova knew she had to dive into the role and learn as she went along, just like she did at Tapulous.
She immediately took on every project she could at Pulse, from securing partnerships with major newspapers to hiring and managing employees across departments. By the time she was 24, she had landed her next role as Stripe’s head of partnerships and was a key player in getting Lyft as a Stripe customer.
While at Stripe, Cordova became curious about angel investing after seeing so many of her past colleagues break into venture, and participated in First Round’s angel investing track program.
“I consider myself a generalist,” Cordova said. “Angel investing was my way to learn about all kinds of businesses and figure out how I could be helpful to a business outside of a space that I’ve worked in directly.”
She became quite the prolific
angel investor
, backing over 50 startups. Unlike some angels, who would write a check and have little involvement in a company afterwards, Cordova would dive in to help founders with any operational problems they were having.
After investing in workplace management startup Notion, she became so active in helping the company that she ended up taking a job there as the head of platforms and partnerships, and reported directly to the CEO.
Cordova managed to stay close with several of the partners at First Round Capital she met during the angel investing program. And as luck would have it, the venture firm was looking for a new partner earlier this year, a few months after she left Notion to focus on angel investing full time. First Round’s partner Brett Berson knew Cordova well, since the firm had also invested in Notion, and the firm offered her the role to join after seeing the success of her other angel investments.
It was serendipitous for Cordova at the time, who thought it might be a better way for her to engage and help founders on a more personal level.
“The relationships that I saw that First Round had with their founders felt much deeper and more fulfilling to me than just putting in a check as an angel,” she said.
