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Andrea Hippeau

Andrea Hippeau is a venture capital investor in New York, best known as a partner at the early-stage firm Lerer Hippeau, where she has spent more than a decade helping build the firm's portfolio and investment practice [1][2][3]. She joined Lerer Hippeau in 2014 as a senior associate, was promoted to principal in 2017, and became partner in 2021, having previously worked on the operating side of startups at pet-care company Bark & Co. and at pet-content site The Dodo [4][5][6][7][8]. Before entering the startup world she spent several years in corporate roles at Thomson Reuters, in relationship management and client-facing sales positions, and later moved into corporate development at Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast, where she worked on a $400 million fund used for both M&A and venture investing [9][10][11][16]. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a bachelor's degree in management, business and French from Skidmore College [12][13].

Hippeau has described her Thomson Reuters experience, including cold-calling clients during the financial crisis, as formative to her later career, arguing that sales ability is one of the most important skills for both founders and investors [16]. She traces her interest in startups to her time at Advance Publications and to an MBA internship at Bark & Co. (then BarkBox), where she stayed on as general manager of a new business line and watched the company expand from roughly ten employees to more than seventy while raising Series A and B rounds [16]. She joined Lerer Hippeau after business school, noting that her father, a general partner at the firm, helped her get an initial introduction, though she describes her subsequent decade-long career there as a "natural evolution" built on her own track record rather than a predetermined path [16].

In discussing her investment philosophy, Hippeau has said that across Lerer Hippeau's most successful portfolio companies the common factor was strong founding talent, and she cautions that investors can become overly focused on market size or product details rather than approaching deals with optimism [16]. She has also described a shift in what growth-stage investors look for, noting that at Series A the bar for revenue traction has risen but that team quality has become the dominant criterion, sometimes allowing AI-focused startups with exceptional founders to raise capital before generating meaningful revenue [15]. She distinguishes between a small number of AI companies achieving unusually rapid, compounding growth and the broader majority of startups, which she says still typically require a decade or more of iterative work to build sustainable businesses [15].

Hippeau has also spoken about how Lerer Hippeau's portfolio mix has evolved, stating that the firm now invests roughly 70 to 75 percent in enterprise companies and 20 to 25 percent in consumer companies, a shift she attributes to the broader maturation of New York's tech ecosystem rather than to the rise of artificial intelligence specifically [15]. She has argued that AI is nonetheless making consumer brand-building more capital-efficient, allowing smaller teams to build large-scale brands and reduce reliance on costly customer acquisition strategies that hurt many direct-to-consumer companies in the previous investment cycle [15].

Experience

  1. Partner
    Lerer HippeauMay 2021 to Present
  2. Principal
    Lerer HippeauDec 2017 to May 2021
  3. Senior Associate
    Lerer HippeauJul 2014 to Dec 2017
  4. Business Development Manager
    The DodoMar 2014 to Jun 2014
  5. General Manager, BarkCare
    Bark & Co.Jun 2013 to Mar 2014
  6. Corporate Development Associate
    Advance Publications Inc.Apr 2011 to May 2012
  7. Client Specialist
    Thomson ReutersSep 2010 to Apr 2011
  8. Relationship Manager
    Thomson ReutersJul 2008 to Sep 2010

Education

Media & appearances

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