Meet the VCs with Yoko Okano & Ravi Grover
Designed to bridge the gap between startups and the investment world, each quarter SVB, Escalon, Perkins Coie, and IMA bring together the industry's brightest minds, providing you with an opportunity to glean insights about fundraising, discern investment theses, and understand the prevailing investment climate.
About this edition:
Yoko Okano is the Founding Partner at First Row, and Ravi Grover, is a General Partner at Data Tech Fund.
Yoko Okano - Prior to founding First Row, Yoko was an active angel investor, earning taking leadership roles within groups like Grubstakes and Seattle Angel Conference.
Early in her career at Google, she worked on Google Books & News and launching ebooks on Google Play. She applied the learning from the immense operational scale of Google to her product-related roles at startups before embarking on the investing path full-time.
Yoko loves to dig into product-led growth and shortening an end user’s “time to delight.” She also has a deep passion for bringing more founders and funders into the ecosystem and balancing the power imbalance between the two sides of the table through education. She relishes discussions about fundraising strategy and narrative.
Yoko serves on the board Sustain Music, an organization that uses music as a way to connect - between genres, people and spaces.
Ravi Grover - Back when Ravi Grover and his colleagues at Data Tech Fund were getting off the ground a few years ago, not everyone was excited about their focus on data.
“Some of the feedback we got was that it sounded too boring,” Grover said.
But with the recent rush of generative AI and other AI-related technologies, the conversation around data — and the importance of good data to fuel AI apps and services — has changed.
“Now the struggle is the opposite,” said Grover. “How do we set ourselves apart from all the other funds?”
Grover, based in Seattle, was one of the first employees to work out of Facebook’s offices in Seattle. He later did engineering stints with Seattle startups including Elevator, Poppy, TraceMe, and Mason, and has backed Seattle companies as an angel investor.