Laura Yao

Laura used to want to be a journalist, and throughout college, wrote for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Herald. After she graduated from Yale with a degree in Mathematics and Economics, though, she went to Stanford for her MBA, caught the start-up bug, and founded a recruiting platform for technology companies called The PhenomList. She then became a founding employee at Angel Island Partners, a US-focused long-short equity hedge fund, before joining Bridgewater, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, as a global macro investor. She wasn’t able to stay away from the Bay Area and moved back a few years later to run the commercial side of Kairos Aerospace, a startup aiming to mitigate the effects of climate change through inexpensive sensors and data science.

As a Partner at EQT Ventures, Laura focuses primarily on investing in, and working with, Silicon Valley-based tech startups. She thinks a lot about the efficient movement of people, stuff, and ideas. And she loves acting as a founder’s Siri: she might not know all (or any of) the answers, but she’ll work hard to help them figure it out or bring in the right people to do so.

Outside of work, she enjoys spending long Saturdays with friends in Dolores Park, hiking and camping trips, going to shows, reading both fiction and non-, and fixing stuff in her very old house.