Julianne Brands
5.0
(2)
Startup Founder and VC helping you navigate your first fundraise
Studied at Stanford Graduate School of Business
Works at Breakwater Ventures
Available Tuesday at 5:00 PM UTC
Questions? Start chatting with this coach before you get started.
Julianne's Coaching Offerings
Custom hourly · $125/hr
Get help with Fundraising, Ideation, and .
Julianne’s Startup Founders Qualifications
Experience level: Executive
As a VC and former founder, I bring real world experience to help you navigate building your startup, and especially your first fundraise. My toolkit includes frameworks to help with customer discovery, human-centered design, community-building, business modeling, and fundraising strategy. (Please note, while I do invest in early-stage startups at Breakwater Ventures, I would never charge you to pitch me! This platform is solely because I love to advise and coach startups. If you'd like to pitch me your business, please email [email protected].)
Julianne can help with:
Fundraising
Ideation
Market Research
Go-to-Market Strategy
Business Strategy Development
Venture Capital Strategy
About Julianne
I’m a former founder and investor with 10+ years experience here to help you navigate your startup fundraising process. I’ve helped companies raise $50M+ across my career.
Why do I coach?
Startup fundraising is an unfair process; investors see thousands of fundraises while founders may only see a few. I want to share the secrets of the best investors to help you navigate the process.
Work Experience
Venture Partner
Breakwater Ventures
2023 - Present
I’m a Venture Partner at Breakwater Ventures, focused on investing in and incubating ideas in AI & fintech. I'm particularly excited about agentic commerce, payments, fintech, and AI in underserved industries.
Special Projects
PayPal
2023 - Present
I lead special projects at PayPal Crypto, where I helped launch PYUSD ($1B+ market cap payment stablecoin) and worked on passing the GENUIS Act.
Co-founder & CEO
Coast Labs
2022 - 2023
My co-founder and I launched Jinjur (a social investment platform, developed at d.school and Startup Garage at Stanford Business School) in 2022. We focused on closing the investing confidence gap for millennial women through social collaboration. The product enabled women to form investment clubs with friends and invest together in different asset classes. We purpose-built content and community to increase investing confidence. We bootstrapped the company to 30 customers, and we built an active community of over 1,000 members engaging on investment ideas. Much of it worked. 30 customers. A roughly 30% increase in investing confidence, and a 75 NPS. Using early AI tools to streamline content creation and product iteration. A lot didn't. Growth marketing was expensive and unit economics weren’t viable. We made the tough decision to shut down Jinjur in 2023. Needless to say, I leaned a lot. Building community, user research, designing beautiful products, and growth marketing. I learned how to lead and manage. And I learned (some of) the hard thing about hard things.
Director of Strategy
Sila
2020 - 2021
I led strategy at Sila Money, where I learned partnerships and product from some of the best people in fintech. I sourced, developed, and managed business critical product relationships with Evolve Bank, Stripe, Plaid, Visa, Alloy, and others. I developed our Fintech Partner Marketplace and Startup Package, which doubled the company pipeline and saw a 50% close rate on inbound referrals. I helped build the finnovation (now TWIF) community of nearly 10,000 folks in fintech. I managed our $15M Series A fundraise and Board of Directors meetings and metrics (including implementing OKRs). I learned how to spot market opportunities. I learned the “”ABC’s” of selling. Mainly, I learned how to keep up at a fast-growing startup.
General Partner
OVF
2015 - 2020
I led a seed-stage VC fund with $100M in AUM, three funds in top decile performance, and one IPO. We developed a unique model of entrepreneurs investing in entrepreneurs. Our individual LPs were former founders, and we leveraged their expertise for the benefit of our founders. For five years, I was involved in all aspects of investing and fund management, including due diligence, board management, financial modeling, and fund operations. I also built our community, including organizing The Funded (90 NPS from founders and 110% retention rate) and our Annual Compensation Survey (over 3,000 downloads). I learned what can help make founders and startups successful. I learned board management, negotiation, and fundraising. I learned how to curate an ecosystem. And, I learned how much I love building enduring businesses.
Associate
Pacific Crest Securities
2014 - 2015
Education
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Master of Science, Sloan Fellow 2022
2021 - 2022
Activities and societies: Sloan Fellow, Class President, LOWkeynote 2022 Speaker, Stanford Blockchain Club, VC Club, Fintech Club, Women in Management, GSB Pride
Santa Clara University
Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Economics, Political Science
2008 - 2012
2 Reviews
Overall Rating