1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pamela York of Atasi Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Pamela York was recorded in June 2020.

Pamela York is Founder and CEO, Atasi Ventures, with a special focus on women entrepreneurs in healthcare.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your background as well as the venture firms that you are working on.

Pamela York: I started my career with a PhD in electrical engineering. A lot of my work early in my career is what you would call deep tech and hardware. I got exposed to the startup world. I worked for a company where we spun out 21 companies in a seven-year period.

Sramana Mitra: Which company is that? 

Pamela York: It’s called Sarnoff corporation. RCA had a corporate R&D center in New Jersey and in the process of GE acquiring RCA, they spun it out to become an independent company.

It had a thousand employees and had a $100 million annual R&D budget. They had to figure out its business model and figure out how to be sustainable. It was a phenomenal experience for a person coming out of a PhD program.

If you could figure out how to raise money, you could do it with the environment. One of the big initiatives was incubating teams and technology to spin out companies.

Both founder and key operator in two of those companies had exited. One was a blockbuster IPO and the other was a very long burn down the road but, eventually it got acquired. I had the opportunity to see both sides of what happens in the venture capital finance startup environment. 

Sramana Mitra: When did you do Capita3? Which one was first, Atasi Ventures or Capita3? 

Pamela York: Atasi Ventures. I started out as an engineer, product developer, then a company builder. I never planned on doing most of these things. I just found myself doing the things I love.

As a result of my entrepreneurial experiences, I started doing what you would call angel investing. I started making my own individual investments. I eventually started Atasi Ventures for a couple of purposes. One, it served as my holding company for my personal investments. Second, I wanted to incubate ideas.

One of the ideas that was important to me was bringing awareness-based leadership development into the startup world. I’ve been in the corporate world and the startup world, and I have been doing a lot of change management training and transformational leadership development.

I came to understand the importance of the awareness that we bring to the situation, whatever we are carrying with us and using that to reduce risk and increase success. That was the idea that I had with Atasi Ventures, which I brought to Capita3.

It was formed in 2016. I noticed the issues with female founders not receiving finance commensurate with the number of founders who were building companies. I wanted to understand what was happening.

Are women getting financed? What are the needs? I wanted to dive deep into what was happening. I formulated my own picture and decided that two things needed to happen. One was to support women in being the leaders that could navigate an environment that didn’t see them for who they were. I built a program around that.

Second, I raised a venture fund to take action on investing in these companies. I felt that those were the two things that I could do and wanted to do to change that game for female founders.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Pamela York of Atasi Ventures
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