VC10X - 24 Year Old Partner Sourcing Deals on Tiktok - Sydney Landau, Partner, Shakti VC

I want to be around entrepreneurship. I want to help founders any way I can. And I just want to learn. And so what stemmed from an internship, now two years later, partner at Shakti. So it's been crazy.

So give us a view to that, how quickly you learned, what are the key things that you learned, and how you look at startups, how you source deals.

So I was actually a psych major at Colby. And so I learned to read people really well and kind of like their motivations for starting a company. Why, when you're put on the planet, you can do anything. Why this?

And based on your research, how differently is the next generation allocating capital compared to their

parents? 78% out of the 42 next-gen allocators we spoke with have invested into a company directly.

And you sourced and won an investment through TikTok alongside Serena Williams' VC firm. What does it say about where great founders are showing up today?

And you don't know where they're going to pop up these days. It could be on TikTok.

Hey everyone, this is Prashant and I'll be your host for the VC10X podcast. And today we have Sydney Landau with us. Sydney is a partner at Shakti. She joined the firm as an intern, knowing nothing about venture and became a partner just two years later at 24. We talk about reading founder psychology, what her research with next-gen allocators revealed about where the inherited wealth is actually going. why the firm invests in what they call the reimagination of toothbrushes, and how she solves the deal of a TikTok. So without wasting any time, let's dive straight in.

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Good, how are you? Thank you for having me.

Yeah, very well. Thank you. And it's a pleasure having you on. And to start things off, let's start with how you became a VC at a very young age. You know, what drew you into venture and what experiences shaped the way you invest today?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting story. So I think it first starts, I'm from Charlotte, North Carolina. I was not in Silicon Valley. I had no kind of tech exposure there. I was always really interested in kind of the founder journey and building things from zero to one. And I first saw that, and I went to boarding school in New Jersey, actually. And there was two well-known founders that came out of Blair. They were both consumer products. So I don't know if you've heard of Mush, the baked oats. Okay. So that was one. And I'd always kind of loved... all the entrepreneurship classes and when they would bring in these founders to come speak with us and just kind of like the raw grit of building something