From Entrepreneur to Venture Capitalist

The Story of Mindset Ventures’ Partner Jules Miller

Jules Miller.

Jules Miller is a partner at Mindset Ventures, a Venture Capital firm that focuses on making strategic investments in early-stage technology companies within the United States and Israel. 

The ultimate vision of Mindset Ventures is to allow brilliant minds to build meaningful connections and have access to everything they need in order to succeed, break through challenges, and make their ideas a reality. 

We’re going to walk through Jules Miller’s story and how she was able to go from entrepreneur to venture capitalist in her career. Jules has a fascinating background that started in accounting, led to the founding of two companies, and then eventually transitioned into the VC world with the goal of helping aspiring founders fund their high-growth technology startups.

Jules Miller’s Background

Jules is the head US partner of venture capital firm Mindset Ventures, and she earned her BA degree from UCLA and an MSc from The London School of Economics. 

Early in her career, Jules never imagined that she would become a venture capitalist. While she was always an entrepreneurial person, her path began at a big four accounting firm and eventually led to the founding of two legal tech companies (Evolve Law and Hire an Esquire) and an environmental sustainability consulting firm (Carbonado Group) at the start of her journey. 

Before she joined Mindset Ventures, she also co-founded IBM Blockchain Ventures and ran the IBM Blockchain Accelerator as a lead. 

Her experience as a founder and business leader led to her leaving IBM and joining Mindset Ventures – as they say, the rest is history!

Becoming a VC

Jules Miller didn’t originally intend to become a VC, but she felt that there were some opportunities in the VC landscape that could be improved. She joined Mindset Ventures because she wanted to fund more women and people of color, as well as diverse non-traditional founders, and help them make their startup ideas a reality. 

Her ultimate goal was to be an agent of change in the traditional Venture Capital industry, and instead of funding “typical Stanford dropouts” or “tech bros,” she wanted to make a concentrated effort to allocate capital to founders who truly needed help and aren’t in the traditional demographic of most entrepreneurs we see in the public eye today.

Mindset Ventures allowed her to make her vision a reality and work on finding passionate entrepreneurs and investing in high-growth technology startups as a VC partner.

What Mindset Ventures Does

Mindset Ventures, as described by Miller, “Is like a service provider. We provide financing to a very particular type of company.” 

Currently, their primary investment targets are high-growth technology companies with passionate founders from diverse backgrounds; their ideal founder is one who is willing to do what it takes to achieve quick growth and rapidly scale their company towards profitability. 

Because of the high-risk nature of VC investments, they look for startups that either have clear potential to grow or ones that are already seeing growth at a quick pace before they make an investment or write a check.

The Mindset Ventures motto is, “We invest in boundless minds.” By finding founders who have brilliant ideas in the technology space and giving them the startup capital they need, the Mindset Ventures VC team is able to give early-stage founders the connections and resources they need to succeed.

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