Briana van Strijp is a rare venture capital CEO who reached the top role through a Chief People Officer background rather than traditional finance or partner tracks, bringing over 20 years of culture and organizational design expertise to her leadership of Anthemis Group. She also serves as COO of Anthemis Digital Acquisitions, a 100% female-led ESG-focused SPAC, and has been recognized as a diversity and inclusion leader in fintech while maintaining an active role as a CultureTech advisor and angel investor.

• Championing female entrepreneurship and working to close the venture capital funding gap. She frequently highlights data suggesting that female-led teams often outperform all-male founding teams and actively promotes the WVC:E summit as a crucial space for connecting and empowering women across the European ecosystem.
• Prioritizing mental health and psychological safety within the workplace. She has shared statistics regarding suicide rates to underscore the urgency of destigmatizing mental health issues and argues that leaders must display vulnerability to normalize these conversations and create safe spaces for their teams.
• Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion beyond just gender. She explicitly tracks and shares pride in portfolio statistics regarding founders who are people of color or from underrepresented backgrounds, noting that inclusive hiring requires careful attention to semantics and linguistics.
• Interest in the future of work and organizational culture, particularly regarding remote connectivity. She has called for solutions that facilitate curated company retreats to build trust and wellbeing in remote-first contexts and emphasizes the Adaptability Quotient (AQ) as a critical skill for modern leadership.
• Focus on purpose-driven innovation and social impact. She has suggested that modern business success is shifting away from traditional product-market fit toward a fit between a company's purpose and the future, and she links broader social issues, such as reproductive rights, directly to the health of the innovation economy.