Elena Sakach is a partner at GV who avoids sector labels and describes herself as an investor first, taking unpopular stances and building theses from first principles—a mindset she credits to her time at Coatue where she was promoted to partner in under a year. She looks for compounding businesses whose value grows organically as customers use them, emphasizing trust-based relationships and expansion economics, and has an unusually scrappy origin story of cold-calling her way from Midwestern roots into Goldman Sachs before building her tech-investing path through TPG and Coatue.