Gabby Cazeau is an engineer-turned-investor at Harlem Capital Partners who applies product-building rigor from her R&D experience at General Mills to evaluate startups, using engineering thinking to break problems into fundamentals when analyzing companies and helping founders think through customer needs and scalability. She took an unusually homegrown path into VC, rising from intern to Partner at Harlem Capital, and is known for her proactive sourcing strategy of building relationships with founders who are too early for the fund's stage, then tracking their progress over time.

• A specific focus on diversity and inclusion within the venture ecosystem, highlighting data-driven impact metrics. She frequently shares the firm's track record, such as the high percentage of seed capital in their syndicates going to Black and Latino founders, as well as the number of jobs created for women and people of color within their portfolio companies.
• Dedicated to demystifying the venture capital relationship by advocating that investors should pitch themselves to founders, not just the other way around. She promotes the idea of sharing the firm's own deck to provide transparency on their values, platform support, and the benchmarks they use to evaluate funding stages.
• Deep interest in vertical software markets and the realistic timelines required to reach the public markets. She has conducted and shared research on public vertical software companies to demonstrate that the path to an IPO is often longer than founders expect and requires building robust platforms with multiple product layers.
• Prioritizes the behavioral traits and soft skills of entrepreneurs, noting that she often passes on investments due to factors within the founder's control. She specifically lists poor communication, lack of transparency, and bad references as red flags, emphasizing that how a founder builds a company is just as critical as what they are building.
• Evaluates startups based on their velocity and growth trajectory, using a framework to categorize businesses into different speeds, such as bicycles versus rocket ships. She encourages founders to assess their own momentum honestly to determine if they are on the right path to becoming a best-in-class venture-backed company.