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Julia Spicer has seen it all in the world of venture finance. For the past 15 years, as executive director at the Mid-Atlantic Venture Association, she has seen remarkable ups and downs, and profound changes in the world of venture finance, as she has charted out new ways to represent the collective interests of over 500 venture capital professionals from 100 funds with more than $100 billion in combined capital under management.

“At our core, obviously is the private investment community, which I think has changed quite significantly over the years,” she told citybizlist’s Edwin Warfield in an interview. “Then we used to have primarily institutional venture, we now have family offices, VC, angels, growth equity, private equity, fund to funds, family offices that are institutionalized in the way that they invest. So we have all kinds of hybrids also affiliated with us.”

One of the hallmarks of MAVA is “to always sort of be on that very front end knowing that things are changing and how do you sort of change and try to deliver some things that are really newly needed in a marketplace for our constituents,” she also said.

Before she assumed the MAVA position, Spicer – a prestigious John Motley Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – had accumulated over a decade’s corporate experience and tried her hand at entrepreneur too, running IntellEvents to back woman-owned or woman-run companies in Virginia.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Can you provide us with some highlights/milestones of the 30 year, and your programs such as Capital Connection and TechBuzz,?

JULIA SPICER: As I said, MAVA has been around obviously 30 years since this is our 30-year anniversary this year…We used to have a program also called Capital Connection that most people, particularly those in Baltimore, will probably recognize because Capital Connection was a name that I think was more synonymous with MAVA even more than MAVA because Capital Connection was not geographically based. It was about capital, it was about investment capital, and it was from a branding standpoint it was really what we were known for and in the early days, MAVA and really Philadelphia and the whole Eastern seaboard. I look at us as really the go-to place. Even in my Columbia days it was the go-to place for the venture community for anything south of Boston.

The New York community really was not formally formed as a pure venture community. Now today it is a very different animal, and it really is quite vibrant. But in those days, you know, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore and even Eastern seaboard, there really were no MAVAs and that's really sort of where this organization was created, and was working very closely with Philadelphia until a time when there was so much activity, I think the powers-that-be decided let us split these two things, let us have a MAVA Capital Connection in Baltimore and we will do something in Philadelphia and it was very amicable in the sense that those were markets that were maturing. And I think that is one of the hallmarks for MAVA, is to always sort of be on that very front end in knowing that things are changing and questioning how do you change and try to deliver those things that are really newly needed in a marketplace for our constituents.

Capital Connection was a big milestone for us. It ran for 25-26 years. We still have vestiges of it in some of the programming we do today. I think partnering with people up and down the Eastern seaboard has been really very paramount as well to our success and the industry's success that has been important. Obviously, we have when I came on board we opened the Northern Virginia office and kept Maryland office in those days when physical offices mattered. Today, they really don’t. We are virtual in where we operate and what we did a few years ago obviously we are no different than the national markets when venture has changed as it has had its ups and downs and the numbers of funds has changed. We made a lot of changes when the banking crisis happened. We really pivoted quite a bit and at that moment we really identified that we wanted to do some things in seed stage financing because we were fearful that a few years out there would be very little money going into seed stage.

What could we do post recession, you know, five-six years ago? How we could basically support those early-stage companies and from that we founded TechBuzz, which is something that people might be familiar with today. And that is essentially our new Capital Connection, and a very different staged program but it's a program that we basically run three times a year and it is for the earliest of the companies we try to serve.

MAVA’s lifecycle is really to be supportive of sort of three main constituents and that really has not changed, how we do it has changed quite a bit.

So, at our core, obviously is the private investment community, which I think has changed quite significantly over the years. Then we used to have primarily institutional venture, we now have family offices, VC, angels, growth equity, private equity, fund to funds, family offices that are institutionalized in the way that they invest. So we have all kinds of hybrids also affiliated with us. But really they are all focused on putting fresh capital and active capital investing into the marketplace for high-growth companies...

We have companies from seed stage and all the way up to companies that have either gone IPO or are in an acquiring mode. So we have companies that are venture-backed and some that are not, but they basically are companies that are on a high growth trajectory and those are companies that we serve.

And then thirdly what I call the glue. We actually have a community of really dedicated professional advisers and, you know, it is not enough to just say these are law firms or these are accounting firms or these are advisory firms. I do think we have some of the very best advisers bar anywhere in the country that basically go and lock arms with companies and are great partners and that has been sort of the tenet for the last 30 years. I think those three elements have really made what I call MAVA’s current community a historical community.

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Sponsored by: MAVA

Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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