Reimagining VC
Allan Jean-Baptiste ’08 and his colleagues at Ansa are shaking up the traditional realm of venture capital.
Story by Alexander Gelfand
Photographs by Brad Trent
Some people wear their values on their sleeves. Allan Jean-Baptiste ’08 wears his on his walls. The offices of Ansa, the venture capital firm that Jean-Baptiste co-founded in 2022 in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, are the epitome of corporate chic: glass-walled conference rooms abut a common workspace featuring exposed wood beams, and every sightline includes one or more striking works of mod- ern art. Yet the paintings on the walls aren’t just attractive. Many were created by emerging artists with an interest in innovation, exploration, and technology, all of which speak to the firm’s own core interests and values. When he decided to found Ansa with his partner, Marco DeMeireles, Jean-Baptiste had more than a decade’s worth of experience in the financial sector—enough to have identified a number of cognitive biases in the way venture capital traditionally operates.
Venture capitalists raise money from limited partners (endowments, pension funds, high-net-worth individuals) to invest in startups, placing risky financial bets on early-stage businesses in hopes of reaping out- sized returns. They also provide technical and managerial expertise to the fledgling companies they back, helping them navigate the path to success. As an engine of entrepreneurial innovation, the VC model has helped launch household names from Apple to Zoom. But it has also become somewhat blinkered, according to Jean-Baptiste.
Most venture capital firms, he says, focus on startups that are in either the earliest or the latest stages of development, ignoring those in the middle that are poised on the brink of expansion. What’s more, they tend to overlook founders who lack the right pedigrees or professional networks—those who, as Jean-Baptiste puts it, “didn’t go to Stanford and study engineering and live in Palo Alto.” And they have trouble recognizing the potential of companies that don’t fit neatly into received categories, either because they straddle existing markets and business models or because they represent entirely new ones.
“Venture is a pattern-matching business,” Jean-Baptiste says. “I probably speak to 600 companies a year, and I’m building patterns in my head about what ‘good’ looks like. But when you’re starting a new market, those benchmarks don’t really make much sense.”
As a result, many promising entrepreneurs and companies—especially those trying to build new markets—are passed over by the industry, bereft of the funding and guidance they need to succeed.
Jean-Baptiste and DeMeireles set out to fill these gaps in the VC model by concentrating on mid-stage start-ups in “undercovered” markets and sectors: ones that sit at the intersection of existing categories or seek to invent new ones; ones whose founders hail from nontraditional backgrounds or otherwise fail to conform to traditional venture’s view of what a successful entrepreneur looks like. The two assembled a team of fellow venture capitalists and other personnel who had a wide range of experiences and built a fund that is committed to making “non-consensus” investments that conventional venture firms might never even con- sider.
“Our ground-truth principle is ‘the best idea wins,’” Jean-Baptiste says. “And if you believe in ‘the best idea wins’ and not ‘the best idea comes from X type of person,’ then you’re going to believe in a level of openness. He adds that “the best ideas probably come from a population-representative group of people.” Thanks to that underlying ethos, Ansa’s portfolio is as focused on emerging categories and innovative startups as its interior decorating scheme is on emerging artists and innovative artworks.
Jean-Baptiste’s commitment to pluralism and his belief in the importance of seeing beyond entrenched, monolithic perspectives have deep roots.
Born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and raised in Milton, he grew up in a large Haitian immigrant family where French, Haitian Creole, and English were all spoken. He entered Milton Academy as a kindergartner, two years behind his older sister, Annie Jean-Baptiste ’06, and for the next 13 years, he straddled two distinct worlds as a day student at the school.
“It was really interesting, because I went to a New England prep school—but I also went home,” he says, likening the experience to being “constantly on both sides of two very different cultures.”
Jean-Baptiste flourished at Milton, where he played the viola, competed as a nationally ranked gymnast, and joined the speech team. (“I think speech is one of the most helpful things for venture,” he says, citing the value of being able to clearly articulate one’s ideas when laying out the logic of an investment or negotiating a deal.) But he graduated without a clear sense of what he might want to do in life.
That began to change when he went to Harvard. A long-standing interest in mathematics and quantitative reasoning led Jean-Baptiste to econometrics, which applies statistical methods to economic data, while his family origins—coupled with Haiti’s history of natural disasters, public health crises, and economic troubles—piqued his interest in the relationship between health and wealth in the developing world.
He wrote his thesis on the Haitian cholera epidemic of 2010, and graduated in 2012 with a degree in eco- nomics, global health, and health policy. The work was intellectually satisfying, but Jean-Baptiste quickly came to suspect that if he were to take a job at one of the larger organizations that address issues of health and wealth in the global South, it might take him years to see tangible results. So by the time his sophomore year rolled around, he had already begun formulating a plan to pursue his other passion: technology.
“Technology is a force for equity, because it gives you access to better information,” he says. “So tech was something that I was always interested in.”
The turning point came during a lunch date with his sister Annie, who happened to be interning with an investment bank. Hearing about the quantitative financial analysis she was performing, Jean-Baptiste began to wonder: “What if I became a tech investor? Then I could marry my love of technology with my love of math and analysis.”
Having studied neither corporate finance nor accounting, Jean-Baptiste figured that he would have to find some other way of developing the skills required of a professional investor. So he threw himself into the deep end, interning for two summers at Goldman Sachs before ultimately joining the investment bank’s tech group. The learning curve was brutal, but that was the point.
“We have this family motto: It’s better to roll down the hill than walk up it,’” he says. Translation: “Do the thing that’s hardest first, then shift once you’re already on top.”
It worked. After two years at Goldman, Jean-Baptiste moved to San Francisco to join Google’s in- vestment arm, CapitalG. “Google was the place where I learned to in- vest,” he says.
It was also where he developed his taste for midstage startups: companies with maybe 30 to 100 employees, a dozen customers, and $3 million to $30 million in revenue that need the right combination of money and mentoring to scale up into mature businesses.
In 2016, Jean-Baptiste returned to the East Coast to help launch a late- stage venture fund at the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR). While he was there, he also joined the Kauffman Fellows Program, a two-year networking and development opportunity for accomplished investors.
DeMeireles, whom Jean-Baptiste met while living in the Bay Area, was part of the same Kauffman cohort, and by the time the two decided to raise their own venture fund, they had already helped finance such wildly successful tech firms as the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase and the cybersecurity unicorn CrowdStrike. Despite the worst fundraising environment in a decade, those connections and track records allowed them to raise more than $130 million from limited partners such as Princeton University and Henry Kravis of KKR.
Since then, Ansa has made a series of $5 million to $15 million investments in four midstage start-ups. All make use of artificial intelligence, which Jean-Baptiste believes will be a necessary component of any tech-related business that wants to stay competitive in the coming years.
The firm plans to invest in a total of 15 startups with the proceeds from its first fund. That’s far fewer- than the 20 or 30 portfolio companies that most venture funds would back, and it allows Ansa’s 10 team members to provide a bespoke level of support and service that larger funds cannot match. For example, the firm supplies its founders with mentors who are themselves startup veterans with direct experience scaling up mid-stage companies. And it offers them access to a whole network of industry experts who can serve as additional counselors and advisors.
The idea, Jean-Baptiste explains, is to give founders and companies the care and attention they need to thrive. And that’s good for everybody.
“The strength of my career is fundamentally going to be based on how these specific companies do,” he says. And while he is trying to maintain a healthy work-life balance (he and his wife, Lisa, were married this past January, and he is a devoted uncle to his two nephews), when it comes to his professional ambitions, he is still very much focused on getting to the top of that hill.
“Our goal is not to be a boutique fund forever,” he says. “We want to own this stage of the market.”
Alexander Gelfand is a freelance journalist living in New York City whose work has appeared in such publications as Wired, The Economist, and The New York Times.