Today, I’m pleased to announce the promotion of Dominic Lau to Partner at Ripple Ventures. Dom and I have been working together for nearly five years now and it’s unbelievable how fast time flies while we built the fund’s foundation. In this new role, he will lead investments, provide post-investment support to our founders, scale the RippleX Fellowship, grow our team, and help our funds. Much of what Dom already does day-to-day has embodied this role, far ahead of his formal title advancement. He has been a core pillar of the fund and a contributor to developing the early-stage venture ecosystem in North America.
It feels like it was only yesterday when I shared Ripple Ventures’ first job posting in 2018 when I immediately received a call from a Waterloo student making his case for why he was the person for the role. He had worked in traditional accounting/finance roles but pursued his passion for venture capital through freelancing with emerging managers and early-stage startups in the ecosystem. Of all the applicants, Dom was the only one who had the idea of finding my phone number and calling me to stand out from the crowd. This initial encounter with Dom has consistently resonated in his endless hustle to create value for Ripple and its founders.
Dom joined Ripple as we held the first close on Fund I and from day one, he worked endlessly to build out our internal processes, frameworks for investment, and community of founders/investors. Given his prior experience with other emerging managers, his scrappiness and creativity helped us figure out ways to do our jobs better every day. Dom and I get along very well because we both grew up with a culture of working hard, striving to always be a net positive, and punching above our weight class. Together, we’ve gone through two full fund deployments investing in over 20 companies, and are now building our next fund.
We launched The Tank in 2019, which was our first own office and incubator space. Here, we welcomed our Fund I companies to work alongside our team and other founders at similar stages to build resilient businesses. Dom took this as an opportunity to support our founders in their operational and strategic areas, helping with everything from go-to-market, finances, hiring, product analytics, and fundraising. If you ask any of our founders what it’s like to work with Dom, they will describe him as an extension of their team who actually cares and adds value to the business. You can see what founders have to say about him on his wall of references. The hard work by Dom and our team has not gone unnoticed, especially with the founders he’s worked with who have gotten to their next stages and earned investment from some of the world’s best venture funds.
Dom has always been passionate about mentorship and developing bridges to help underrepresented communities access opportunities. He saw firsthand how hard it was for students to learn real-world strategies for building venture-backable businesses and frameworks for evaluating early-stage companies. As a result, he took it upon himself to launch the RippleX Fellowship program as a way to give back to the next generation of entrepreneurs and investors. Through pure hustle and determination, Dom has built a world-class fellowship program that has helped countless underrepresented students across the world access this knowledge, network, and mentorship.
To date, the program has completed 11 cohorts, in which half of the participants have gone on to build their own startups collectively raising over $50M in funding with the help of Dom. He’s built a network of 1,000+ students across 60 universities and 25 countries whom have participated in at least one of the program’s offerings. A large focus of the flagship program was to empower underrepresented students, in which he’s consistently met 50%+ gender diversity and 90%+ BIPOC representation in each cohort. To state how big of an impact this program has had not only its students but for Ripple Ventures would be an understatement and all of this credit is due to Dom.
Beyond the fellowship program, Dom has been the engine that keeps our team together and constantly firing on all cylinders. His passion for talent development has helped us hire and train new investors such as Arielle, Turja, Jay, Naz (just joined Ripple full time) and many more. All of these amazing people had such great experiences learning from Dom in the fellowship program that they sought opportunities to join the team and continue their journey with Ripple. He’s built out our entire investor onboarding infrastructure, helping on-ramp new employees with email/call templates, deal sourcing walkthrough videos, investment frameworks, and basically everything he wishes he had when he first joined Ripple.
Building out a diverse team at Ripple is important to us, especially by hiring team members from different backgrounds that support our thesis, share a culture of working effectively, and are highly collaborative. Dom has been at the forefront of pushing our team to be more inclusive and diverse across all aspects of our firm and this has helped establish Ripple as a firm that founders and investors want to work with.
As we look towards the rest of 2022 and beyond, we do it with a stronger partnership and team that’s ready to build the most robust venture ecosystem to support founders building market-shifting software tools. We can look at the future with a stronger foundation with Dom as a Partner on the Ripple team.
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