Welcoming Julia Maltby to Flybridge
I met our new senior associate, Julia Maltby, for coffee a few blocks from our office in Flatiron for the first time yesterday. She has been working for us for nearly two years. Welcome to team-building in the age of the coronavirus.
I knew Julia was a special talent the first time we virtually met in the winter of 2020 while she was a first-year MBA at Wharton. She had already been working with Anna, Chip, and the entire XFactor team for the prior six months and the early reviews were off the charts. My partner, Jesse, had also seen her in action at WeWork over many years as a business development manager and then director of partnerships and business development. We were all immediately impressed with her incisive intellect, her passion for entrepreneurship, and her savvy navigation of opportunities and investment processes. She has a preternatural ability to identify quality entrepreneurs and business opportunities, exhibiting wise investment judgment far beyond her years of experience.
In joining us as an intern — working virtually like the rest of the world— Julia was able to operate almost like a full-time Flybridge team member (we still haven’t seen verifiable proof that she earned her MBA degree, but I’m sure that’s somewhere on the blockchain). She amplified our investment thesis of Community as a Competitive Advantage by declaring the Rise of the Creator Economy and identifying Tik Tok as a promising business-building platform. She has even already sourced two new investments consistent with this thesis, Fable and a new one to be announced.
Julia has been supporting each of our three network funds — The Graduate Syndicate (Harvard community), XFactor (female founders), The Community Fund (under-estimated founders) as well as our seed fund and various special purpose vehicles. In every situation, she has integrated beautifully with our sometimes quirky, always passionate small team.
Finally an official, full-time member of the team (and substantially taller than my 12-inch screen): welcome Julia!
