Shea Tate-Di Donna

Shea Tate-Di Donna is a Lecturer in the Department of Technology Management in the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, where she teaches Entrepreneurship. She is a venture capital investor, operator, fund builder, and author with two decades of experience in early-stage venture capital and startups. She previously taught Design Your Startup at the Stanford d.school, and she built and taught the curriculum for two internship programs: TEC: The True Entrepreneur Corps at True Ventures, and a Duke internship and incubator program in Silicon Valley.

She earned her MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and her BA, magna cum laude, in English and Psychology Honors from Dickinson College.

Tate-Di Donna's work focuses on how venture firms are built, how founders are best served, and how capital reaches new fund managers and founders. She has worked extensively with Emerging Manager Venture Capital (EMVC) funds and with what she defines as Transitional Emerging Manager Venture Capital (T-EMVC) funds. T-EMVCs are an agile subset of the emerging manager ecosystem, led by managers with non-traditional venture backgrounds, alternative illustrations of investment ability and long-term track records, and diverse intellects, who are able to invest competitively at the seed and early stages. She developed a scalable framework for improving fund manager outcomes that is now widely referred to as "Venture as a Product."

She is the co-author of The Venture Fund Blueprint, which is accompanied by a series of step-by-step fund guides. She is also the creator and author of LP Perspectives, a published interview series in which limited partners share how they evaluate and back venture managers, created to build alignment between LPs and GPs through clarity, trust, and transparency.

Tate-Di Donna was a member of the founding team and Senior Vice President at True Ventures, conceived in 2005 as the original founders-first firm investing in early-stage technology startups. She helped build the firm from a five-person team to $650M in assets under management across three fund cycles. True is known for investments in Automattic/WordPress, Duo Security (acquired by Cisco), Goodreads (acquired by Amazon), Fitbit (IPO 2015, acquired by Google), and HashiCorp (IPO 2021, acquired by IBM). She served on the investment team and conceived True's signature Founder Services platform, working directly with the founders of each portfolio company and creating initiatives such as True University, TEC: The True Entrepreneur Corps, and Founder Camp.

As Managing Director and Head of Client Innovation Solutions at First Republic Bank, she led innovation for the venture and startup ecosystem, building products that streamlined capital access and operational support for funds and drove $3.1B in deposit impact. She pioneered offerings including a Limited Partner Program, a Venture Lending Matching Service, and a Digital Fund Content Platform.

As a Venture Partner at Melinda French Gates' Pivotal Ventures, she examined the gendered investing landscape in Silicon Valley and women's access to capital, developed the firm's venture strategy, and shaped its emerging manager and direct investing initiatives.

She was Founder and CEO of Zana, a global, on-demand video and resource platform delivering skills for startup success from expert entrepreneurs. Zana was a PyCon Startup Row winner (SR'15) and was acquired by Startups.com in 2015. She later founded Founder Centric and served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Storm Ventures.

Tate-Di Donna advises 1517 Fund, Mythos Ventures, and several AI startups, including Cerebra AI, MyAtlas, AutoAlign, and previously advised AI.Reverie (acquired by Meta). She serves on the Advisory Board of the British Emerging Manager Institute and the Global Emerging Manager Institute, serves on the Board of Directors of the Reading & Writing Ventures Foundation, and served for three years on the Board of Trustees of The Bowman School, including one year as Co-Chair.

She began her career in venture with JAFCO America Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners. Previously, she was an analyst in the Office of the CEO at Barclays North America.