Spotlight: BMW i Ventures Featured Team Member Thao Nguyen

Could you share a little about your background?

I grew up in Vietnam and moved to the US for college in 2011. After graduating from college, I started my career in real estate investments, working in finance and transaction sides. During that time, I also learned how to code, and that allowed me to transition into a product management role at HomeLight, an early-stage real estate tech startup based in San Francisco. In 2020, I felt a more urgent imperative to think deeply about how to make a bigger impact through my career and decided to pursue an MBA. Business school was a transformative experience, as I was able to take interesting classes, build meaningful relationships, expand my professional network, and most importantly, try out different career paths to determine that venture was where I wanted to be next.

What do you focus on at BMW i Ventures?

At BMW i Ventures, similar to other Associates on the team, I focus on three main areas: (i) finding innovative startups transforming mobility and industrial sectors through sustainable solutions and executing due diligence on potential investments, (ii) conducting research on interesting topics within the firm’s investment focuses, and (iii) working alongside our portfolio companies. I’m also passionate about building communities and meaningful connections with entrepreneurs, researchers, advocates, and investors in the space, with a focus on supporting and empowering underrepresented groups to be part of the climate tech movement. 

What was your pathway into venture capital?

My path to venture is definitely not linear (and I’d say many VCs I’ve met also have all sorts of different paths before going into this space). If you look at my LinkedIn, my career choices so far seem quite… random, but I promise it all makes sense (at least in my head). I’ve always been interested in VC, as it combines four things I love: technology, investing, constantly learning new things, and meeting interesting people. However, the barrier to break into VC had previously seemed completely impenetrable. 

So I did some investing (in real estate) and learned to be an operator at a proptech startup before going to business school at Chicago Booth. There, I was able to do internships in sustainability consulting and VC during my MBA program, as well as get to know peers who were also looking at this career path and meeting many inspiring investors. Through this journey, I was able to narrow my focus to climate tech VCs, specifically those targeting big areas of GHG emitters (energy, transportation, the built environment, etc.) When the opportunity at BiV came up, it was no-brainer that this was my dream job.

What do you look for in a potential investment?

Every company is different but the framework that I’ve set out for myself focusing on three main criteria. First is market opportunity and solutions offered, i.e. how big the addressable and obtainable market is and the ongoing dynamics that makes it ripe for innovation. This might sound pretty obvious, but I like large and fragmented markets that are ripe for innovative solutions addressing acute customer pain points. Regarding the actual solutions, I love those that elevate workers and SMBs to move away from wasting resources on manual/low-value activities and into higher-value works. This is definitely a reality with a lot of companies in transportation and manufacturing industries, which makes my day-to-day job at BMW i Ventures interesting. Second is the product-market fit validation measured through both quantitative metrics (market sizes, revenue growth, unit economics, etc.) and qualitative assessment (how critical are the customer pain points that the company is trying to address, customer feedback, potential risks, etc.)

Last but not least, I love getting to know the team as much as possible. This is where I think investors start to diverge a little bit in terms of what they are looking for. Of course, there are some basic aspects of founders that make all investors, me included, excited: (i) balanced teams with different strengths and domain expertise to support various aspects of building and growing a company, (ii) founders who have spent months if not years understanding the ins and outs of their markets, including figuring out all stakeholders and the winning go-to-market approach, (iii) unique advantages that the teams have to tackle challenges in their markets, because it’s very likely that they’re not the only ones that try to address big problems. Outside of these criteria, as a woman of color in industries where women and BIPOC communities are so underrepresented (hard tech, VC, etc.), I have a personal mandate to look for non-obvious and non-traditional founders from these communities. I think climate tech in general and the EV transition in particular offers us a unique opportunity to invite people from all different backgrounds to be part of the solutions. 

What is your most contrarian view on an existing or emerging technology trend?

Recently, there has been lots of hype around crypto/blockchain and web3, including the intersection between web3 and climate tech. While I think blockchain technology has many merits and useful applications, I’m not so much bullish on web3 applications (such as ReFi, or regenerative finance) in carbon reduction and removal, at least not yet and not at scale, especially without meaningful regulatory push. To me, the ReFi and web3 solutions that I’ve seen (majority has been in carbon market construction and carbon credit verification) are where blockchain is still a nice-to-have rather than must-have feature. 

What advice would you impart to entrepreneurs?

To ensure a productive fundraising process, first make sure you target the right investors for your industry, stage, and check size. Second, really understand and be able to articulate your differentiation and unique advantages to win a market. And lastly, coming from my background in operating and product analytics, I think there is a lot of value in investing in analytic capabilities early on for startups. It’s really hard to know how you’re doing and where you’re heading without good data for your metrics, and as a company scales, it just gets increasingly harder (and costlier) to clean up your data.

What’s something interesting about yourself that most people may not know?.

Growing up in a big city, I wasn’t much of an outdoor person. However, since moving to the Bay Area in 2015, I’ve grown to love the outdoors, especially hiking in North Bay (Marin) and in national parks. Recently, I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with a group of business school friends, and it was easily one of the best experiences of my life. At the top, we were able to view one of Africa’s three glaciers, which was magnificent. Unfortunately, this glacier has been shrinking rapidly and might disappear altogether because of the impacts of global warming. It was a moment of both awe and worry for me, and a reminder for myself to work towards addressing climate change through my career in the next decades.