An Interview with Maryanna Saenko (Co-Founder at Future Ventures)
In celebration of Women’s History Month, Wharton Femtech Club is spotlighting extraordinary female leaders in the women’s health space.
Interviewed by Emily Chen (W’23)
Maryanna Saenko is an early-stage venture capitalist and co-founder of Future Ventures. She invests in frontier technologies that make the world a better place, and don’t prey on human frailty. Recent investments have been across a wide swath of sectors, including nuclear fusion, sustainable agricultural and land management, bee immunology, women’s reproductive longevity, and the application of AI to everything from the construction industry to medical therapeutics. Previously she was at Khosla Ventures, and prior to that DFJ. She was also an investment partner at Airbus Ventures where she led a series of venture investments strategically aligned with Airbus’ future-of-aerospace initiatives. Before Airbus, Maryanna was a consultant at Lux Research and a research engineer at Cabot Corporation. She’s worked on lunar rovers, martian landers, driverless cars, and long-range low-frequency communication systems.
Maryanna graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BS in BioMedical Engineering and a BS and MS in Materials Science and Engineering.
EC: Before starting Future Ventures, you held investment positions at different funds. What inspired you to start a fund of your own and what about your investment thesis areas most excited you?
MS: I was reflecting on this question, because on one aspect, it would be an opportunity to tell a story about our ethos and why my co-founder, Steve, and I believed that this firm needed to exist. But frankly, that would be a retrospective rationalization. I want to be honest about that because it’s the reality of my character. I’m generally the kind of person who jumps first and then figures out how to build parachutes. First and foremost, I should be clear that Future Ventures came about as an opportunity. The largest inflection point for me was the opportunity to work with Steve again. We had worked together previously, and then I went off to Khosla Ventures, and then this perfect confluence of timing and capacity allowed us to sit down and say, “Would we want to start a venture fund, and what would it look like?”.
We’re an early-stage venture fund. We focus wholly on deep-tech companies that we think will be fundamentally important for the continuation of humanity and our ability to co-exist on this planet and eventually others. It was as simple as recognizing that was the clearest representation of my and Steve’s personalities and curiosities and care for the world.
“What would it look like to just build the most honest organization to our individual characters?” and Future Ventures came out of that.
It didn’t come from some broad philosophizing of the world’s needs and how we could build it. It came from the perspective of “What are we uniquely suited to do?”. My motivation in starting Future Ventures was also a personal reality of wanting to work with Steve again, the most fun person I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with. The capacity to continue doing that and potentially do that for the entirety of my career was something that I wanted to sign up for immediately. That was a real gift.
EC: You’ve spoken so highly of Steve, and I think that working relationship is so valuable for us to learn from as we may be thinking about finding our future co-founders or joining an early-stage fund or start-up. How do you and Steve complement each other as co-founders of Future Ventures?
MS: Our fund is a little bit different than most in that most funds are partnerships. A two-person firm is fundamentally and structurally very different. There isn’t a sense of a “Maryanna investment” or a “Steve investment.” Neither of us ever moves independently of the other. It’s a partnership of equals, which is unique and amazing, and challenging. Here, everything falls on both of our shoulders, which is also a real gift that we get the opportunity to have this back and forth with every potential investment and diligence.
Steve’s unique superpower is that he is a profound genius and has deep curiosity. I love bringing investments up to him because he has this wealth of history. Last week, I was looking at a fertility investment related to sperm motility. Steve said, “You wouldn’t believe this, but 20 years ago, I invested in a silicon photonics space company that was doing laser tweezers to select the right sperm for animal husbandry.” It was amazing because it was not a topic we’d ever discussed. Then suddenly, we could have a fascinating discussion about the company, what happened to the investment, and why they decided to go into infertility. The converse also then becomes true when, occasionally, I’ll bring Steve something where I think he’ll have such a deep-seated bias for or against it, and he’s always willing to look at a known topic with new curiosity.
We’re good partners for each other in that we each have our centers of technical excellence based on our individual, academic and career backgrounds. For myself, a lot of that is around robotics, but also increasingly in and around biology and agriculture. Those are sectors that I’ve been thinking a lot about in recent years, but we’re always able to co-explore spaces together and use each other as intellectual sounding boards. It’s great because, frankly, it’s quite a lonely job. There’s not one skill set that one or the other has. What we have is a fluid and dynamic way of engaging with one another.
EC: What excites you about deep technology and the spaces you focus most on — you mentioned the agriculture space, healthcare, and robotics? And why did you choose to make your impact in investing, specifically (as opposed to operating, starting a company, etc.)?
MS: One way to look at investing is that you have this capacity to have a potentially broad and meaningful impact. The other way to look at it is that we don’t really do anything. We throw money at the wall, and occasionally it lands in the right people’s hands, and they do spectacular things with it, and then investors take too much credit. As an engineer, I’ll be honest, the hardest thing about being an investor has been the fact that you don’t do the work anymore. You’re not responsible for the product and the outcome — not in the same way that the entrepreneur and the team are. It can be tempting to get in there, get your hands dirty, and get involved. The thing that we [as investors] are most useful at is a kind of comparative analysis: here’s what’s worked in other sectors, here’s how we can drive analogies, or here’s how we might want to set up a hypothesis and an experimental structure to test this against a market hypothesis.
The simple reality is that I’m a bit ferret-minded in the sense that I’m so curious about so many different things. On one aspect, that could make me pretty useless just to be surface level across a broad swath of areas. By and large, that generally means you’re not very good at any of them. But venture capital investing is the one access point where that might actually be useful because what you learn from is the interstices and the adjacencies, and being able to translate learnings across just barely overlapping sectors. We’ve learned something in silicon photonics that makes it useful for biological sensing, and then we can go do something interesting with drug discovery as a result.
You can only jump across those many fields like a skipping stone if you have that level of awareness across them. This is the one place where what is otherwise my Achilles heel of distractedness across different technological curiosities is a strength.
The other thing is I’m just so inspired by people like Dina (Founder of portfolio company, Gameto), who is the opposite of me. She will not rest until this aspect of women’s reproductive longevity is really addressed, spoken for, and cared for. If my one job in life is to help people [like Dina] feel more supported and heard, that would be the greatest sense of accomplishment. You’re looking at hundreds of companies, so you can take learnings from every single one of those and help the one company that may not have happened.
EC: Can you talk about one of your current portfolio companies that you’re really excited about and share more about the investment process?
MS: I’ll talk briefly about two companies. Firstly, with Dina and Gameto (check out our interview with Dina Radenkovic, Co-Founder of Gameto!).
What was so compelling is that Dina has this long-term world-changing vision of looking at women’s reproductive aging as a model for aging. The age of onset of menopause is correlated to total life expectancy. It’s a paradigm shift in how we think about health and aging, specifically women’s health. But you can’t build a business around a paradigm shift of an ideology, so Dina’s brilliance is many-fold. She has the endpoint in mind but is building a sustainable business toward that. They’re starting with granulosa cells in petri dishes to mature immature eggs, which can get into actual clinics and can help real people. You can build a real business around that. Then in parallel, you work on the next construct of the business, which is taking stem cells and turning them into gametes. Every part of the business, in and of itself, is a huge step change. But the underlying structure of the company essentially isn’t reliant on any one of those immediately working tomorrow, and you don’t have to give them millions and millions and millions of dollars to try to get there. There’s a coherent path between where they are today and the kind of company they might be in 30 years.
It’s such a clever and compelling story-telling structure. It’s interesting for investors to hear about the world-changing idea and the rational stepwise process of getting there.
Each of these underlying models is a pretty stable business, so even if this doesn’t work on path A, we still like maintaining some level of low-cost optionality and knowing that you’re already starting with something with a couple of shots on goal.
The second company I’ll discuss briefly is YourChoice Therapeutics, the non-hormonal male contraception company.
I loved this idea for many reasons, partially because so much of the argument against it is that men won’t take a contraception pill. I think it’s ridiculous that women bear the entirety of the burden of birth control, and it’s such an unfortunate reality that so many solutions are only for women.
We think about fertility planning mostly for single sexually active people. But the largest unsolved use case, in some ways, is family planning and couples that are together, who recently had a child, and don’t immediately want another. There are not many contraception options for them between that period of breastfeeding and not wanting to get pregnant again.
I love exploring those spaces. I love exploring spaces where there are a series of assumptions that we’re all culturally born into and think that’s just the way the world works. Is it really?
Or is it just because we have yet to explore the space or because a technological or biological solution doesn’t support us yet? I, for several reasons, think that YourChoice is very interesting. But I think, more importantly, it shouldn’t be a weird off-axis investment area or sector. I wish more people were pushing more solutions in this space.
EC: That kind of goes into my next question, which is about areas of innovation within women’s health. We talked about male contraception, but are there any other areas that you’re really drawn to that you think will be really big in the next couple of years that you’re excited about for your fund?
MS: There are so many. There are certain things that are low hanging fruit that are valuable but don’t quite fit our thesis. The thesis of our fund is discovering underlying technology innovation that unlocks some new reality. I think there are a lot of things around women’s health, and particularly women’s reproductive health, that have to do with helping women understand their genetic and social predispositions. I think there will be a huge shift in how informed the average member of any population globally is to understanding their personal risks, their personal health, and what actually makes sense for them. I’m excited to see a real proliferation of people getting to feel more informed about their health and getting to find a pathway toward more personalized medicine and understanding.
One of the areas that I’ve been most curious about recently is the push forward in better understanding biological signaling between cells, cell types inside networks, how intracellular communication can shift biological outcomes, and understanding the feedback loop systems in our bodies, whether they’re through the endocrine system or something else.
I’m also curious about better predictive grouping around predisposition to conditions like postpartum depression. It currently feels like a total crapshoot to patients whether they’re going to have it, and I think there’s increasing data to point with some relative level of confidence who is at risk for this and then find mitigations. I think that the interplay between women’s health and mental health is something that we will start understanding more about in the next couple of years, hopefully not decades.
EC: You’ve also invested in therapeutic companies that have more of a clinical component and medical outcome. How does that fit into your investment pipeline?
We’re cautious here. We try to avoid things that have just one clinical therapeutic outcome. Other firms are very good at that style of investment. To our earlier conversation [about what makes Dina and Gameto such a great investment], we try to do things that have a couple of paths forward. The reason that I like clinical outcomes is because it’s easier to measure. I love things that make people feel better, but you can’t always trust people, so it’s important to understand coherent markers of what’s working. But then that also comes with the risk of investing at a stage where they’re still going through phase one, phase two, maybe even earlier. How do you get comfortable with that risk? That’s so inherent to the business of VC, especially with these companies where you’re just taking such a big gamble and not knowing if you can trust the science or how to validate it. We invested in a fusion company out of MIT because we thought the first principles — will this work — were very sound. The second was evaluating whether the team was qualified actually to see the science through. And then, frankly, at some point, we got comfortable and were willing to take on a certain level of risk for a certain price.
EC: Any final words for our club members and things to look out for as future investors or entrepreneurs?
MS: If you’re going to contribute your most valuable resource — your time — to a company then you should really own it. A big red flag is when I sit down with a business leader and they are unable to answer a single technical question. I’m not expecting them to know everything, but I hope they can speak fluently about the business and the underlying technology. Too many folks underestimate their capacity to “be technical” and I think organizations suffer for it. If you believe in something enough to spend your time working on it, don’t be afraid to get into the weeds.
Future Ventures focuses on seed and early-stage investments in trailblazing, purpose-driven entrepreneurs with unique ideas that have the potential to reinvent entire industries.
As venture capitalists, the Future Ventures partners have led founding investments in several companies that had successful IPOs and others that were billion-dollar acquisitions. Some of their early VC investments include Boring Company, Commonwealth Fusion, D-Wave, Planet, Skype, SpaceX, Tesla and Upside Foods.
To learn more, visit https://future.ventures/.
