Have you ever felt like an outsider that didn’t belong even after you earned a seat at the table? Our guest Mallun Yen has faced and successfully overcome this challenge over and over again in her career. She reveals how being an outsider fueled her creativity and helped her tap into the power of community to find breakthrough solutions. She was able to think outside the box because she didn’t even know there was a box!
Mallun is the Founder and Partner of Operator Collective, a $50M venture fund that brings together senior operators from diverse backgrounds as Limited Partners. This is a group critical to a startup’s success but largely absent from the historically white male venture industry. Mallun has assembled a close knit community of 130 incredibly talented Operator LPs who have built up the world’s most admired companies like Zoom, Stripe, Salesforce and Slack. 90% of the LPs are women, and more than 40% of them are people of color! Prior to Operator Collective, Mallun was Vice President at Cisco, founding team member at multiple category-creating startups, including RPX ($0 to $100M & IPO in 3 years) and SaaStr (world’s largest b2b software community).
In this episode, Mallun discusses why building powerful communities is the key to changing the status quo and what has helped her bring people together for a common cause. She also shares her bold vision of an inclusive world where every dreamer and every doer can go beyond barriers.