She headlined the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Venture Capital class as the youngest vice president in the storied history of VC firm Bessemer Venture Partners. Now, less than two years later, Talia Goldberg has finished her rise through the ranks with a promotion that makes her one of the youngest investment partners at an established VC firm.
Goldberg, 28, was named a partner by Bessemer on Tuesday, making her the fifteenth partner at the firm across offices that include the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, India and Israel. Goldberg will invest in marketplaces, consumer internet and software companies, with an emphasis on financial services for the underserved and creating better access to healthcare.
The investor is the latest in a line of Bessemer partners to reach its top investor group after starting at an entry level, joining Bessemer while still a college student. In her career at the firm, she worked closely with portfolio company Pinterest, where she helped with business development, and found investment ServiceTitan for the firm, which backed the service business software startup now valued at $1.65 billion in 2015. Goldberg also led Bessemer's interest and investment in Toss, a payment service based in South Korea. Toss is currently valued at $1.2 billion, and was on pace to carry $18 billion in transaction volume last year.
"We've watched her in action build relationships with many companies," says Bessemer partner Jeremy Levine. "She's demonstrated fantastic judgment and a work ethic... and a really good nose for finding her way through opportunities."
Making partner is significant at a firm like Bessemer that employs a large number of investment professionals at fixed tiers of seniority. Partners can sponsor and lead their own investments, even without majority support of their peers, Levine says. "They can pound the table and say, 'I really want to make this investment,'" he adds. "I can count the times I've seen something voted down over the last 20 years on one hand."
Goldberg joins a youth movement of partners at Bessemer that includes partners Kristina Shen, Charles Birnbaum and Amit Karp, as well as several partners just a few years older such as Brian Feinstein. But Levine says the promotion isn't a sign of title inflation at Bessemer: most investors aren't partners, and more young investors ultimately leave the firm, becoming partners at others or joining its startups.
One concern, if not critique, of the recent wave of partner promotions in venture capital: newly-elevated young partners might be getting set up for failure, with limited windows of time to validate their new roles through a hit deal. Both Levine and Goldberg say that at Bessemer, promotions don't amount to trials, though performance affects a partner's future over a longer period of time. Goldberg points to ServiceTitan: she and her colleagues spent a year of canvassing its category, she says, before focusing on the company.
Goldberg, who was named the call-out for the Forbes Under 30 list in venture capital for 2018, credits persistence and curiosity for her quick path of promotion, and as tools that will keep her in the job for the long term. "Do everything you can to put yourself out there," she advises would-be VCs. "Show persistence in being out there and not giving up. We're constantly meeting companies in new categories. So if you are someone who is intellectually curious and wants to learn a lot, there's no better industry."
