When Goyal reached out to Elad Gil, a prolific angel investor she had met after he invested in her husband’s company, for advice on how to break into venture capital at an established firm, Gil proposed a bolder plan: take $600,000 of his own money to start investing on her own. It paid off. Goyal, a former product manager at trucking software company Samsara, spent the next six months researching and investing in startups on nights and weekends before quitting her job to launch her own early-stage firm, Basecase Capital, in May 2021. Since then, she has raised three funds totaling $99 million and invested in more than 30 businesses, including IT services company Supabase and data warehouse startup Census. Investing in business-to-business software entrepreneurs isn’t unique, but Goyal has her own twist: She doesn’t take pitch meetings. Instead, she seeks out exceptional employees at tech companies whom she thinks will make great founders one day. She builds relationships and picks their brains on startup ideas before they even launch a company so that she’s the first call when they do. “The best part about my job is that I have 37 founders running around that are constantly making great things happen, and I genuinely feel success for them,” she said.