Introducing: Mikayla Sullivan, ISA Ventures’ Associate
A few months back, ISA Ventures posted two jobs: an Associate and an Analyst. As a small team, both roles are critical hires for a new venture fund.
Today, I’m excited to announce Mikayla Sullivan has joined ISA Ventures as our Associate. She’ll be primarily responsible for identifying and meeting founders that are new potential investments, and doing the initial intake and evaluation of these deals.
Mikayla comes to ISAV as a founder — she co-founded KinoSol six years ago in Ames. That quality is extremely important: it matters that our venture team has strong experience founding, leading, and growing companies, not just investing in them. We want our founders to know that we’ve been there in their shoes.
She also brings deep connections within Iowa’s startup ecosystem, especially in Central Iowa. She founded KinoSol as she studied to receive her BA from Iowa State University in 2017. She was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Iowa State University’s Startup Factory, working with dozens of founders at the earliest stages of developing new businesses. She also mentors at Techstars in Des Moines.
As a female founder, and now as one of only a few women in Iowa’s venture industry, Mikayla brings much needed diversity to our investment ecosystem. Iowa is a small state, and since ISAV will only invest in Iowa companies, we need to make sure that every high potential founder here can participate and get connected. While we have a long way to go, Mikayla’s voice is an important step in the right direction.
Finally, she brings an organizer’s mind to our team. She’s only been on the job a bit over a week, and already we’ve made huge strides in translating the vision for what ISA Ventures can and should become into reality, automating several key steps of our evaluation process and streamlining others.
We’ve only just begun to see what this new ISA Ventures team can do. Stay tuned!
