Mischa Vaughn
Partner at Felicis
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
Partner
2024 - Current
Head of Content
2022
Leading the vibes (brand, marketing, comms, and content) for Felicis. I get to work with awesome founders on their announcements and creative ambitions. Felicis investments include Canva, Notion, Adyen, Shopify, Credit Karma, Flexport, Attentive, Plaid, Weights and Biases, Runway, MotherDuck, ConductorOne, Prenuvo, Vannevar Labs, and more. Coverage has included WSJ, FastCo, Fortune, Forbes, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Axios, Business Insider, and others. 🍀
Felicis invests in seed through Series C stage companies across multiple sectors, industries, and frontier tech.
Mixing Board Community Member
2021
Mixing Board is a community of brand and communications leaders that share knowledge with each other and organizations that can benefit from accessing members’ expertise, experience, and mentorship.
Mixing Board offers mentorship and helps with building teams to organizations looking for smart advice.
Director of Content
2020 - 2022
Led the external storytelling efforts (editorial, brand video, social, newsletter, as well as PR for a year and a half). My team's effort directly accounted for $7.5M of revenue. We grew blog search traffic by over 625% and social audience by over 160%, created industry-leading content (Webflow blog and social posts get far more average views and engagement than all of their competitors), launched a docuseries and streaming platform, produced TV ads, customer videos, live video, and billboards. Directed the creation of a new voice and tone style guide, collaborating across the company and with the executive team. Grew team from two to nine reports, and managed several agencies as well. Worked with a PR agency to secure a lot of press coverage, including Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Inc, TechCrunch, Axios, Wired, the BBC, and many more. Collaborated on some really nifty websites, all made in Webflow. Laughed a lot, had tons of fun.
Webflow is a visual web design platform, CMS, and hosting provider for building production websites and prototypes.
Raised $334,900,000.00 from CapitalG, Draper Associates, Accel, Y Combinator Continuity Fund and Silversmith Capital Partners.
Head of Editorial
2019 - 2020
I ran Carta's editorial and storytelling efforts. This included content and working on PR opportunities. Carta's blog helps inform and enlighten employees, founders, and investors; traffic grew over 400% in the year I was there.
Carta is a global ownership management platform that helps companies, investors, and employees manage equity and ownership.
Raised $1,157,600,000.00 from 8090 Partners, Unanimous Capital, Sand Hill Angels, Vetamer, GS Growth, Step Ahead Capital, Massive, Silver Lake, Moonshots Capital and Launchbay Capital.
Senior Communications Manager
2017 - 2019
Led editorial, social media, and video strategy through growth stage to IPO and beyond. Launched Built to Adapt, a digital and print publication that reached 100K readers a month. Managed story strategy and cross-team operations for the Pivotal Blog; created and maintained a writing style guide for the 2600+ person company. Managed social media budget, editorial agency, and weekly newsletter (150K subscribers). Produced customer videos and stories for clients from Fortune 500 to startups, including: Citi, charity: water, Comcast, Country Financial, Merrill Corporation, and more. Produced a Shorty award nominated podcast, That Moment, which ran for two seasons.
Principal Communications Director
2016 - 2017
Editorial, Brand, Growth, and User Experience Consultant
2014 - 2016
Advised startups and firms about their editorial strategy, audience and partnership development, product and user experience, use of social media, and marketing. Clients included: AJ+ (Al Jazeera), #ChoosePossibility, The Creative Action Network, Offer Letter, the OS Fund, Pivotal, Sherpa Capital, Spark Capital, and Wand Labs.
Product and Editorial
2012 - 2014
Worked with CEO & CTO to prioritize features and fixes for the web application. Took features from concept to deploy, led brainstorms, analyzed data, communicated decisions, optimized and ensured the quality of the audience and writer experience. Organized a retreat for 60 people. Grew company to over 8 million subscribers and 50 million monthly visitors. Curated over 100 pieces of content.
Upworthy is on a mission to change what the world pays attention to.
Raised $12,000,000.00 from Catamount Ventures, Uprising Ventures, Flight Ventures, Knight Enterprise Fund, Klee Irwin and Spark Capital.
Media and Content
2009 - 2012
Integrated Twitter in conjunction with televisions shows, in-stadium experiences, sporting events, movie releases, etc. Managed the editorial process for the #AskObama Town Hall. Maintained Twitter’s media blog and regularly wrote and shared best practices and email marketing campaigns. Managed relationships with FX, MLB, NBA, and more. Analyzed quality tweets using Pig and Hadoop; the findings helped the product team iterate on the new-user flow.
X is a social networking platform that allows its users to send and read microblogs.
Raised $12,869,191,511.00 from Greenlight Capital, Binance, Litani Ventures, Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar Holding, The Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust, Fidelity, Alwaleed Bin Talal, Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital.
Editorial Consultant
2009 - 2009
Wrote for the TED Blog, TED Global 2009 Guidebook, and profiles on TED.com. Helped manage the Open Translation Project, TEDx licenses, podcast uploading, and TED’s book club.
TED is a technology, entertainment, and design company that offers conferences focused on ideas worth spreading.
Education
Bachelor's degree
2005 - 2008