Nina Stepanov

Founding Growth Lead

2024 - Current

Angel Investor

2019

Tare - Pre-seed Ellevest - Series B AtoB - Series A Up&Up - Series B Arch - Seed Une Femme Wines - Seed, Series A, Series A+ Brightland - Seed Stytch - Series A Bevshop - Pre-seed (Acquired by Barcart)

Growth

2022 - 2024

Scout

2022 - 2024

Director of Platform

2020 - 2022

After 3.5 years at Forum Ventures, I wanted to operate again but saw a unique opportunity to mix operating and venture at Contrary. I joined Contrary to lead a first-of-its-kind, massively ambitious community and talent-first fund. While there, I supported a team of 10 across numerous investing and platform initiatives all centered on delivering a world-class network for the most promising builders and thinkers in startup. I supported my team with large-scale in-person and online event execution, building a hands-on, tech-driven talent management process, scaling a Venture Partner network that spans across the US and Canada, and running the Contrary Fellowship, which serves today's best and brightest talent, from engineers to product people, designers and investors.

Advisory Board Member

2020 - 2021

Principal

2019 - 2020

A few years into my career as an operator, I decided to pursue a career in venture capital. I began my process in Boston and eventually left my startup role and went to New York without an offer to network my way into the industry. Soon after, I joined Forum Ventures (fka Acceleprise) when it was just Mike Cardamone, the founder of the fund and Whitney Sales running the flagship, San Francisco program. When I left, the team had grown into 3 cities, 3 Managing Directors, 2 Associates, 2 Program Managers and a full marketing and business development team. I, alongside Mike, built our New York City presence, followed soon after with Toronto, a dual effort with Jonah Midanik. During my time at the fund, I rose from a career-shifting Associate role to Principal Investor, while handling various parts of the fund including new office launches, investor network growth and management, multi-city demo day execution (online and in-person), portfolio support specifically on GTM and brand strategy, and so much more. I helped raise subsequent funds, launched a Studio, and handled much of the brand-building for the firm. My work at Forum Ventures is some of the highest level execution I've had in my career.

Investment Associate

2017 - 2019

Marketing Team Lead

2016 - 2017

Acquired by OpenGov in 2019 Leaving HubSpot just after their IPO to join ViewPoint, a bootstrapped govtech startup, was a very personal decision as I wanted to get back in the weeds before getting into venture. I left one of the best marketing teams in the country at that time to build my own at ViewPoint. I built an entire marketing strategy from ground up to include an inbound content strategy, webinars and in-person events, partnerships with industry leaders, social media strategy, and brand thought leadership within the govtech industry. I brought together Sales and Marketing using HubSpot software to create clear attribution reporting as well as countless nurturing campaigns aided by our thought leadership strategies. I grew monthly visits and conversions by 2-4x month-over-month all while tightening existing budget and focusing all fronts on providing the best experience for existing customers. Uniquely, I took over our RFP process, which drove over 50% of sales for the business and was able to meaningfully increase our application rate and improve our likelihood of being shortlisted. This strategy led to multiple state-wide RFP wins and a powerfully streamlined sales process, which eventually began to inform our product and growth strategy.

Demand Generation Manager

2014 - 2016

IPO'd in 2014 I started at HubSpot as a co-op but after my 6 months wrapped up, they offered me a full time role on their world-class marketing team a year before I was meant to graduate. In lieu of dropping out, I dropped my marketing concentration and graduated early to take on the opportunity. During my time at HubSpot, I worked on a lot of different projects from Demand Gen and Product Marketing campaigns to Sales Enablement work that eventually led me to a skunkworks team within HubSpot. My first year was spent building an advocacy platform and referral revenue source for HubSpot, which garnered over $60k in MRR in the first 3 months from leads who closed 3x faster than regular leads and reduced CAC by nearly 50%. The second was focused on Inbound.org where I worked under Dharmesh Shah, helping to build the world’s largest community of marketers and growth analysts on the web. This role involved building a powerful onboarding experience and aggressively testing various engagement tactics to grow the forum-based platform. All in all, HubSpot was one of the most transformative companies I’ve ever worked for and I regularly reflect on my decision not to stay.

Demand Generation Associate

2014 - 2014

I joined Intuit after working at a very small startup to see what big company culture and problems felt like. It was a unique experience that gave me a strong understanding of the impact cross-functional process improvements can have on a massive organization. I originally joined the Demand Generation team to support on email marketing and up-sell campaign management but ended up identifying an inefficiency that was causing the Sales, Marketing, Design and Customer Success teams to operate much less efficiently when it came to running cross-functional campaigns aimed at closing new customers and upselling existing users. I ended up working with a team of Intuit Solutions Engineers to build a platform using Intuit's QuickBase product that improved alignment between these disparate teams. The tool increased the number of campaigns run per month by 5x, created a massive asset repository and meaningfully improved visibility and communication across said teams.

Marketing Associate

2013 - 2013

Acquired by Medium in 2016 Embedly was my first real job and the gig I blame my deep obsession with startups on. Sean, Art, Kawan, Andy, Bob, and John, if you're reading this, thank you. I was the first non-technical hire at Embedly and was a co-op (6-months, full time). This role involved a lot of unique and unrelated project work, which all depended on what the business needed at any given moment. Some days I was assisting with the close of an enterprise-level client, others I was organizing multiple stakeholders for events and some days I was simply running errands for the office. In this role, I learned a lot about focus, what it takes to build product/market fit and educate an industry, how to communicate with developers on your team as well as those seeking support and how to manage clients from enterprise to small business.