Molly Alter wears a lot of hats. She’s a mocumentary filmmaker working on a project about an alternate reality where charades is big business. She’s a caesar salad connoisseur and documents her rankings of different restaurants’ attempts on a blog called JULIUS. She’s also Northzone’s newest partner.
Alter’s path to venture capital was not an obvious one. Her parents were journalists and she grew up heavily involved in creative passions like theater and improv comedy. These interests were the basis for the company Alter started at Harvard that filmed a cappella concerts and dance recitals and ultimately led her to VC.
She told TechCrunch that she really just started that company as a way to make money — it was better than her other job cleaning toilets — but it morphed into a real business that scaled up to 27 employees. Then Insight Partners came knocking via a message sent on Facebook Messenger to see if Alter wanted to join their analyst program.
“I went to Insight straight out of undergrad,” said Alter, who graduated from Harvard. “My rationale was that I’m not from this world. I don’t know anything about these different businesses and business models. There is a lot for me to learn about starting companies. I’ll get a broad exposure and after a couple years, I’ll start my next company.”
She didn’t end up starting that other business and has been in venture ever since. After nearly five years at Insight, she moved over to Index as a partner out of their London office in 2020. She moved to Northzone and to New York City in 2023. Now she’s being promoted to partner at the firm and will continue her focus on vertical software. Northzone is a multistage firm that currently backs startups in the U.S. and Europe out of its €1.1 billion 10th fund.
While Alter assumed she’d go back to being an entrepreneur, she realized being a VC was a better fit for her and that building blocks for that career were always there even if she hadn’t noticed them. She said as a kid, she was always questioning and was obsessed with how things were made and where they came from down to the bread she used to make toast.
“What you are doing at its core by investing in innovation, is finding out how things work right now and how things could be better,”Alter said.
Alter said she likes that being a VC requires her to go deep into a subject and learn all the ins and outs about it. She said her investment in GovDash is a great example. While software for government contracts may not seem super interesting on the surface, Alter said she was fascinated by all the intricacies like how even a government contract for a janitor needs to be vetted for potential corruption.
“This is such an exciting job,” Alter said. “You are learning about things that are right under your nose and learning how these things work today and if they are broken how an entrepreneur could fix that.”
Alter thinks her creative background and current pursuits has made her a better investor. A direct example is that her interest in film led her to source a Series C investment into Frame.io in 2019 when she was at Insight. The company built a cloud-based video collaboration platform, which Alter understood the need for immediately based on her past experiences in film. The company later exited through a $1.3 billion sale to Adobe in 2021 after raising about $90 million.
She added that she thinks it helps in less tangible ways too. She likes having other things to talk about with founders to help them relax and not feel like they need to be talking about their company 24/7.
“I do have a ton of diverse interests and it helps me build stronger relationships with founders and build that trust to go through thick and thin,” Alter said.
Being a VC hasn’t always been the easiest job, Alter said, but she’s ready to double down on investing with this latest role. She wants to cut through the AI noise to find the startups with real potential and she remains bullish on vertical software and investing out of New York.
“I think there were times where I had to exercise that grit and feel like I was pushing a rock up a hill,” Alter said. “It hasn’t been easy but I have really felt that this is the right industry for me to be in. My test of that is, am I excited on a Sunday night to launch into a week of meeting founders or do I get Sunday scaries? Sundays at Northzone, I’m chomping at the bit.”