Investors Like Me: Lolita Taub

Community-oriented businesses generate wealth for, and loyalty among, a wide circle of stakeholders, which aligns those stakeholders around the company mission. With their broad networks of community support, these companies often have lower customer acquisition costs and attract the best talent.

Taub sees massive potential in this community-oriented approach. She believes Ganas’ focus in this area will drive the fund’s success.

Taub's personal history makes her an ideal advocate for underrepresented technology founders and investors. She is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who came to the U.S. in search of a brighter future for their kids. After being the first in her family to graduate from college, she found professional success in technology sales.

As her sales career progressed, Taub launched The F Show on YouTube, where she interviewed female millennial entrepreneurs. Through that experience, she recognized the lack of funding available for underrepresented and underestimated founders. She later completed an MBA as a first step to making her way into the VC space.

Despite her accomplishments, Taub herself continues the fight to overcome the funding gap and has reinvested her own management fee at Ganas Ventures. Essentially, she is investing in herself.

Taub's professional accomplishments include $70 million in technology sales and 90-plus investments as an angel investor. She co-founded early-stage fund The Community Fund Scout at Lightspeed Venture Partners and VC at Backstage Capital and The Community Fund. She also was a co-founder for proprietary matching tools, including the Startup-Investor Matching Tool and the GP-LP Matching Tool, which connect emerging fund managers with general partners and limited partners. She also co-founded Lolita-as-a-Service, or LaaS, an online network that provides courses and guides to help start-up founders secure funding and expand their businesses.

I started investing back in 2017, around the same time I joined K Fund. I was lucky that I had the opportunity to invest in community with the Portfolia Enterprise Fund as an investment partner.

As for why I started investing: to create generational wealth for my family and for our community by investing in it. Here’s the backstory.

Look, there’s a blue ocean opportunity to achieve alpha by investing in founders in underestimated communities and markets. And, to put my money where my mouth is, that’s exactly why I'm in LatAm now.

Investing has been a little bit like riding a mechanical bull. Good thing I’ve always been one for a good challenge and have no shame in falling and getting back up.

My journey breaking in (and staying in) VC has been a roller coaster ride. I’ve volunteered in angel groups like Tech Coast Angels, interviewed with a ton of bad-fit funds (I won’t name them, but you know them), worked at funds such as Backstage Capital, became a Scout for Lightspeed, launched a fund (The Community Fund), and recently I launched Ganas Ventures, where I invest in early-stage Web 2 and 3 community-driven companies in the US and LATAM.

We all know the biggest challenges underestimated people face in venture capital: being underestimated. The thing to remember is that persistence always overcomes resistance. So, if it’s your dream to be an investor, keep at it. Do not be deterred by the haters and instead focus your energy on people who believe in you and you actually enjoy.

1. Community-driven US and LatAm unicorns.

2. More underrepresented GPs achieving alpha.

3. More underrepresented community members becoming founders, scouts, and investors.

1. SEC regulation of the maximum number of LPs a fund can have (because it keeps those who aren’t rich and don’t have rich friends out of VC).

2. SEC “accredited investor” definition (because it keeps people in our communities from an opportunity to create generational wealth).

3. Those who disagree with my No. 2 and don’t consider that while my mom, a maid, can go spend all her money on Lotto tickets, she can’t invest in a company that can become a unicorn and create generational wealth for her.

Who is Lolita Taub? She is the founder of the $10 million early-stage venture capital (VC) firm Ganas Ventures. She launched Ganas in 2022 with three high-level goals: to invest in 75 pre-seed and seed-stage companies, to support diversity in technology, and to promote a community-driven approach to business.

I grew up poor in south central Los Angeles and I often heard “money is evil,” so my relationship with money was terrible.

The thing is that money can be used for evil, but money is neither evil nor good. We need money to pay bills, get healthcare, [insert human bare necessities]. Money allows us to survive, thrive, and get the power/leverage we need to build the world and life we want. I’m about that (and I secretly dream of one day getting a weekly massage in my own home).

There’s no secret in how I do it all. I work long hours, leverage my bot assistant, LaaS, a wonderful fractional team, use no-code tools, and most importantly have an incredible husband, Josh, who is always there for me and the community. He built the Startup-Investor Matching Tool, a platform that introduces underestimated founders to investors and also now leads finance and tech ops at Ganas Ventures.

Say hello on Twitter, sign up for my newsletter for curated actionable insights and resources for underestimated founders, funders, and friends, and know you’re welcome to apply to invest in or get funding from me at ganas.vc!