Cheryl Cheng, M12 Managing Partner on AI, Healthcare and SaaS

Grace Gong (0:01)

We're live. Hi Sharer, welcome to Venture with Grace.

Cheryl Cheng (0:05)

So good to see you. Happy Friday.

Grace Gong (0:07)

Happy Friday.

I feel like you're such a, like you're like this super sweet person, but also I feel like you have accomplished so much in your career. So I'm like so excited to dive into our episode. And right before we dive in, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, is the ultimate call for AI innovators. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support unmatched by hyperscalers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify, and Higgsfield already partnered with Nebius to run their AI workloads. Plus Venture Bank startup can save up to 150k on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startup to learn more. Okay. So I want to start with your journey because you have done, like you have done both from an operator perspective, like you have worked on the Clorox Company, which is one of my favorite product at home. Then you co-founded your own innovation company and then bring larger brands and startups and technology community together.

And you have also worked on the LP side as well as now you're back to Venture and you're the managing partner at M12. Maybe we could start from what were some core lessons that you've learned early on in your career kind of shaping into who you are today.

Cheryl Cheng (1:27)

Yeah. So first of all, thank you for having me.

I think one of the main lessons I learned in college was actually not what I studied but learning how to learn. And this is one of the things that I think liberal arts colleges or humanities majors like social sciences, like they really emphasize. So I went to college thinking I would become an environmental engineer. I did really well in chemistry in high school. I thought I would be a chemistry major and then I would go to law school.

And then I would become an environmental engineer. And first quarter of chemistry in college just obliterated me. Like it was so hard. It was nothing I was prepared for. It was very clear it was going to have to be a pivot. And from there, I just continued to follow areas that I was interested in. But all the while, everything I did was interdisciplinary. So I was a public policy major. And then throughout that, then I found economics. I really liked economics. And then I started digging into more corporate finance. And my first job out of college was as a tech banker.

And I remember in my interview, I said, listen, like, I know nothing about technology. I was not an engineer, but I know how to learn. And if you give me a chance, like, I will, I will show you that I can do this.

And I've been very lucky in my career that people have given me those opportunities to prove that I can learn and I can pick up new things. And what I found was every time I got to one milestone, I realized how much I didn't know about other things. And then I went to go scratch that itch and like, try something different. And so this is where I've sort of bopped back and forth between advisory and finance to being in operations. And by the way, like being an operator, you actually need a lot of finance, right? Like you own a P&L. And if you don't understand finance, like very difficult for you to navigate your product or your group to profitability. And then ultimately, I'm just always trying to learn new things. And so whether this is tackling health care, now I'm doing a lot in AI and enterprise, it is just about kind of meandering through.

And maybe it's just I was unfortunate and I wasn't one of those people who is super spiky in one thing and just knew that my life's work was going to be focused on one area. But I think that that diversity of learning has made me a lot happier and given me just a lot of opportunities to help founders.

Grace Gong (4:05)

I love that. I feel like being a person with a lot of sub-domain knowledge is super useful for being a founder and VC leader because it's literally about the broadness of your knowledge base than being an expert in something many times.

I want to start with, obviously, your past investing focus was primarily on healthcare and fintech. Maybe we could talk about now you're broadening into the broader AI world. Maybe we could start with the M12 VC firm as a whole, maybe the background on the firm, as well as maybe some quote-unquote misconception that people may interpret differently, and then we can pivot into the subsector that excites you the most.