Luciana Lixandru, Partner at Accel, on how to spot global winners among local champions

**Carlos Espinal** (0:00)
Hi, everyone. Welcome to This Much I Know, The Seedcamp Podcast with me, your host, Carlos Espinal, bringing you the inside story from founders, investors and leading tech voices. Tune in to hear from the people who built businesses and products, scaled globally, failed fantastically, and learned massively. Welcome, everyone. On today's podcast, we have Luciana, Partner Accel, and co-investor with us in one of our companies, which we're really excited about, but I won't bore you just yet. I'm going to wait for you to tell that story, Luciana, but first of all, welcome.

**Luciana Lixandru** (0:32)
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me here today. I have to say it's my first podcast ever, so I'm extra excited.

**Carlos Espinal** (0:39)
Ah, cool. Well, let's make sure it's a good one. All right, so first of all, one of the things we like to start off with is your background.

**Luciana Lixandru** (0:44)
Absolutely.

**Carlos Espinal** (0:45)
So I know that you went to school in Georgetown and you studied economics and mathematics, but maybe there's two elements to that story that we probably need to cover. For some of you, you might not know where Luciana is from, and that's probably an interesting story of how you got to Georgetown from where you're from. And second of all, what did you do after you graduated?

**Luciana Lixandru** (1:06)
So I am originally from Romania, and in fact, I'm originally from a relatively small town in Romania. I joke with my friends from there. It's the 18th largest city, about 100,000 people. And when I was 16, I still remember, I had this idea, which at the time was crazy that I wanted to study abroad. In fact, I wanted to study in the US. And I had never been to the US before. At that point, I had never been on a plane before. So I started doing online research and I started studying for my SATs and learning all these words by heart. I still remember. Applied to a bunch of universities and was fortunate enough to be accepted at Georgetown and got a scholarship there. So I was able to go. And I always say it's the best four years of my life. Now, since I met my husband, he doesn't like it when I say that because we weren't married back then. Or we didn't know each other back then. But it was really a wonderful experience, academically and socially and frankly, just eye-opening from so many perspectives. In Eastern Europe, in my family in particular, in Eastern Europe in general, if you want to be successful, you have to do something with math or sciences. It kind of is how it used to be at least back in the day. So I always knew I was going to study math. And I wanted to add something that was more specific to the school where I went and Georgetown is very focused on international studies. So I added a major in economics. And I always thought I would go on and teach. And then all my friends, all my cool friends were going into banking. And I thought to myself, well, I could move to New York for a couple of years and hang out with my friends and have my first job and go back to grad school after. And then life happened and I never went back. So to be honest, I got into technology serendipitously. And I was placed into the technology team at Morgan Stanley and M&A and I realized that I actually really love technology, but the big corporate world wasn't really for me long term. So after a year in New York, I moved to London. This was plus or minus 11 years ago now. And that's how I got into investing. First I moved to Summit Partners, which is a growth fund. I worked in their team here for a bit over two years. And I joined Accel back in 2011
So quite a long time ago, end of 2011, to be fair.

**Carlos Espinal** (3:25)
Well, before we go straight to Accel and your time there, maybe we can talk a little bit about your time at Morgan Stanley and Summit Partners. I think I remember as well when I graduated in investment banking and management consulting, there's like the stereotypical career paths that people kind of maybe have been oversold and over glorified when you're in school. But now, you talk to people who went down that path and they highly regret it. Sometimes it's about the stories of late hours, sometimes it's the stories about the craziness that happens there. But maybe you can share with us a couple of things. Firstly, any of the sort of lessons that have served you well, that you learned at Morgan Stanley, and second of all, any funny stories of your time you were there.