Valerie Syme began her career in Washington, DC writing for a political news service but moved to Business Development (and Corporate Development over time) based on a strong interest in business and absolutely no interest at all in continuing to wait tables at night.    

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Reuters took her to NYC where she worked on some of the earliest deals in online news distribution. She headed to San Francisco in ‘97 to run Business Development for Individual Inc. and quickly got involved in the tech start-up community and has been at it ever since. She was VP of Business Development for CompareNet which was purchased by Microsoft in ’99. 

 

After spending four years with Microsoft, she co-founded Tribe (sold to Cisco). Over the last 10+ years she has been executive at, consulted to and/or advised more than a dozen start-up companies including ZING (acquired by Dell), Lyve (acquired by Seagate), TopSpin (acquired by Beats Electronics), StepUp Commerce (acquired by Intuit), Aggregate Knowledge (acquired by Neustar), TastingRoom (acquired by Lot 18) and BlackArrow (acquired by Cross MediaWorks). Doug Sinclair, who she worked with at ZING, brought her into Pacific Arc to join he and Wei by telling her the other side of the table had a much better view and was slightly less exhausting. She is still waiting to see if that’s true.