Yasmin Razavi

General Partner, Growth

Yasmin Razavi doesn’t make gut-based decisions. For her, the often decade-long partnership between a founder and VC deserves a special kind of attention. As a general partner at Spark, she spends the mental calories required to look at the data, the story, and the market to understand at a granular level why a company is doing what it’s doing.

Yasmin grew up in Tehran before leaving to study engineering at the University of Toronto, and later business at Harvard, where she received an MBA. Before joining Spark, she was a consultant at McKinsey & Company and an investor at Index Ventures in London. She later joined Snap Inc. as a product manager to build the technology behind the app’s monetization stack.

At Spark, Yasmin is a student of go-to-market and believes it separates good companies from great companies. She partners with founders after they hit product market fit on their journey to scale. “I help the founders I work with out-execute their competitors in their act one, and think through and capitalize on their act two and three.”

Companies
Adept
AllStripes
Capella Space
Cruise
Discord
Harmonix
Instawork
North
Postmates
Proletariat
Standard Metrics
Zum

“I believe gut driven investing often favors a certain type of entrepreneur and disadvantages founders that are not performers, but who are nonetheless building solid businesses. This is something I’m very conscious of and want to avoid.”

Coming from a long line of engineers, Yasmin is drawn to highly technical founders. She believes the power belongs to those who can create and shape the future of technology. It’s led her to invest in enterprise software and financial services companies that empower developers.

Yasmin’s favorite place in the world is London. “When you tire of London you’re tired of life.”

Yasmin is fully analog when it comes to her reading habit. She reads fiction exclusively—and only in print.