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This year’s Top 25 Young Professionals vary in their backgrounds and their professional pursuits – they’re leaders in banking, real estate, nonprofits, law, entrepreneurship and architecture, to name just a few.
Some are lifelong Coloradans who couldn’t conceive of living anywhere else; others are transplants from the East and West coasts or somewhere between. What they have in common is a relentless achiever’s mindset, a can-do spirit and a desire to do good for others as they do well for themselves.
Read on to learn more about Nina Vendhan, Chief of Staff & Product Manager at Studio Management in Denver, Colorado.
Nina Vendhan, 24
Chief of Staff & Product Manager, Studio Management | Denver
A Colorado native and daughter of immigrants from India, Nina Vendhan was admitted to Harvard a year early and was inspired to study development economics after witnessing economic disparities both in Colorado and in India.
Armed with a degree in economics and mathematics from Harvard, Vendhan started her career at Tulco Holdings, the venture capital arm of billionaire and media mogul Thomas Tull, as the first and only direct undergraduate hire. She partnered with Tulco Labs, Tulco’s in-house artificial intelligence and data science team, to accelerate growth in the firm’s portfolio companies by understanding consumer behavior.
Now at Studio Management, an asset-management firm whose mission is to influence the flow of capital into companies that improve society and push culture forward, Vendhan is the only female member of the investing team and also serves as the chief of staff. She has taken on a wide range of responsibilities, including reviewing new investment opportunities, performing market research and supporting current portfolio companies with ongoing financial and operational analysis. Her areas of focus include quantum computing, eldertech, proptech and edtech. Vendhan works out of Denver to identify and support founders in the Rocky Mountain region. While California and New York often dominate the venture capital headlines, she wants to help change that narrative through technology investments as she staunchly believes that Colorado is full of innovative entrepreneurs ready to make their mark.
Vendhan is fervently passionate about supporting entrepreneurs, particularly underrepresented founders, including women and people of color. Currently, less than 3% of venture capital funding is allocated to female founders, with women of color founders receiving less than 1%. Vendhan leans into her identity as a woman of color to enact change in venture capital and ensure that technology initiatives are developed by diverse founders to benefit a larger population. She is the youngest advisory council member of the Women and Girls of Color Fund supported by the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, for which she has applied her investing experience to help distribute more than $440,000 in philanthropic investments.
The most fulfilling aspect of her work: “Being able to support innovative entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds.”