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The ad Venture to Silicon Valley Trinity Today catches up with Amy Flanagan , the trailblazing Trinity graduate and ESTEEM scholar who is making her mark in Silicon Valley here did Amy Flanagan, a gifted mathematician who has pivoted through engineering, high-level corporate consulting on to (now) Venture Capital in Silicon Valley, start out? ‘I was absolutely fascinated with Apple. I remember racing out of school when I was 10 or 11 to get home and all I wanted to do was watch Steve Jobs' entire keynote address for the latest product launches – and yes, buy them. I was hooked when they launched the iMac G3 and it came out in those translucent, vibrant colours that were just fun.’ The love for perfecting design, for opening up interesting things to see how they worked, was already in place; asked at primary school to redesign a sneaker, she went overboard, spending hours at the PC with Adobe and other tools, turning and readjusting a piece of footwear. Her maths skills bloomed while at Holy Child in Killiney. Amy’s love of numbers suggested maths for 3rd level, but her teacher Mr Keane said, “if you study maths you're never going to see a number again. What you might want to consider is engineering, because that is more about actually solving problems and numbers, while maths gets extremely theoretical.” ‘So he seeded the idea in my head.’ She found Trinity’s approach ‘unusual’ and attractive: ‘the first two years are general, you get to study electrical engineering, and computer and structural and mechanical all at the same time, before you fully make your decision.’ A memorable instance of that drive towards application and iteration came in winter of her sophomore year, when she spent days with a team in one of the labs, figuring out how to code three buggies to allow them autonomously move around unspecified track routes and follow traffic laws. ‘At the time it seemed like a very futuristic problem, but now I catch Waymos (autonomous driving taxis) all the time here in San Francisco and I can see this – clearly a significantly more advanced version of course – making a real difference in our day-to-day lives.’ She had entered Trinity right as the property bubble burst and the country was launched into the 2009 recession. There was ‘always worry about being able to get jobs and what the impact would be once we graduated, but Mr Keane’s advice was still proving solid. Despite the downturn, the
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problem-solving skills of engineers made them attractive to a variety of industries, which provided graduates with a lot of flexibility. Even when one sector slowed down, engineers could pivot to explore other areas that aligned with their interests.' Her path to Silicon Valley, where she now plays the Venture Capital (VC) game full-time as ‘Limited Partner’ with two funds, is a story of breakthroughs, of shifts of place and increasing pace. While working with a company in Paris after a stint in the Politecnico di Milano – all part of a work+study integrated master’s degree – she heard of a narrow opportunity to apply for a scholarship to enter ESTEEM, an accelerated master’s programme convened by Notre Dame. She would eventually be offered the slot. ‘My entire body was just alive with excitement, I could feel it like running down my arms.’ In some ways, her qualifications on paper indicated that yet more study might be excessive, but she knew instinctively that the decision would be life-changing. Clearly, it was. What followed was a full-on immersion into American life and culture, along with a relentless push toward results – all within the frame of finding real-world commercial applicability. ‘In ESTEEM, you end up paired with a professor from the campus who has new exciting technology or research. You take that project on and spend your entire year pushing it forward. Evaluating, “hey, is there a business case here? Can we commercialise this?”’ She was quickly snapped up by Bain & Company as a consultant, graduating through multiple roles and moving from Chicago to San Francisco. Becoming a ‘Bainie’ was one of her transformations. She would even (though they did not know it at the time) marry a fellow Bainie. ‘On a macro level,’ says Amy of that company, ‘you start to pattern-recognise problems faster and see how most companies face similar issues. My time at Bain influenced how I think about building businesses, tackling organisational issues, creating culture, and my role as a professional – supporting those around me and how important mentorship is to people who are coming up behind you.’ She threw herself into the job itself and the promotional path, taking on an ‘externship’ at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where she drove strategy, helping structure key products and business lines for the Bain Innovation Exchange. The ongoing chapter of her life and career was starting to take shape. ‘I got to transfer to our San Francisco office where I then bumped into my now husband in the elevator – it really was very fulfilling overall.’ She worked in the crypto industry for the major exchange Coinbase, for two years experiencing the ‘crypto hype cycle’ first hand. By now she was acclimatised and fully adapted to swim, not sink, in the Valley. One of the venture funds she works with now, Rally Cap, specialises in ‘Emerging Markets,’ a buzz term that seems to cover a wide range of places and companies. How would she define them? ‘These are regions with often large populations, rapid economic growth and a surge in technological adoption. These markets are full of energy, with a young, increasingly tech-savvy population that’s eager to innovate. They might not have the same level of infrastructure as we may be used to, but that’s exactly where the opportunity lies – this prompts fresh thinking and new, innovative solutions.' The wider big money world of VC also has its cycles and heavy weather, with the relative downturn in VC investment over the past year or two also affecting the money flows into emerging markets. Keeping a sense of buoyancy among tech investors is the AI boom, with the stock of chipmaker NVIDIA, for instance (see the article on Steve Collins elsewhere in this issue for more on them) showing huge swells. But does Flanagan agree with that assessment? What are her predictions? ‘I wouldn’t categorise it as a downturn – it is more of a normalisation from the 2020/2021 bubble when valuations were sky high, but in reality, with little to show for these prices due to the ZIRP era [Zero Interest-Rate Policy, due to the pandemic]. Markets go in cycles, it’s something we’re all familiar with, and now we’ve entered a necessary correction phase – but with the correction phase, you see it play out to different degrees in the different sectors of the market. For example, with early stage businesses, the activity and interest is still there, we’re not seeing a depression in this space, and that’s primarily because with an early stage company, you’re at the start of a very long road. Investors know that what they are really betting on is the founder, and the idea, but there are still so many operational and executional challenges yet to be faced and to be figured out… Honestly, if you can make it work in these market cycles, you have a much, much healthier business which is way better prepared to take advantage of the upcycles as they come as well.' Talking to Amy is to realise how the pressure cooking processes of study and corporate competition have made her compelled to solve hard problems, to engage and to produce. Asked to supply some responses for this article, in a short time she produced far more than we could use, several thousand words, despite it being an awkward hour on America’s West Coast. With a Silicon Valley accent blending into a lilt that is pure Killiney, Flanagan has already shown a fascination for seeking out and adapting to entirely new environments. From Dublin to California, she has followed an extraordinary path. There are no doubt many more shifts, pivots, and problems to solve – and still to come.
