Co-Founder & Managing Director, Renegade Partners
Renata Quintini is a venture capitalist, futurist, and co-founder of Renegade Partners. Previously a Partner at Lux Capital and General Partner at Felicis Ventures, Renata has invested in transformative companies like Air Space Intelligence, Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, Planet, and Cruise Automation.
She’s also a three-time state karate champion, Jazz guitar player, and Brazilian immigrant. Renata shares why she approaches her cofounder relationship like a marriage and why she focuses on entrepreneurs who take big swings.
What types of businesses does Renegade invest in?
We invest in software businesses and look at how we can apply the best technologies to markets that matter.
My partner Roseanne Wincek and I have been generalists our whole career. I’ve invested in everything from eyeglasses to self-driving cars, and Roseanne has backed many companies in the Fintech and SaaS space. We tend to gravitate towards different personalities and experiences, which makes our pie even larger.
Renegade funds have spanned enterprise, vertical, SaaS, DevOps, and Fintech and they began investing in AI even before it was called AI. We’re always trying to understand what has fundamentally changed, either in terms of users, business processes, and workflows, or what kind of platform shift or distribution shift exists that will unlock something that wasn’t possible previously.
What do you look for in a founder and a company?
I like visionary founders with profound product knowledge or market understanding, and who work on things that are hard to build for very large markets. For example, we led the Series A for Air Space Intelligence four years ago (and invested again in its Series B in 2023). The first product was like Waze for the skies—a complicated platform that simulated all the airplanes currently flying in US airspace and allowed you to project their future locations, taking into criteria like altitude, fuel, and other levers for optimization in real-time.
When we first met the founders, from revenue and traction standpoints, the company was very early. What they were trying to build was complicated and would take time. But, we felt a deep conviction for what they were creating. First, this market is very, very ripe for transformation. The founder also had a crisp vision for what the platform could solve for the broad airspace market and easily foresaw the future evolutions of the company clicks ahead of where the product was.
Aerospace is not the easiest industry to sell into, but once you’re in, the product is part of a critical workflow. I loved the product vision.
Can You Share News From Another Renegade-Funded Company?
Neon, which builds developer tools to help game creators create and control their own brands, is one of the most recent we’ve announced. For simplicity, Neon offers a Shopify-style infrastructure where players can buy games and in-game experiences delivered directly to their preferred gaming platform.
In 2020, Epic Games sued Apple for its practices through its iOS App Store. Up until the lawsuit, the gaming studio did not own their direct relationships with their gamers—Apple did. Gamers had to download the app in the App Store, transact there, and then Apple kept 30 percent of the revenue.
Chris, the founder of Neon, is a deep Fintech guy, not a gamer, but he loves the market.
Neon allows gaming companies and game developers to build direct relationships with their end customers and create long LTV and different experiences, which is a huge opportunity. Neon’s platform puts the power back in the hands of developers, accelerating the gaming industry’s shift to a more competitive, fair, and open ecosystem. We invested in Neon’s $14 million round, alongside Thrive Capital, a16z speedrun, and others last November.
Renegade is female-founded and run, which is not common in Silicon Valley. How Did You Meet Your Partner, Roseanne Wincek?
I wish we had a meet-cute. I first got to know Roseanne around 13 years ago when she was just starting in venture at Canaan. There weren’t many women in venture at the time so we all knew each other. Roseanne was on a different path working at legacy firms, first Canaan and then IVP—she joked that the firms she worked at were older than she was. We were friends and collaborators.
One day in 2018, we were at a dinner and somebody asked: If you were to start your own venture firm, what would you do? People began pontificating about where the industry was going, and Roseanne and I were finishing each other’s sentences.
We agreed about venture’s generational transition, the world bifurcating into big platforms and small boutiques, and the need to return to the origins of venture capital: being very closely aligned with founders and taking risks together.
We wanted to go back to the OG way of doing venture.
You’ve worked in venture capital since 2007. How have your experiences over your career informed Renegade?
When I started investing in venture funds for the Stanford endowment, venture underwent a huge transformation. Suddenly, it was 10x cheaper for companies to get started. We saw a wave of prior operators starting smaller venture firms, super angels, or micro VCs, many of which are now big, established platform funds.
The TLDR for me was that this created a new challenge for founders: product market fit as a discipline completely changed. It was less expensive and easier to be in business, so they needed less capital; there was also more competition, and they had less time to figure out what others wanted.
If we go back to the origins of those firms, they offered something top of mind to founders: how to build products or get to revenue quickly. The experience of seeing new firms outcompete big brands was a blueprint for how Renegade could create an edge in working with the best founders.
From Stanford, I went to Felicis Ventures, which sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: a Brazilian, a Turkish, and an Indian enter a bar… We were new kids on the block starting a brand and doing venture atypically: not caring about ownership, punching overweight on rounds, and pursuing opportunities that were not middle-of-the-fairway. This served Felicis very well and is something I took to Renegade.
My experience at Lux drove home the power of having a standout brand. Lux is known for investing in the “rebels of science.” Renegade helps startups grow into companies. We want to be top-of-mind for founders looking for that type of partnership.
How did you figure out the strategy and cofounder dynamic for Renegade?
Roseanne and I spent nights and weekends trying to answer the question of why the world needed another venture capital firm.
We worked with a coach for nine months to figure out the strategy for the firm and how we would be as cofounders.
You can figure out whether someone is a great investor in five minutes—you grab a piece of paper and look at returns—but the cofounder relationship is like a marriage. We bet our careers on each other. We already had a friendship and mutual respect, but this idea of synergistic, complementary leadership is a different ball game, so we wanted to hone in on that.
When did you pull the trigger on starting your own firm?
Roseanne and I quit our jobs the same day in 2019. After gearing up for fundraising, we closed our first fund on Friday, March 13, 2020—the same day the Princess Cruises ship sailed into the Bay and everybody quarantined with no idea what the world would look like tomorrow. On top of that, there were two banking failures—Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank— a declaration of war, followed by the market correction.
That is the environment Renegade was born into. These massive shifts were an earthquake and could have broken you if your foundation wasn’t strong. Renegade had a really strong foundation. It didn’t even rattle.
Since then, we announced Renegade II last year and now have $228M AUM that we have invested in 29 companies to date, mostly at the Series A level.
What distinguishes Renegade in the venture world?
Our ethos is: If we don’t disrupt ourselves, somebody else will.
We use probabilistic thinking and forecasting tools in an objective process that everybody can buy into. We work with Annie Duke, a decision scientist and former pro poker player who uses Nobel-laureate-level cognitive science around decision-making.
Our regimented abstract rubric, essentially scorecards where the most comprehensive one has around 70 criteria, is an objective common language for what we think creates great value—what industries and businesses we like, what a Renegade deal looks like, and what qualities a Renegade founder has.
We don’t want to be right. We’re not optimizing for ego. We want to make the best decisions. And the best decisions, the ones that find the right founder, are going to generate outstanding returns for society, employees, and LPs.
Why did you decide on this approach?
Everyone wants to back a great founder in a growing market, but what does that mean?
We’ve been in rooms where either the loudest person or the table pounder takes the day. A jaded investor might not be interested in a market because they’ve been burned before but haven’t recalibrated, even though that world has changed. Confirmation bias can make people think they’re a good rater of one factor, but when you look at the data, you may learn that that factor may not be predictive or, even worse, is negatively correlated to success.
We now have five years of data to learn from—we call it watching the game tapes. We are garnering tons of valuable insights into how we decide. We also learned that Roseanne and I spike on different criteria, which makes our combined decision quality even stronger.
Could You Share Examples Of Your Criteria?
We came up with a group of factors—we call them mediating judgment—in various key categories, such as founder and market, and defined what Renegade looks for in each of them. When we get to the investment committee level, everyone on the team will independently and anonymously grade the criteria and say the “why” for their scores. When we put points of view into words, we can discuss data points for further analysis. This allows us to start discussing facts and data rather than just opinions.
For example, let’s imagine I previously invested in a sector where sales cycles were super long, and I had a bad experience in that segment. Then, another partner at my firm brings a deal in that space. When we discuss “market,” I will make explicit my qualm that sales cycles are slow, one by giving the market a slow score and two by explaining that it is because of the sales cycle. Now, the conversation isn’t about whether that market is inherently good or bad but focused on learning more about the sales cycle now and whether anything has changed.
What challenges and opportunities does the current global economy present?
No surprise: AI is the biggest platform shift I’ve seen in my lifetime in terms of opportunities and where the transformations will go. We’re in the super early innings, and there’s a big difference between what makes compelling use cases now and which businesses will be long-term, sustainable, and durable.
Lots of excellent founders with great ideas are building. There’s a lot of excitement but we also see many ideas coalescing and competing. These are exuberant times and are also not the clearest to navigate. We have been able to identify and back ideas and approaches that we find unique and durable long-term. I can’t wait to share more about them!
Do you see VCs adapting or evolving further to better serve founders and companies in this landscape?
That barbell that is the industry will get even crisper and stronger. Specialized or boutique firms will become even more tailored to founders, offering more industry or stage specialists. I’ve heard some firms are even thinking about function, for example, offering go-to-market or marketing services to deepen their reputations and relationships among founders and companies. These are bespoke things that don’t scale by definition.
We’re also going to see the larger platforms scaling even more. It’s happening already in terms of investing across the stack, even beyond what we would consider early-stage venture returns—debt investing and public markets. The landscape has changed dramatically in the past few years.
How do you benchmark success at Renegade?
In venture, average doesn’t do anything for you. Nothing beats money in the pocket—companies going public. But five years since Renegade was established, we’re looking at whether our companies are graduating—whether they’re making it to the next milestone and growing their revenues.
We also look very closely at the portfolio’s runway—the cash balances. You get revenue in two ways: outside financing or customer revenue. The latter propels your business growth and is a leading indicator for future performance.
Each particular business has different KPIs we’re always looking at, but a key predictive indicator is whether the founder is doing what they said they would do. A company’s ability to forecast and meet forecasts is a great predictor for future success—it means the founder knows the critical levers, understands the opportunity, and makes the machine repeatable.
How Does Your CANOPY Membership support you in your work?
I started as a Community table member, but I’m about to migrate to a desk at Menlo Park at Springline. I’m moving up in the world! Our firm has an office in San Francisco, but when we’re not in the office as a team, I want to spend my workday in an inspiring environment as part of a community of people building or investing.
It’s crazy that serendipity is a lot of what fuels this industry, so being at CANOPY is very helpful for that. I also love the energy that CANOPY staffers Mercia and Laura bring. People fuel me, so I love getting out of my home and being around great energy.
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Follow Renata on LinkedIn and on X @rquintini. Follow Renegade Partners on LinkedIn and on X @RenegadePtnrs