Anisha Suterwala
It’s the last Saturday in March, and I am walking over to an Edwardian house located just two blocks east of my apartment building. It’s where my ex-coworker-turned-friend-turned-neighbor Anisha lives with her boyfriend Brandan and their adorable dog Kira.
Their apartment is a cozy, colorful haven in the heart of the Lower Haight neighborhood, one that I have come to see as a comforting symbol of constancy in my life. It’s where Anisha and Brandan regularly host friends, sometimes for parties and sometimes for relaxed weekend get-togethers, and it’s where every object—from furniture to decor—looks settled down and content, determined to stay in its rightful place. In the ever-changing San Francisco, their apartment feels like a home.
“Wow, you look very chic,” I say excitedly when I see Anisha.
She is wearing a black sweater, a blue denim jacket, blue wide-leg jeans, black leather boots, and oversized cat-eye sunglasses for final touch of posh. I don’t know how she looks so stylish given that she had spent the weekend preparing dough for Ligurian focaccia, which she will be baking later.
“Thank you!” she smiles. “What do you say we go to the Richmond, grab lunch, look at some books, and come back here for the focaccia?”
“Sounds perfect to me.”
We take an Uber to Clement Street and find a table at Burma Superstar, a popular spot for Burmese food in the city. Our timing is on point; we got in just before the swaths of weekend brunchers are scheduled to start rolling in, and it’s perfect because we need plenty of time and quiet to catch up after not seeing each other for a while.
Anisha is an investor in the venture capital financing space. Also known more simply as VC in Silicon Valley, this line of work is the financial fuel behind many startups. The best way to think of venture capital financing is to see it as the monetary stimulus that helps entrepreneurs turn their ideas into reality. Which ultimately helps drive innovation in the tech industry.
How it usually works is that an entrepreneur who has a business idea first seeks money from a VC fund. If the fund’s investors deem the business idea to be viable and potentially lucrative, they invest in the entrepreneur’s idea in exchange for equity ownership in the company, which will ideally provide the fund with a return on investment when the company either goes public or is acquired. This is not a one-time event; a VC-backed business usually goes through multiple rounds of financing as it grows. One of the earliest rounds of financing is known as the Seed round. Anisha’s focus is on startups that are seeking Seed funding as well as Series A funding, which is reserved for early-stage companies that are further along on the maturity curve and have already started generating revenue.
A particular image comes to mind when one thinks of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Just think of the fictional characters Laurie Bream, Russ Hanneman, and Peter Gregory from the TV show Silicon Valley. They are obviously dramatized personalities, but anyone who has seen the show will agree there is some truth to these characters.
Like their esoteric vernacular, for example. Or their ruthless networking at lavish tech parties. Or their ability to unapologetically cut struggling companies from their portfolios. Or their tendency to get very hyped about the coolest new thing and then forget about it in the blink of an eye. Even in the real world, the venture capitalist is a vibe.
Anisha does not fit any of these stereotypes. She marches to the beat of her own drum. She is an introvert who loves books and films. She paints. She bakes. She spends her free time with people closest to her and makes friends thoughtfully—never opportunistically. Whenever she can, she is researching something or someone. She is, at her core, a deep thinker.
“It’s fascinating,” I say, “because, in my mind, I keep thinking there is no way you would ever enjoy this type of work. But, you clearly do? I feel like you have been thriving at your job.”
“It’s actually ideal, in many ways,” she answers. “When I am not networking, most of my time is spent reading and researching. I have to understand the businesses I am investing in, I have to understand the market, and I have to keep learning about new developments in tech. There is always a lot of knowledge to keep up with. And, I like learning about all this.”
That’s just when one is not networking. But every venture capitalist knows that networking is an important part of the job. It’s how deals get done. For Anisha, that means she has to spend time sourcing deals, which is a business-friendly way of saying that she has to go looking for entrepreneurs and ideas worth investing in.
“Okay,” I continue, “this is the part that I only know from watching Silicon Valley. I picture tech parties and Burning Man, and you having to go mingle with people to meet founders.”
“That is one way of doing it,” she laughs. “I prefer doing my own research first and doing direct outreach, via LinkedIn, for example. Or, another way is to talk to funds who invest in earlier rounds, so in my case, funds that do pre-Seed investing. And, that’s because those funds will want to make sure their portfolio companies are already setting themselves up for financial success in future rounds.”
“Interesting. Do you enjoy this aspect, the networking?”
“It depends. I don’t find those stereotypical networking parties to be that useful, to be honest,” she adds. “But what I do enjoy—and what I find really energizing—is identifying passionate founders and then reaching out to them to talk about what they are creating. It truly feels like talking to a friend who is geeking out about something they love.”
“It’s cool to hear that, because I feel like most people think you need to be this status-obsessed, power-hungry extrovert to be a successful VC person.”
“I don’t think so,” she adds. “Though it is hard to gauge how successful you are as a VC when you are starting out, because the feedback cycle is very long. It usually takes between five to seven years for businesses to grow and become successful, so it can take up to almost a decade for you to see a return on investment. But, I am sticking with my approach for now. I want to see if I can be successful doing it my way.”
After Burma Superstar, Anisha and I walk over to Green Apple Books, her favorite bookstore in the city. It’s there that we take a step back and start from the beginning of her story, slowly reconstructing how she came to be the Anisha she is today.
Anisha was born in Mumbai, India. Her parents then moved to Oman for some time before emigrating to the United States. After a brief stint in Detroit, they ended up in Grosse Pointe, a suburban town in Michigan that Anisha describes as a blissful, large-scale neighborhood from the eighties adorned with rows of idyllic American houses.
“My parents loved it there,” she adds. “All the neighbors knew each other. I think they really felt at home in Grosse Pointe. I don’t think they were ever able to recreate that sense of belonging, once they moved to Dallas.”
In other words, Michigan was just a tad too cold for a family from Mumbai. The Suterwala household settled in Texas, where humidity and heat reigned, and Dallas effectively became Anisha’s hometown.
“How was that transition for you?”
“Dallas was very different,” Anisha says. “A much bigger city where you could spend all of your time in the car or indoors. But, I think the transition was harder for my parents than it was for me and my sister. They did find their place in the city eventually, and now have close friends in Dallas too.”
A precocious and observant kid, Anisha spent much of her childhood absorbing the world around her, without giving much of herself to be absorbed by the world. She was shy and did not talk for a while. At all. If parents took her to their friends’ dinner parties, Anisha would just sit in silence and read.
“What did you read in those situations? Books?” I laugh.
“Anything I could get my hands on,” she chuckles. “Books. Newspapers. Juice boxes.”
Anisha, luckily, did start speaking just in time for school. All the way through high school, she remained, nonetheless, the precocious and observant kid at heart and spent most of her time in a universe of her own, observing and analyzing the world. Reading was unsurprisingly her primary way of doing this.
For the record, Anisha’s top ten books are (in no particular order):
The Waste Land (1922), by T. S. Eliot
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924), by Emily Dickinson
Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
Pride and Prejudice (1813), by Jane Austen
A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), by John Kennedy Toole
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), by Laurence Sterne
Swamplandia (2011), by Karen Russell
All My Puny Sorrows (2014), by Miriam Toews
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), by Douglas Adams
And Then There Were None (1939), by Agatha Christie
“Huh,” I say when she lists the names. “Fiction and poems.”
“Why bother with real life?” she says wryly. “I just want to read good stories.”
Anisha graduated high school as valedictorian of her class and then went to Yale, where she majored in English Language and Literature. She served as the president of Yale Rangeela, the Yale’s first Bollywood dance team, and also wrote for the Yale Daily News. I can’t help but think of Gilmore Girls when she tells me about her college experience. Did she also have to deal with the Paris Gellers and the Logan Huntzbergers and the Doyle McMasters? (To set the record straight, though, the only thing in common between Anisha and Rory Gilmore is their love of reading. The comparison is otherwise entirely unfit. Anisha is a catch. Rory Gilmore is insufferable.)
“How was Yale?” I ask. “I imagine you had to get accustomed to a different echelon of society?”
“Yale was definitely a good experience,” Anisha answers. “Very intellectual, but yes, it was also an entry into a rarified layer of elites.”
“Elite because of wealth?”
“Not necessarily because of wealth. Elite in the sense that it was normal to have access to the crème de la crème of everything. Doors were always open to them.”
“Did you ever feel like you wanted to fit into those circles?” I ask.
“No, not really,” she answers. “I never cared for prestige and glamour. Also, by that point, I didn’t feel like I needed to fit in because I was already accustomed to being an outsider. I guess I never liked being the center of attention.”
Duh, one might say. Who hides behind books as a shy kid and then grows up to love the spotlight? It’s a bit deeper than that, though. Once you get to know Anisha, what you realize is that she is not shy at all, and that she is—when needed and when surrounded by people she trusts—very comfortable holding court. What makes her an outsider is instead her deep-seated empathy. It’s a word that gets tossed around quite a lot these days and that quickly loses meaning, but in Anisha’s case, it means what it’s supposed to mean. Anisha feels deeply, sometimes to an extent that is unfathomable to others.
Her boyfriend Brandan described this trait well, when he said to me, “a lot of people say they care about others but few actually live out those values. Anisha really does. I can’t tell you how many times she asked that we go back to our apartment to grab extra change, if we had just spotted someone on the street who needed it. One time, when we were at this tea store, the lady who was working there said she was saving money to buy one of the teapots we happened to be looking at, and when Anisha heard that, she offered to buy the teapot for the lady. Anisha is deeply empathetic and she pushes me to live out what I say.”
Being so empathetic can be a double-edged sword. It’s a gift that helps strengthen relationships and that makes one highly attuned to the life that happens between the lines, to all the words that are left unspoken. It’s also a curse, especially when it becomes a magnifying glass into other people’s intricate emotional landscapes of hidden motives, festering insecurities, and unresolved feelings. It can be a lot to handle. Duh is the right response to Anisha’s dislike of the spotlight, but only because it makes sense that an empath like her prefers to stay in her own lane, where she can make sense of the overstimulating world around her.
Thirty minutes into our excursion through Green Apple Books, Anisha buys a book, and the two of us head back to Lower Haight because it’s time for Anisha’s baked goods. The dough for the Ligurian focaccia has been proofing since last night, which means it has been doing that for about thirteen hours in total, and Anisha needs to stretch the dough when we’re back, let it proof for another forty five minutes, then stretch it again, and finally bake the stretched dough for thirty minutes. This, by the way, is Anisha’s pastime, not a one-time passion project. She is always baking something—cakes, cookies, bread—and she has been doing it for years.
“How are you not exhausted by baking?” I ask when we get back to her apartment. “This all sounds so involved.”
“I find it meditative,” she answers. “It’s also very methodical, which, to me, is comforting in this chaotic universe.”
I underline the word methodical in my notebook when she says this. It’s the word that helps bridge the seemingly orthogonal sides of Anisha’s life. How did an empath, who majored in English Language and Literature and who loves to read and bake, end up in venture capital? Because—to keep the math references going—in the set of all empaths, Anisha belongs to a subset of methodical empaths. She feels deeply but she thinks systematically. It’s a trait that helps her stay calm in times of emotional turmoil and it’s a trait that lends itself well to world of finance, where methodicalness is highly prized.
Anisha taught herself basic finance during college. After graduating, she wasn’t entirely sure what to do, but she caught an eye of a higher-up who worked in banking and who was looking for someone to write the S-1 form, the initial registration form required by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) for every private company that wants to become public (or, in Silicon Valley slang, that wants to IPO). This was in 2015, when tech companies in Silicon Valley were IPOing at an astronomical rate, and Anisha—an attentive reader, a skilled writer, and a methodical number cruncher—turned out to be the perfect fit for the job. She quickly transitioned into an investment-banking analyst role and became a finance wiz.
She then worked in tech, which is how I met her, and by that point, she was already known as the resident human calculator. I remember opening her Slack profile at some point and noticing a brilliantly succinct one-liner below her profile image, which said, “Freak in the spreadsheets.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, Anisha moved to Chicago, where she got her MBA degree from Chicago Booth, and then came back to San Francisco to work as a venture capitalist. Her empathy is what made her relatable, creative, and imaginative, but it’s her methodicalness that made her diligent, driven, and patient. She is, what tech people like to call, a unicorn.
“Okay! It’s ready,” Anisha announces from the kitchen. “Denis, you can come take photos of the focaccia now.”
Brandan and Kira join us in the dining room for the delicious, homemade Italian snack. For a few minutes, the warm, soft, and fragrant focaccia is the only thing I can think about, and my bliss gets an extension when Anisha boxes up a few more slices of the bread and a slice of her cake for me to take home. As I’m getting ready to leave, I notice a colorful book on the dining table, right next to my plate. It’s the book Anisha bought at Green Apple Books. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton.
“Fiction, right?” I smile.
“Always, Denis.”
