Lily Joo

Who they are

Lily Joo is Founding Partner at 10K Ventures — a Georgia Tech finance graduate who built a Berlin-based VC firm from scratch in 2019 after stints at Glovo and Lazada, and now sits on the boards of ValerIA and Edgee.

Person

Lily studied Business Administration and Finance at Georgia Tech, graduating summa cum laude with a 3.99 GPA — a signal she carries into an unusually rigorous operator-turned-investor career. Early roles spanned a student foundation investment committee, an analyst internship at Herndon Capital Management, and operations at Pomelo Fashion and Lazada (Alibaba's Southeast Asian arm), giving her a rare mix of financial discipline and on-the-ground startup ops before she ever wrote a check. She then moved to Glovo as an Operations Manager — one of Europe's fastest-scaling delivery companies — before pivoting into venture via a Venture Partner role covering DACH and Southern Europe at VentureFriends.vc. In 2019 she founded 10K Ventures in Berlin: a personal investment arm she describes as focused on high-conviction deals, building, acquiring, and investing across Europe and beyond. She's an investor and board member at ValerIA (AI-powered HR management) and Edgee (open-source edge computing), and an LP in Newtopia VC's $50M early-stage fund in Latin America. She speaks actively on the circuit — moderating a panel at Panathēnea 2025 on the risk and regret calculus of leaving big companies for startups, and joining an AI Summit Barcelona panel on how AI is rewriting the fundamentals of company building and financing.

Network

Lily's visible network is anchored in the European early-stage and Southern European startup scenes. She engages regularly with Sacha Morard on startup and VC topics, and with Pau Laporte on ecosystem posts — both consistent with her DACH and Southern Europe investing focus. Her LP position in Newtopia VC and board seats at ValerIA and Edgee point to an active cross-Atlantic network spanning Berlin, Barcelona, and Latin America.

  • Sacha Morard· Frequent co-engagement on startups and VC
  • Pau Laporte· Frequent engagement on startup ecosystem posts
  • ValerIA (portfolio)· Investor and board member — AI-powered HR management
  • Edgee (portfolio)· Investor and board member — open-source edge computing

How they likely show up

  • Summa cum laude Finance degree (3.99 GPA) → likely brings quantitative rigour to deal evaluation — expects precision in numbers and structure.
  • Career arc moves from ops (Pomelo, Lazada, Glovo) to venture → she has lived inside the execution layer; she'll pressure-test operational claims, not just TAM slides.
  • Founded 10K Ventures in 2019 and has maintained it as her primary vehicle → operates with a long time horizon and high autonomy, not a committee person.
  • Board seats at both a deep-tech (Edgee — edge computing) and an HR-tech (ValerIA — AI) company → generalist with conviction, not a sector tourist.
  • Active speaker circuit — Panathēnea 2025 moderator, AI Summit Barcelona, VDS 2024, 4YFN 2026 — → comfortable as a public voice and earns trust through ideas-on-stage, not just capital.
  • Hybrid role-type pattern (operator → investor) and mixed tenure shape → values versatility; likely bored by founders who only know one mode.

Conversation tips

  • → Reference a specific panel she moderated — the Panathēnea 2025 discussion on 'risk, reward, and regret' in moving from big companies to startups is a topic she clearly has strong views on.
  • → If you have an ops or execution angle, lead with it — she ran operations at Glovo and Lazada, so she reads operational competence fast and respects founders who've been in the weeds.
  • → Don't skip the Latin America angle: her LP position in Newtopia VC's $50M fund is a deliberate bet, not a passive one — ask about cross-Atlantic founder patterns if relevant.
  • → She's fluent in English and Korean — worth knowing if cultural context or cross-border deal dynamics come up in conversation.
  • → She attends 4YFN Barcelona as an active investor — if you have a Southern Europe or DACH angle, name it explicitly; it's a stated focus area for her.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on the Panathēnea 2025 panel she moderated — 'risk, reward, and regret' in moving from big companies to startups. She chose that framing herself, which means she has a real point of view on it worth drawing out.
  • Reference her board seat at Edgee, the open-source edge computing platform — it's a technical bet from a finance-trained investor, and the tension between those two things is worth unpacking.
  • Mention the AI Summit Barcelona panel on AI rewriting company-building fundamentals — she was there representing a specific thesis, not just attending, and it's recent enough to be live.

Discovery questions

  1. You ran ops at Glovo before moving to venture — when you're evaluating an early-stage company's operations now, what's the thing founders almost never think to show you?
  2. Your LP position in Newtopia VC sits alongside your European portfolio at 10K Ventures — how do you think about the differences in founder profile or market dynamics between Latin America and DACH right now?
  3. You moderated the Panathēnea panel on leaving big companies for startups — what's the answer people get most wrong when they're weighing that decision?

Avoid

Don't come in with a generic AI pitch framed as 'the future of X' — she's been on panels specifically about how AI rewrites company-building fundamentals, so she'll want the specific mechanism, not the headline.

Make it yours

Tailor these openers to what you sell

These openers are generic. Sign in and tell Brief what you sell — it rewrites the hooks and questions around your pitch.

Sources

Brief on your next meeting?

Type any name. Get a structured pre-meeting brief in seconds.

Try Brief →

Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on July 31, 2026. Each claim is linked to its source above.

Automatically generated by AI from public sources. May be inaccurate or out of date. Remove or correct this profile →