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Brianne Kimmel is the founder and managing partner of Worklife Ventures, a $45M early-stage venture firm backed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Yuan. Her portfolio has 9 unicorns: Webflow, Deel, Clubhouse, Supabase, Tonal, and more. She recently opened Worklife Studios in Silver Lake, LA: a physical gathering space for founders, creators, and technologists who believe the best work happens when real humans are in the room together.
But before all of that: Youngstown, Ohio. Rust belt. Ukrainian immigrant family. A journalism degree from Kent State. A move to Sydney, Australia alone at 22 and four years there, chasing something she couldn't quite name. She came back and started writing $1,000 angel checks to founders most people hadn't heard of, helping them get into rooms with Andreessen Horowitz before she had any leverage to offer.
She had a philosophy instead: lead with generosity before you have anything else.
In 2019, inspired by Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and a personal craving for real connection she couldn't shake, she launched Worklife Ventures. The mission: make work more human.
This episode is about a thesis Brianne has been building her entire career: that corporate culture stripped something essential out of us, that the internet took another 100 things we haven't gotten back, and that the best founders are the ones Silicon Valley keeps overlooking: the ones with zigzag lives, real taste, and a reason that's bigger than the exit.
In this conversation, Brianne and I get into:
- Why the MBA founder almost always builds a generic company and what the zigzag life produces that no business school can teach
- The "culture sourcing" strategy that gave her more deal flow than anyone chasing it the conventional way
- Why Gen Z hates dating apps for the exact same reason they hate bad workplaces and what it tells us about the future of work
- Why the "next door millionaire" (the plumber, the contractor, the skilled tradesperson) has more job security in the AI era than the Ivy League entry-level software engineer
- The science of luck and why the unlucky person is usually trying too hard
- Why vulnerability in the workplace isn't a nice-to-have but actually the foundation of high-performing teams
- How becoming unrelatable is the number one thing that kills careers, even wildly successful ones
- Why a mission without a "why" can't attract great people, no matter how good the salary is
- What it means to "get outside the bubble" and why it's the most important leadership move of this decade
Brianne is one of the most original thinkers I've had on this show. She leads like she believes humans actually matter. This one is going to stay with you.
Full episode is live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
