Joy Fairbanks
Managing Principal, Fairbanks Venture AdvisorsJoy Fairbanks is an experienced institutional investor, builder, innovation advisor, and educator. She works extensively with founders of early and growth stage tech startups across sectors and verticals.
Joy is Managing Principal at Fairbanks Venture Advisors (FVA) and serves as an operating and investment partner with venture funds focused on enabling innovative tech ventures with high performing and underrepresented founders. Joy is featured in the book, Latinas in VC.
Joy works with emerging investors and VCs on developing investment theses, crafting robust founder and startup valuation rubrics, drafting performance tracking/reporting, sourcing investments, and cultivating individual and institutional LPs. Additionally, Joy works with universities, investors, and corporate clients on innovation programming, platforms, and advisory.
Joy’s superpower is identifying high potential founders and guiding them to success. Joy advises over a hundred tech startup founders per year across sectors and geographies on product development, market assessment/customer acquisition strategy, partnerships/pilots, financial forecasting, funding, M&A, turnarounds, and exits. She is a requested speaker and university lecturer on these topics and writes about startup success at FairbanksVentureAdvisors.com.
Joy has launched and provided support to various tech incubators across the US and abroad including Techstars, Blackstone, Village Capital, Venture Out, Columbia Venture Community 2.8 Women’s Accelerator, LBAN/Latino Business Action Network, Stanford’s Hacking for Recovery, Cal Hacks, NYU’s New Media Accelerator, and the Long Beach Accelerator. She is the founder of two management consulting practices.
Joy has served as a faculty member of entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School where she organized Columbia’s first cross-campus startup hackathon and ran the impact venture incubator course.
Joy has an MBA in finance from Columbia Business School, a Masters in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Bachelors in Economics from UC Berkeley.