TCA Member Spotlight – Angela and Sonia Steinway
December’s Feature Spotlight introduces TCA Members Angela and Sonia Steinway. East Coast transplants by way of the University of Pennsylvania, they’ve chosen La Jolla Shores as their new home and TCA as their vehicle into the San Diego startup and innovation lifestyle!
Can you tell us a bit about yourselves – how you started down your career paths, where you’ve ended up at this point in your career, and what you do to blow off steam when you’re not busy?
Angela:
When I was at the University of Pennsylvania, I tried to start my own medical device company. I invented a device and received a provision patent, but I quickly learned that it takes a lot of money – and I had a lot of student loans. Instead I joined Oppenheimer after graduating as a research analyst covering the medical device and diagnostic space. I stayed there from 2007-09. There was a lot of M&A activity, so it was a really fun time to be on Wall Street, and I learned a lot.
After the market crashed, one of the companies I had covered was looking to start an investor relations program. With my interest in entrepreneurship – and the fact that people weren’t jumping ship from this company – I thought it was a good time to switch paths again, so in March of 2009 I moved to Integra LifeSciences and started their IR program. When I joined, we were near $500 million in market cap; we’ve seen a 10x appreciation since then, to nearly $5 billion in enterprise value today.
Once the program was established and running, I picked up responsibility for corporate finance and strategy and also became heavily involved in their M&A activity. We did over 18 acquisitions while I was in that role. When we moved to San Diego in 2017, I changed to a sales role to get more commercial experience. I had the corporate finance and strategy boxes checked and wanted to get experience on the commercial side of the company as well so I did national contracting for a year and a half. About a year ago I became the sales director for one of our fastest growing lines – regenerative skin substitute products – and currently manage a group of 55 salespeople nationwide.
Outside of work, I dive as often as I can! I’m part of a local nonprofit social meetup scuba group organizing dives in La Jolla Shores, buddying up and going out a few times a week if possible. We’ve been to some cool dive spots in the world. We used to be exclusively vacation divers when we lived back east – and Sonia is still primarily a vacation diver because the water is too cold for her. We’re doing a big diving trip in Honduras this spring. This fall we went to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands.
Sonia:
I am an attorney by training. My particular focus and passion is consumer finance and regulation. I started out working with people filing for bankruptcy leading up to the 2005 Reform Act, and was amazed at how bankruptcy laws act as an additional social safety net, allowing people to get out of the hole so that they aren’t scarred permanently. You couldn’t have a thriving start-up sector without bankruptcy; if you knew you couldn’t declare bankruptcy, you would never be able to start a company because you’d be at risk of getting permanently stuck with the debt.
Angela and I met my first day as a freshman in college. After graduating, I went to work for Bain & Co. doing management strategy consulting. I wanted to help businesses solve problems, learn to speak business lingo, and develop the skill of thinking like a consultant in 2×2 matrices and 3 bullet points. I then unlearned all of that going to law school at Yale, where you speak in 600 page briefs and footnotes. I was still interested in consumer finance. By that time, Dodd-Frank bill had made massive changes in the industry, and it gave me the opportunity to do some regulatory consulting work.
But after working with banks to implement the new rules, I realized that, while most of the time regulation is incredibly important, it often doesn’t help individual consumers. I wanted to engage more with people to empower them to make smarter financing decisions.
At the end of clerking – I worked for two judges, one in Delaware (home of corporate law) and one for the U.S. Second Circuit in New York – I met the person that would become the cofounder of my consumer auto finance company, Outside Financial. I actually deleted his email at first because I thought it was too crazy an idea to become the founder of a startup. I’m more risk-averse; Angela is the entrepreneurial one. But I “undeleted” the email and forwarded it to Angela. We decided that since she had job stability and health insurance, it would be amazing to operate in this innovation space as the founder of my own company. We’ve been running it for 3 years now, operating remotely – my cofounder is still in New York. It has been a fascinating learning experience being in a startup on every level.
Outside of work, my personal passion is rock climbing – I love to climb, I would climb every day if I could. I’m also a competitive crossword puzzler. We also have a nine-year old son, who we spent most of our other free time with. He wants to be an entrepreneur when he grows up, so I guess we’re doing something right.
What led you to taking an interest in angel investing, and TCA in particular?
Sonia:
There’ve been a number of paths that led us to angel investing. We’ve both felt some skittishness around the future growth of the market, and we were looking at alternative ways to invest our money. We both also firmly believe in the power of innovation and entrepreneurship when it comes to growth and opportunity, and we believe in building and investing in our community. We love San Diego, and we want more companies to thrive here so that people can have great qualities of life here. San Diego has developed such a strong and rich community and we see entrepreneurship as a great path for continuing to grow and enrich that community.
Angel investing feels like this amazing way to not only grow wealth through investment, but simultaneously create good sustainable jobs and give entrepreneurs a chance to thrive – so it really fit in with a lot of our personal goals. But because we’re totally new to angel investing we didn’t feel comfortable doing it on our own; we wouldn’t see enough good deals or be able to vet good deals, and we wanted to learn from other people who know how to do this well. We canvased the landscape of local organizations that do angel investing and discovered TCA. We’ve learned so much from attending meetings and speaking with other members, but also really enjoy the camaraderie at TCA! We’ve devoted a lot more to angel investing than we ever thought we would before we were angel investors! We’ve made one investment separate from TCA and being in TCA has really informed how we’ve thought about that – the questions we’ve asked, understanding how that process works – which has been great. It’s fundamentally an investing group with the goal of earning money, but the social aspect has been really amazing and we love the people we’ve met.
Angela:
When I was at Penn, I was heavily involved in a student incubator called the Weiss Tech House. After gaining some work experience, I came back as an alumni advisor and a judge and mentor for student startups coming out of that program. That was something I enjoyed doing with my spare time when we lived in New Jersey. When we moved here, I was hoping to find something that would fill that gap, and although I haven’t gotten involved in TCA as much as I’d like to, it stimulates that part of my intellect and gives me an outlet for that impulse.
Sonia:
We love going over deals together. Angela has a background in life sciences and deeply understands that space, I have a tech and regulatory background, and we enjoy meeting in the middle to bounce around our thoughts about the deals. Our rule is that we both have to want to invest in something, we both have to feel strongly about it, before we go through with it. It been really cool, almost a romantic couple activity to do this together, we get a babysitter for TCA dinners or other functions, it’s been really lovely, (laughs) keeps the magic alive!
How has your personal background influenced your investment strategies?
Sonia:
My investment thesis is probably a little more targeted and narrow than Angela’s. I want to see companies that are going to make a meaningful difference in the world. It’s easiest to see that in something like life sciences, whether it’s a life-saving technology or something that provides a meaningful quality-of-life improvement. But even with other kinds of tech, I want to see that there’s some element of societal progress in their offering. I’m also really interested in non-traditional founders, particularly women. These are the traits that make me more excited about an investment opportunity. We’re not to the point where we wouldn’t invest if a company was not fitting in these boxes of a non-traditional founder or a high-social-impact product, but that’s probably where we would ultimately prefer to invest.
Angela:
I like to think about whether companies would be a good investment from the context of having been on deal teams for a public company; would I acquire this startup if I was an established company in this space? The other factor I look at is the leadership team, and whether they can build a team that can execute on their proposed business plan. In my experience, so much of the success I’ve seen, whether they’re going to hit their earnout payments after they get bought, is from entrepreneurs who are not just “The Person” handling everything themselves but a person that can build a team. And the last piece of it would be does it make sense from a financial standpoint, do they have a strategy, do they have a good commercial plan? These are the same three areas of focus I’ve been developing over the course of my own career, and so I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned from my own experience in determining whether a company has these elements for success and is a worthwhile investment.
Can you share any lessons you’ve learned from your experiences that our readers might find helpful?
Sonia:
We’re so new to angel investing that we haven’t yet screwed up badly, thank goodness! I’m sure we’ll get there. I can say, as an entrepreneur myself and watching other entrepreneurs going through processes like fundraising with TCA, the largest lesson I’ve learned is to build your network far in advance of when you’re going to need it. Try and take in as many diverse viewpoints as you can, because every entrepreneur thinks that they’re facing issues for the first time, that nobody’s ever dealt with their particular issues – but the stronger your network, the more you realize everybody faces the same challenges, and you can lean on those people to help you make smarter decisions.
Are there any organizations you support and would like to highlight? Any causes, events, companies that the startup community, TCA, or San Diegans in general would benefit from knowing about?
Sonia:
If anyone would like to know more about Barbara Bry’s mayoral campaign, I would love to talk about her. She was a former TCA member, before she became a City councilperson, and we were drawn to her by her stance on scooters. She’s also a Penn alum, and a successful angel investor who believes in funneling her success back into the community, particularly funding female entrepreneurs, which has made us very excited about her ability to foster innovation, attract the right kind of jobs, and bring more talent to our community.
Why did you decide move to San Diego, and how has it changed your life? What makes it unique and stand out from other places you’ve lived? What excites you about the future of San Diego?
Sonia:
We came to San Diego on vacation about 8 years ago and absolutely fell in love with it! We’re both analytical, so we had a spreadsheet with different factors we were looking for in a city when we were thinking about where we wanted to live, but when we got here we immediately thought, “this is it, this is everything we want.” It then became a question of how we could make it out here. I ended up going to law school back east, much to Angela’s chagrin. When I was done clerking and after founding my startup, I was working remotely, and it turns out there’s a lot of auto finance talent in the area – there were some legacy companies that left and their people didn’t want to leave San Diego, so they stayed here – and we’d actually engaged consultants and experts here, which felt like a sign.
At the same time, Angela’s work wanted her to move to a more commercial role, which she could perform from many different places, and so we felt this was the time since everything was trending in that direction. We came out here on President’s Day weekend in 2017 and found the perfect home on the last day of our trip. It just came on the market that morning, and we were the first people to see it. We put in an offer right away… and then told our families, “Surprise! We’re moving to San Diego!”
We love the climate, the weather, and how active and outdoorsy San Diegans are. When we were living in New Jersey we’d go hiking and people thought we were crazy for spending time in the woods. It felt so warm and welcoming here. We’re both vegetarian, and the food is so much better here (I’m a big farmer’s market person). In terms of entrepreneurship, I’ve always felt that New York is too big and too much is going on – yes, there are lots of resources but navigating the massive ecosystem can be challenging. Whereas here, it’s a little easier to wrap your heads around things and meet folks, so I’ve definitely enjoyed getting engaged in this community in a way I don’t think we ever did when we were living back east. When you find the right home, it feels like everything clicks into place!