HHCIB 009 Sarah Downey & AR:VR

How Hard Can It Be?

This week's episode features my conversation with Sarah A. Downey, a Principal at Accomplice focused on venture investing in virtual and augmented reality and frontier tech. Before getting into venture she served as Director of Marketing at Ovuline, a women’s reproductive health startup making fertility and pregnancy mobile apps, and as Manager of Content and Communications at Abine, a consumer online privacy startup. She got her J.D. from the University of Connecticut School of Law, and a B.A. in Psychology from Hamilton College. Sarah’s pretty well known in VR circles as a contributing writer for UploadVR.com, and has been featured as a source in over 250 publications including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, CNET, and CNN. She’s a video gamer, weight lifter, and scifi fan, or as her Twitter bio says, a “17 year-old boy interests in the guise of an adult female.” Awesome. To me Sarah’s one of the more fascinating characters on the Boston venture scene these days, and what I most hoped to get out of our conversation was a better understanding of how a nice girl from Connecticut goes from being a lawyer to an inked up, cosplaying, video game fanatic helping to make sure Boston holds its spot at the virtual reality grown up table. I found my answer where she did; in the parking lot of a Barnes & Noble a few years back, where she decided to stop living the life other people expected her to live, and started to build a new one around the truth of who she was, what she wanted, and what she loved to do. How Hard Can It Be is sponsored by G20 Ventures, early traction capital for East Coast enterprise tech startups, backed by the power and expertise of 20 ?of the Northeast's most accomplished ?entrepreneurs. G20 Ventures.?..?? ?People first. How Hard Can It Be is ?also ?sponsored by Actifio?. Actifio? virtualizes?? data ?the way a hypervisor virtualizes compute, ?to ?help customers enable the? ?hybrid cloud, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability.? ?Actifio?... ?Radically Simple.?