What drew Anna to Earlybird was not only the firm’s track record, but also the depth of its ecosystem. Having backed some of Europe’s most ambitious founders, Earlybird has built a network that is both influential and, in her view, still full of untapped potential. 

“The firm has backed some of the most ambitious founders in Europe, and with that comes a network that’s both powerful and, in many ways, still underutilised.”

When much of our professional lives happens online, she sees an increasing need to be more intentional about how people come together in person. As technology continues to scale information and automate workflows, Anna believes that relationships are becoming one of the few truly scarce assets.

“You can scale information, but you can’t scale trust in the same way.”

This shift is what makes the role particularly compelling to her: the opportunity to shape environments where meaningful, lasting connections can emerge.

Anna’s path to this role has been anything but linear. She began her career in consulting, drawn by the opportunity to work across industries and problem spaces. While the experience provided a strong foundation, she found herself missing a sense of continuity and long-term ownership.

This led her into the venture ecosystem, where she joined Pretiosum Ventures at an early stage and worked closely with the founder. While she was involved across different areas, she consistently gravitated toward the human side of the work: building relationships with founders, connecting people within the network, and creating opportunities for those connections to happen organically.

Over time, this shifted from something she simply enjoyed to something she saw as fundamentally important. In her experience, many of the most meaningful outcomes in venture don’t happen in formal settings, but through the relationships built around them.

“When you see a founder meet their future investor, customer, or employee through something you’ve created, it stops feeling like an event and starts feeling like a core part of how value is built.”

This view is closely tied to a broader shift she has observed across the venture ecosystem. Increasingly, venture is becoming relationship-driven rather than transaction-driven. In highly competitive fundraising environments, decisions are often made quickly, sometimes after only one meaningful interaction. As a result, the foundation for those decisions must be established well in advance.

The most effective investors today are those who are already part of a founder’s network long before capital is needed, acting as sparring partners, connectors, and long-term supporters. Community plays a crucial role in enabling this dynamic by creating repeated, low-pressure interactions where trust can develop naturally over time.

Despite this, community is still often perceived as intangible or difficult to measure. Anna challenges that notion. In her experience, many of the most significant outcomes in venture (whether hiring, partnerships, or fundraising) emerge from these informal, relationship-driven interactions. They may not always be immediate or linear, but they are fundamental to how value is built.

This thinking also informs how she approaches events. While the number of industry events continues to grow, she believes very few create a lasting impact. The events that actually matter are the ones that feel considered from the outset, in who attends and how people are brought together.

“A well-curated group of 20 people can create significantly more value than a room of 200 with no clear intention.”

For Anna, smaller, carefully curated gatherings often create more value than larger, less focused formats. The goal is to enable conversations that go beyond surface-level exchanges: discussions that are more honest, nuanced, and ultimately more useful for the people involved.

Equally important is what happens after the event. The true measure of success is not attendance or immediate feedback, but whether relationships continue and lead to something tangible over time.

Looking ahead, Anna’s ambition is to build a community that people actively choose to be part of. This means designing experiences that feel intentional, differentiated, and genuinely valuable, ranging from intimate formats that foster deeper connections to larger gatherings that bring together the broader ecosystem around shared themes.

A warm welcome to Anna as she joins the Earlybird team, based in the London Office. Reach out to her on LinkedIn to get the conversation started!