A Venture Capital Leader’s Advice for Women in Finance

Passing the Mic: How Serena Dayal Built Conviction, Judgment, and Her Career

An ASK. BUILD. GROW. conversation with Serena Dayal, Venture Partner at Athena Capital

Serena Dayal has built her investing lens in chapters: investment banking, private equity, andgrowth-stage venture, each adding a different kind of rigor. Today, as a Venture Partner at Athena Capital, she’s drawn to inflection points where new technologies and business models collide, and where conviction matters as much as credentials. Underneath the prestigious title, her throughline is grounded: do the real-world work, build judgment through reps, invest in relationships, and don’t wait around for luck.
 
ABG Print sat down with Serena to pass on the lessons that shaped her path, and share the advice for women in finance she returns to again and again as she invests, leads, and builds conviction in a fast-moving industry.
 

You’ve seen companies from multiple angles, as a banker, a private equity investor, and a growth-stage VC. How did each stage shape the way you invest today?

Each stage gave me a different perspective. As an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, I learned the fundamentals of corporate finance under pinning public and private markets and what drives M&A. Private equity added an operational and ownership lens and ingrained deep respect for founders and management teams building in the most complex, consequential sectors. And growth equity investing at Soft bank felt like a springboard backwards, to companies at an earlier stage of their growth trajectory but also forwards, to companies defining the future.
 
For me growth / venture investing is where it gets exciting. You’re partnering with founders at true inflection points, as new technologies and business models are emerging, in areas where GenAI is shifting competitive dynamics or where entire industries (e.g. healthcare and defense) are undergoing structural rewiring. You determine when a team is exceptional and when a frontier technology has a real pulse and then you ask the question, what has to be true in order for this to become an escape velocity company? And to answer those questions, I always fall back on the fundamentals, about markets and companies, that I learned in banking and PE.

Looking back, was there a mentor, colleague, or even a tough manager who helped shape how you lead today?

I’ve been lucky to work with several exceptional senior women who shaped how I lead, women who combined clarity, decisiveness, and generosity. Watching them operate showed me how high standards and deep support can co exist.
 
More recently in my career, I worked for a former CEO who was remarkable at building teams. He created an environment where we rigorously (but kindly) challenged one another, where we thoroughly discussed investments we were passing on, and modeled what it looks like to lead while prioritizing shared learning. He taught me that culture isn’t an abstract idea, rather that it’s built through daily habits, trust and open information flow.

The world of investing can be high-stakes and high-pressure. How did you learn to trust your own judgment, especially when everyone around you had strong opinions?

I was taught very early into my time at Fortress that you can’t evaluate a business model solely from behind a computer screen, though the numbers are important and give you crucial clues. You have to go out and touch, see, and feel the business in the real world. That means speaking to customers, competitors, professors, domain experts, or literally anyone who has experienced the product or service from any angle to test it for yourself.
 
Over time, once you’ve done this for enough sub sectors, sat with clinicians in a health system, listened to procurement leads explain what they actually buy, etc., you begin to form a cohesive world view. The reps compound and you also start to make non-obvious lateral connections across different types of business models.

If you could give your younger self one piece of career advice, say, right after college or in your first big role, what would it be?

Don’t forget about luck. A friend of mine, Lucy Lee, recently described luck as golden threads hanging from the sky: they are all around us, but are impossible to bump into if you’re standing still. You need to create enough momentum and entropy in your life and career that you end up colliding with a few of those threads.

For early-career professionals trying to stand out, especially women in finance or venture, what qualities or habits make a lasting impression?

Finding women you admire, peers, juniors, seniors, and bringing them along with you on your career journey. Amplify their voices in meetings. Make space, share opportunities, pass the mic.

Quick Hits

• Go-to reset: “My favorite reset is going to look at art… Creativity is contagious!”
• Rewatch rotation: “My three favorite movies are Dune, Dunkirk and the Darkest Hour…”
• Home base: “London will always feel like home to me, probably because I’m fluent in the language.”
• Coffee order: “Espresso! And quite literally at any time of day.”
• Alt career: “Today, I’d love to be a curator at a contemporary art museum.”