Enhancing value. Navigating exits.
Guiding tech founders, c-suite executives, and investors to realize opportunities while navigating obstacles and transitions.
Fairbanks Venture Advisors (FVA) functions as an operating and investment partner, an advisor to early stage and growth ventures, and a source of original programming for tech incubation and investing.
Operating & Investment Partner. FVA works with emerging fund managers on crafting investment theses, robust investment valuation rubrics, performance metrics, reporting standards, HR/firm building, cultivating LPs, sourcing investment targets, and due diligence.
Advisor. FVA serves founders and c-suite executives, across sectors and growth stages from ideation through hyper-growth and international scaling.
FVA advises on product development, business modeling, market assessment and customer acquisition, financial forecasting, performance measurement, partnerships/pilots, fundraising, investor relations, turnarounds, M&A, and successful exits.
Programming & Curriculum Developer. FVA creates and delivers tailored programming and curriculum for founders and investors. FVA guides incubated portfolio companies to derisk the investment and maximize returns. Such programming and curriculum has been delivered at Columbia Business School and tech incubators in the US and abroad.
Innovation Ecosystem Builder. FVA has launched several tech incubators in higher education and as part of private-public partnerships. FVA unites stakeholders for inclusive outcomes in sustainable, market making enterprises.
Services Offered
Founders
FVA can help you where you are stuck to amplify your potential.
Planning and Due Diligence for High Valuation Exits at Any Stage.
Assessing Non-Consensus Market Opportunities
Guiding MVP Iterations and Optimizing UX
Developing Go to Market Strategy for Launch & Adjacent Markets
Setting Pricing and Monetization Strategy
Nailing Pitching and Fundraising Under Time Constraints
Managing Pivots and Turnarounds
Refining Investor Relations
Investors and Corporate/University Innovation Accelerators
FVA develops sector specific or sector agnostic tools and programming for capital allocators and innovative venture teams, delivers advisory services for portfolio companies, assists with high potential founder outreach, and collaborates on LP attraction and retention strategies.
Startup Success Blog
Optimize your tech buildout, choose milestones and metrics that matter, slay your 30 second pitch, price on value, and learn how to derisk your venture through UX research.
Featured Founders
Check out the stories of the people starting promising ventures.
Read about the people and the movements welcoming you to catapult our innovation ecosystem to the next, more inclusive, level.
Let’s do this thing! 🌟
Community Support
Testimonials
-
![]()
“Joy Fairbanks helped prepare my AI startup for an exit at a high valuation. Her help was instrumental to showcase our potential, team, operations, roadmap, and value to prospective acquirers.
Keith Gipson
Founder & CEO
Facil.ai -
![]()
“Joy is extremely knowledgeable and experienced in startups and VC financing, a hard worker, and extremely delightful to work with. Truly a rock star! If you are looking for someone who is going to help you excel to your best level and beyond, please do yourself a favor and contact Joy ASAP.
Jose Seara
Founder & CEO
DeNexus, Inc. -
![]()
"With Joy Fairbanks's guidance, customer discovery has become an essential part of our business strategy. Her insights have left a lasting impact. This continuous focus on customer discovery enables us to consistently understand our customers' pain points and find effective ways to address them. As our business continues to grow, the principles she taught us remain at the core of our operations."
Emily Woodman
Co-Founder & CEO
At Their Side -
![]()
“It has been an amazing journey knowing and working with Joy. She excels in developing and deploying highly creative growth strategies aligned to market trends and expectations. She is particularly skilled at product management, GTM, and financial best practices and methodologies. Her leadership and thought-capital around companies of impact - doing good for people and the planet- is astoundingly apparent in her Hacking for Humanity course she teaches at Columbia University. It's impressive to watch Joy toggle between macro and micro aspects of building businesses. Joy has the unique ability to look at new products and early-stage companies through the eyes of an investor. I'm looking forward to partnering with Joy for years to come.
John Majeski
CEO & Founding GP
Portola Valley Partners -
![]()
“A few months after founding GEM, I had the amazing opportunity to participate in Hacking for Humanity, a 3-day startup hackathon, and got to know Professor Joy Fairbanks. This 3-day experience for social venture founders was life changing for me. It validated my desire to be an entrepreneur and showed me that there are tons of people that truly care about startups with a social mission. After that, I enrolled in the Social Venture Incubator course taught by Professor Fairbanks. This course is one of the best classes that I've taken at CBS. You can tell how much thought the professor put into each class, the reading materials, the guest speakers, and the lectures. It is not only the content of the course that makes it so special, but the dedication that Professor Fairbanks has for each one of her students. She provides very detailed feedback and guidance on each venture, she offers a lot of office hours, and spends time with her students beyond what her responsibilities require her to do. You can tell that she really cares. I've spent long hours with her discussing GEM and being a Latina female entrepreneur. She is not only a great advisor but also a role model. The entrepreneurship path is not easy. Professor Fairbanks understands the importance of collaboration and promotes it. Collaboration was a strong focus in both Hacking for Humanity and in the Social Venture Incubator. I was able to form highly diverse teams to work on my startup. We were a combination of students from different careers and represented undergrad, EMBA, and exchange students. This not only helped me to obtain different perspectives but also to broaden my network and reach. If you are a founder at Columbia, you need to take Professor Fairbanks's class.”
Lulu Arias
Director of CS at Xendee
Founder & CEO GEM -
![]()
"Joy is a passionate, strategic, and experienced mentor for entrepreneurship. She provided valuable insight as a founder herself, a business strategist, and a woman in business. She pulls on decades of cross-sector experience, which gives her a broader understanding of the factors and challenges of entrepreneurship. Joy helped me step back and analyze my business, our strategy for the future, and the overall market that we were targeting. She was patient and thorough as she dug into the details alongside me, showing that she truly cared about our company's success and mission. I cannot recommend Joy enough to other aspiring entrepreneurs, especially those who are struggling with strategic planning or funding decisions. She is quick, insightful, and deeply passionate about mentoring and coaching entrepreneurs.
Shanna Crumley
Director, Impact Data Science
Mastercard
Co-Founder & Co-CEO
Bitae Technologies
