Joy Fairbanks
Managing Principal
Joy is an experienced institutional investor, builder/founder, innovation enabler, and educator. She serves as an operating & investment partner and as an advisor to high growth, innovative tech companies across sectors.
Joy is a requested speaker and university lecturer on entrepreneurship, investing, and tech innovation.
Joy’s superpower is identifying high potential founders and guiding them to success. She advises over a hundred startup founders per year on product development, market assessment/customer acquisition strategy, partnerships/pilots, financial forecasting, fundraising, turnarounds, and successful exits.
Joy has extensive experience advising companies across geographies from M&A and strategic planning to process improvement and supply chain optimization.
Joy develops tech incubation programming and has launched and provided support to various startup accelerators across the US and abroad. She has worked with the following: Blackstone Launchpad (powered by Techstars), Inventor to Founders (I2F) Cyber NYC, Village Capital, StartEd’s NYU New Media Lab, Stanford University’s Hacking for Recovery Lean Launchpad, Stanford’s Latino Business Action Network (LBAN), Black Ambition, The German American Chamber of Commerce (GACC-Step USA), Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), Venture Out, The Long Beach Accelerator, CSULB’s Apostle Incubator, Columbia Venture Community’s 2.8 Women’s Accelerator, and various Columbia University entrepreneurship initiatives.
Joy is an alumna of Columbia Business School (Roar Lion Roar!), The London School of Economics and Political Science (Mick Jagger’s alma mater), and The University of California at Berkeley (Go Bears!).
Joy has served as an adjunct assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School with a demonstrated expertise in entrepreneurship, finance, innovation, and strategy. Joy is highly supportive of impact ventures and organized Columbia’s inaugural Hacking for Humanity Startup Hackathon.