Venture Capitalist Miriam Rivera Is Betting On Longshots — And Finding Unicorns

When Miriam Rivera was born in 1964 to a pair of Puerto Rican migrant farmers in Dunkirk, New York, women in the United States could not get a credit card or mortgage without a male co-signer. Although the Civil Rights Act was signed that year—which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin—Wall Street was still three years away from seeing its first female member of the New York Stock Exchange.

Sixty years later, Rivera is thriving as the cofounder and CEO of Ulu Ventures, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm with $400 million in assets under management and a portfolio that includes ten current or recently-exited unicorns. Rivera says that her personal journey, from a free-lunch kid learning English from watching Sesame Street to Silicon Valley power broker, is reflected in her investing philosophy. “I’m really looking for those long shots,” Rivera says, “because in a power-law distributed world, it's really the few that will generate a lot of profitability.”

Rivera is one of the 200 all-new members of our fourth annual 50 Over 50 list—a collection of women who, like Rivera, have careers that are hitting powerful peaks during life’s second half.

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