Ask Me Anything with Brianne Kimmel, Angel Investor and Founder of Worklife Ventures
This URL once hosted a December 2019 AMA with Brianne Kimmel. The original text was lost, so this page now carries a sourced profile instead: her Zendesk years, the $5M debut fund, the Webflow and Hopin bets, and what her public writing tells founders who want to pitch her.
On this page
A note on this page. In December 2019 this URL hosted a community "Ask Me Anything" with Brianne Kimmel. The Q&A text was lost in a 2026 site migration and no archived copy exists, including on the Wayback Machine, so we cannot republish it and we will not reconstruct answers she never wrote. What follows instead is a profile built only from dated, public reporting and Kimmel's own published statements. Nothing below is quoted from the lost AMA.
Brianne Kimmel is the founder and managing partner of Worklife Ventures, a San Francisco seed fund she launched in September 2019 after several years running go-to-market programs at Zendesk and angel investing on nights and weekends. The short version of her record: a $5 million debut fund announced by TechCrunch on September 10, 2019, a $35 million second fund reported by TechCrunch on April 25, 2022, and early checks into companies that later cleared billion-dollar valuations, including Webflow, Deel, Pipe and Hopin.
That is why the 2019 AMA drew an audience in the first place. At the time, Kimmel was one of the more visible examples of an operator raising a solo fund, and she was doing it with an explicitly SaaS-founder-facing playbook.
From Zendesk growth to SaaS School
Before the fund, Kimmel worked on Zendesk's go-to-market team, where her focus was self-serve growth and technology integrations, and where she built the Zendesk for Startups program. Earlier stops included Expedia and teaching digital marketing classes at General Assembly.
The bridge between operating and investing was SaaS School, an invite-only workshop for early-stage SaaS founders that Kimmel started while still at Zendesk and ran twice a year. It doubled as deal flow: when Worklife Ventures came out of stealth, TechCrunch reported that the firm expected roughly 40% of its deals to come through SaaS School alumni.
Founding Worklife Ventures in 2019
TechCrunch's September 10, 2019 story on the fund's launch is the cleanest snapshot of the original setup. Kimmel set out to raise $3 million, closed $5 million in about two weeks, and planned to write checks of up to $150,000 into enterprise SaaS companies. The limited partner list read like a who's-who of the products she wanted her portfolio to emulate: Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, InVision CEO Clark Valberg, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Cameo CEO Steven Galanis, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz, Garry Tan, and the funds Slow Ventures, Felicis and NFX. Early portfolio names disclosed at launch included Tandem, Dover and Command E.
Her stated thesis, as she described it to TechCrunch at launch, was to bring great consumer product experiences into workplace software, a position she had been calling the consumerization of the enterprise. She was also, by her own angel track record, already an investor in Webflow and Voiceflow before the fund was announced.
| Fund | Reported | Size | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Worklife Fund I | TechCrunch, Sept 10, 2019 | $5M at announcement | Target was $3M; checks up to $150K; TechCrunch's 2022 coverage puts the fund's final close at $13M |
| Worklife Fund II | TechCrunch, April 25, 2022 | $35M | Original target was $75M; average check ~$2M at ~$20M post-money |
Sizes and dates as reported by TechCrunch in the linked stories below.
The track record, with the caveats
By April 2022, TechCrunch reported that Worklife's early portfolio included Deel, Webflow, Hopin, Tonal, Clubhouse, Pipe and Public, and credited a cluster of unicorn markups for the fund's performance. Some of those marks aged well: Webflow raised a $120 million Series C at a $4 billion valuation in March 2022. Some did not. Hopin, valued at $7.75 billion in its August 2021 round, had cut 12% of staff by the time of TechCrunch's April 2022 piece and sold its core events business to RingCentral in 2023. Clubhouse hit a reported $4 billion valuation in April 2021 and then faded from the conversation. Paper multiples from the 2020 to 2021 vintage should be read with that context.
Where the record is fuzzy
Two things we could not fully reconcile, so we are flagging them rather than smoothing them over. First, Fund I's size: TechCrunch reported $5 million at the September 2019 announcement, but the same publication's April 2022 story says Fund I closed at $13 million, which suggests the fund kept raising after launch; we have not found reporting that documents the gap. Second, Worklife's own site cites Business Insider for a 7x return on Fund I in under three years. That figure comes from the firm's marketing page and, as with any interim venture multiple, reflects unrealized marks, not distributed cash. Treat it as the firm's claim, not an audited number.
What founders pitching Brianne Kimmel should know
Everything here is drawn from her public statements, not the lost AMA.
- The thesis is consumer-grade software for work. In 2019 interviews around the fund launch she argued that people leaving consumer companies like Uber, Coinbase and Airbnb would build the next great workplace products. If your product needs a sales deck to explain, you are off-thesis; if it spreads bottoms-up, you are on it.
- Go-to-market is her wedge. A January 2020 Every profile of her approach described a fund built on sector focus and a strong opinion on GTM, with proactive outbound to map a company's competitive set before investing. Expect her to already know your competitors.
- She is deliberately easy to pitch. That same profile noted her Twitter bio at the time read, in effect, DM me for deck. Cold inbound from builders is part of the model, and SaaS School was designed as a founder funnel.
- The bar shifted after Fund I. By April 2022 she told TechCrunch that Worklife wanted to back software for the average person and products that open up meaningful ways to make money, not just tools for other tech workers, and that she was largely holding back on web3 except where a company emphasized education or reached beyond the tech bubble.
- Check size roughly tracks the fund era: up to $150K from the 2019 fund, around $2 million at a $20 million post-money from Fund II, per TechCrunch's reporting on each fund.
If the December 2019 AMA ever surfaces in a reader's archive, we would genuinely like to restore it. Until then, this is the honest version of the page: what she did, what she raised, what worked, what is still just a mark on paper, and what she has said, on the record, about how she picks founders.
Sources: TechCrunch, "Work Life Ventures raises $5M for debut enterprise SaaS seed fund" (Sept 10, 2019), techcrunch.com/2019/09/10/work-life-ventures/ · TechCrunch, "Brianne Kimmel's new $35 million fund isn't yet tempted by all of web3" (April 25, 2022), techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/brianne-kimmel-worklife-fund-two/ · Every, "Brianne Kimmel's Momentum Investing" (Jan 20, 2020), every.to/divinations/brianne-kimmels-momentum-investing-240134 · Worklife Ventures, worklife.vc/people/brianne-kimmel · Widely reported financing coverage of Webflow (March 2022), Hopin (Aug 2021; RingCentral sale, 2023) and Clubhouse (April 2021).
