Nicky joined PeakSpan Capital in 2022 and has since worked closely with 10+ growth-stage software and technology businesses across PeakSpan’s Digital Health, Customer Experience Management, and PropTech portfolio coverage, currently serving as a Board Observer for Lula and Lendware. Prior to joining PeakSpan full-time, Nicky worked at Spurrier Capital Partners (acquired by Lincoln International), supporting B2B software M&A and private financing transaction advisory.

Nicky is an avid reader and holds a B.A. in English, with minors in Math and History, from Middlebury College, where she graduated summa cum laude with departmental and thesis honors. At Middlebury, Nicky was a member of the women’s cross country and track and field teams, earning multiple All-American honors during her time as a Panther. In her free time, Nicky can often be found running along the West Side Highway or in Central Park with friends, planking on the Megaformer at SLT, critiquing a new “must-try” restaurant, or jetting off to a new destination (despite her previous expedition’s suitcase still sitting packed on her apartment floor).

Becoming a great investor is certainly supported by reps and pattern recognition, but at its core, investors win with creativity and agility. PeakSpan fosters an environment where people speak up loudly and often—a learn-by-doing approach that ensures every investor is in a constant “strategic conversation preparedness” state, not only to support their portfolio and prospect engagements, but also their peers’. Productive discourse at PeakSpan drives passion and engagement, innovation and analysis, and ultimately superior results and stronger relationships for our business. These opportunities to “step up” in conversations as a junior investor have forced growth at an unparalleled rate; PeakSpan produces investors, not analysts.

Each company takes its own unique journey to Peak 1, and some paths are more circuitous than others. When faced with a challenging season of rebuilding, the deal team and I worked alongside our portfolio partner’s management team to completely rework the company vision, including ICP, product positioning, GTM strategy, and more—a Herculean task that was only possible due to the complete conviction the deal team and leadership team had in one another. The boundaries between investor and entrepreneur quickly blurred into a single driving force focused on building something great at a moment when clarity around success was far from tangible. PeakSpan’s dedication to and passion for innovation and creativity (in addition to deep domain expertise) made us the best-prepared group of investors I could imagine stepping in for our portfolio partner like a startup SEAL Team Six.

There’s a common misconception in earlier-stage startups that “all revenue is good revenue,” when in reality, cash in the door today might mean hemorrhaging customers tomorrow. Customers aren’t free to gain or maintain, particularly in B2B software where white-glove implementations and ongoing support resources are the floor of customer expectations. As a result, investing behind ICP (ideal customer profile) customers is critical to ensuring highly performant and enduring revenue, exactly what we love in the SaaS model.

While saying no to revenue can be hard, sometimes even impossible, after spending years building a product that feels like it works “for everyone” or “for any use case,” the “Crossing the Chasm” methodology of company building is critical to creating a strategic business with strong acquisition and retention health that ultimately yields durable enterprise value.

Highly performant teams rely on the individual strengths of their members, something I saw firsthand as a runner in college. The Distance Medley Relay is made up of four legs: the 1200, 400, 800, and 1600, which each require unique skill sets (the 400m runner is all power; she’s a sprinter, whereas the miler needs poise and control). Yet the team needs each runner to execute her strategy perfectly to win.

PeakSpan is an organization that both invests in and sharpens each investor’s unique skill sets, while operating with the confidence that every member can hold the baton and run on their own. This has been massively empowering for me as an investor, enabling my teams to operate efficiently and creating opportunities for me to take ownership of our output. It has also helped build a fund that trusts and relies on cross-theme domain expertise and individual deal team performance and execution.