Adriana Saman

Principal at Clocktower Technology Ventures
B.A. in Political Science from University of Pennsylvania
 

Background:
Adriana Saman is a Principal at Clocktower Technology Ventures in Santa Monica. In her role, Adriana focuses on deal sourcing, diligence, and execution. Prior to Clocktower, Adriana was a Strategy Associate in Chase’s Digital Payments team where she worked closely with all consumer-related payment products to develop consolidated roadmaps, business cases, and strategic initiatives. Before joining Digital Payments, she worked at J.P. Morgan as an Investment Banking Analyst focusing on M&A transactions across Latin America. Adriana is originally from Ecuador and holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

What originally inspired you to make the jump into investing? Why fintech? 
Fintech comes before investing; I have always been passionate about financial inclusion in emerging markets and have always sought ways in my career to be involved with that cause (did IB covering LatAm, then joined a strategy team to learn about fintech). I then realized that the way I wanted to be involved in fintech / financial inclusion was by backing the challengers instead of working for an incumbent (Chase vs. startups). I also realized I wasn’t meant to be a product / ops person but rather really enjoyed the fast pace of spending time with different founders / stakeholders and learning about them.

Favorite aspect of your job?
Getting to talk to incredibly smart founders every day and constantly thinking about what the future will look like / what the most important problems are to solve.

What inspired you to start the LA chapter of Synergist? What were some initial challenges and learnings?
I think LA is an amazing place to live and build a career, but I found that I was really missing the community component that I found in NY with other colleagues in finance; it’s always fun to meet people with similar professional interests and find ways to help each other. I also thought it’d be a nice hack into making new friends in the city. The challenge was building a community during Covid – we were only able to host a handful of in-person events before lockdown, which made it more difficult to establish local branding from the getgo. I learned that people can easily tap out on virtual events, but at the same time, you can still derive a lot of value by bringing the right kinds of speakers and affinity groups together even if only online. I’m proud of all the effort and love that the first board put into creating the very first zoom-only events, and I made some tight connections as well!  

What advice would you share for women early on in an investing career?
Make sure you find your “pod” of close friends / mentors that can always give you unfiltered advice on anything you are going through; don’t underestimate the value of community!


Thank you for your time, Adriana! To learn more about Clocktower Ventures, check out https://www.clocktowerventures.com/.