Synergist Senior Sound Bites - May 2020:
Sarah Hinkfuss

Background
Sarah is a VP at Bain Capital Tech Opportunities Fund, a growth stage tech fund. She focuses on investments in fintech, insuretech, and property tech. She grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and attended Harvard University, where she majored in Economics and Environmental Engineering. Before joining Bain Capital, Sarah was an investor on the growth team at KKR. Before moving over to investing, she was Senior Vice President, Client Services, at Applied Predictive Technologies, an enterprise SaaS company in the predictive analytics space that was acquired by Mastercard in 2015. Sarah received her MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was an Arjay Miller Scholar and Siebel Scholar.

Favorite thing about your current role?
Diving deep into systems level change – we invest in companies that are taking advantage of, and sometimes creating, change in big ecosystems. Understanding why these companies are successful, and what you need to believe that will continue to make them successful, requires you to understand who the players are, how they interact, and what their incentives are. I love the “aha” moment when I figure out the “why” behind the “what.”

Most challenging thing about your role?
Choosing where to spend my time – there are markets to understand, investors to build relationships with, companies to meet and support, places to visit, pieces to read, etc., etc. What’s hard isn’t finding something meaningful to do, but rather sorting among all of what I could do to choose where to spend my time. Also, I know that I won’t do my best work if I just work all the time, so it’s cultivating hobbies and a life outside of work that makes me whole, and can be particularly challenging.

Skills you feel are most important to be successful in your role?
Empathy and curiosity – While the job requires me to understand a lot of macro trends and produce analyses and decks, at the end of the day the job is all about people. I seek to understand, and I care.

Something you wish you had known at the start of your career?
It’s not enough to love what you do, you also have to love the people with whom you do it.

Biggest accomplishment?
I’m most proud of the times in my career when I’ve built bridges – between people, between disciplines, and facilitating access to capital. For example, earlier in my career, I founded and led the public sector practice at Applied Predictive Technologies, bringing together the work I had done earlier in the government and non-profit space with my new world of technology and big data. Our work in the public sector practice covered efficacy in K-12 public education, reform in a state prison system, and inventory optimization for one of the largest foodbanks in the country. More recently, at KKR, I focused on insuretech investing, allowing me to leverage my experiences as the co-head of the insurance vertical at APT – and more specifically as a technology vendor selling into the insurance industry – to connect with insuretech founders and management teams who were doing the same day in and day out. My efforts in the space and the relationships I built ended up leading to the team’s investment in Policygenius at the end of last year. And at Bain Capital, I’m building again!
 
Hobbies outside of work?
My fiancé and I love to sail in San Francisco Bay – just the two of us or going out with friends. Nothing gives me better perspective than being on the water powered only by the wind. Besides sailing, I love cooking, baking, running, and I do a crossword every night.

Balancing personal with work?
Well, whatever was true before has completely been thrown out the window with the shelter-in-place restrictions! I’ve always found integrating work and life more authentic to me than keeping them separate. I enjoy seeing colleagues and partners socially, my personal reading is (mostly) indistinguishable from work reading, and I don’t keep “typical” work hours. That being said, the most important thing for me has been flexibility. I appreciate being able to put something personal first when I need to – anything from a special dinner to workout. I also recognize that balance is more episodic than it is consistent. During this time in my life, my fiancé and I both know that we’re prioritizing the professional parts of ourselves. This will evolve over time.
 
What do we see that tells us we have room to improve our gender equality?
Look at who disproportionately holds the economics – the equity in tech firms (Carta has a great annual study on this) and the carry in investing firms: it’s men. Addressing the gap is about spreading the gains more widely (possible, but unlikely except in rare circumstances) and getting more women into positions of leadership (will take time). I hope to be part of this change.

Examples of times we’ve gotten gender equality right?
Every member of my team is kind, wicked smart, exceptionally driven, and similarly intuitive. We’re also very different. We come from different disciplines, have different educational backgrounds, and spike in different areas. We’re really good, and diverse. The diversity is an asset for better sourcing, better diligence, and better portfolio company support. It’s cool to see my team experience the benefits of diversity that research proves out.

One thing we can do to make a positive impact on gender equality at our organization?
In this era of exclusively work from home, I actually think there’s a really neat opportunity to challenge some of the stereotypical ways that women are disadvantaged professionally. For example, on video conferences where everyone’s face is the same size, we all start the meeting by playing equal roles.

Favorite book? Podcast? Source of news?
I read so much short-form news daily that I choose to read long-form on the weekends. I love the New Yorker, the Economist, and the weekend reads recommended by Kyle Westaway.