What makes an experience meaningful isn’t just what you do, but how it shifts your perspective.
As I near the tail end of my own Groove internship, conversations with past Groove interns reminded me of how truly unique a VC internship is and how my own perspective has evolved.
Looking back, nearly every lesson these five inspiring, driven individuals shared resonated with my own experience. But what struck me most was how their reflections extend beyond Groove. The perspectives the group shared are ones you can carry into any experience, no matter where you are in your journey.
Here’s what they had to share:
Kwaku Bodom: From EdTech Dreams to Venture Capital
When you first ask Kwaku Bodom about his career path, this is the one thing he’ll tell you he knows for sure: “There is no linear path to VC”
It’s a simple statement, but his journey proves it.
The Startup Spark
Kwaku’s first taste of entrepreneurship came when he co-founded an edtech startup dedicated to helping high school students figure out their next step. In addition to being a founder, Kwaku's experience at a healthcare analytics company during the pandemic highlighted the need for innovation in the industry. Both experiences planted an entrepreneurial seed and ultimately led Kwaku to Groove Capital.
Learning the Venture Capital Playbook
At Groove, Kwaku’s days were a mix of sourcing startups, conducting due diligence, and immersing himself in Minnesota’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
One highlight? Contributing to due diligence on Ittili Health, now a Groove portfolio company.
“At Groove, they give you the autonomy to shine. They take your ideas seriously,” Kwaku says. “Seeing my work translate into an actual investment—that was powerful. It showed me I could do this kind of work.”
Moving Upstream
After Groove, Kwaku took his experience to Accolade Partners, a global fund-of-funds based in Washington DC, where he evaluated VC and PE firms rather than individual startups, giving him a broader perspective on how capital flows through the investment ecosystem.
Ultimately, realizing he wanted to be working closer to the companies themselves, Kwaku joined Best Buy, where he currently works in corporate strategy and development.
Lessons from a Nonlinear Journey
Looking back, Kwaku advises anyone considering VC or any other career that feels uncertain to focus on building genuine relationships, develop a critical and personal perspective, and learn to live with and embrace the nontraditional path with its inherent risks.
“In early-stage investing, you know most companies won’t make it. But the ones that do, they hit big. The same goes for your career. Some bets won’t pan out, but the right ones can change everything.”
What's Next
This fall, Kwaku is heading to the University of Michigan for business school, where he’s especially excited about the opportunity to join one of the school’s student-led venture funds!
Sunwoo Lee: From Groove to Shaping Her Own VC Lens
When Sunwoo Lee joined Groove Capital the summer after her freshman year, she didn’t just “intern.” She jumped headfirst into helping build a venture fund from scratch.
Learning How to Build From Zero
At Groove, Sunwoo got a front-row seat to the realities of an emerging VC fund: fundraising, deploying capital, and creating a pipeline without a blueprint.. Sharing her experience building with Groove, Sunwoo states:
"College doesn’t teach you that what you build is never the final product. Groove was the first time I really learned how to build something from zero. There was no rubric—just figure it out."
A Bigger Leap
After a year embedded in Minnesota’s startup scene with Atland Ventures and Groove, Sunwoo realized that Minnesota was a tight-knit ecosystem and she wanted to see what was beyond it.
So, she made a bold move: she dropped out of college to join FNDR, the storytelling firm that shaped Apple, Airbnb, and Snap at their earliest inflection points. FNDR built its reputation in the room with visionary founders, and today brings that same creative discipline to a new generation of breakout companies. As part of the firm’s growth team, Sunwoo helped support the launch of Fund I and sharpened her operating edge along the way.
Sunwoo’s next big move was Slice, a hybrid fund of funds investing in emerging managers with funds sub $20m. It started with a belief that the venture ecosystem was quietly being rebuilt from the bottom up, by a new class of managers operating more like founders than financiers. Slice is designed to be early to that shift, and to the breakout founders those managers would discover first.
That thesis now connects back to that summer at Groove.
“I saw firsthand how hard it is to be a solo General Partner. Fundraising, managing limited partners, supporting 90+ portfolio companies, all while being the very first check in. That stuck with me. If you want real impact and the best upside, you have to back people at the very, very beginning.”
The Slice Podcast grew out of those conversations. For her, the podcast isn’t about chasing views. It’s about having a peer-to-peer conversation to give managers a platform to tell their story in a way they can share with LPs, founders, or their network.
Advice to Her Younger Self
Looking back, what would Sunwoo tell her 19-year-old self?
“Enjoy the ride. Be kind to everyone you meet. Be curious. Try everything, even if you fail, you’ve just added to your knowledge bank. And remember, you have something to learn from every single person you meet.”
She smiles. “Honestly, there’s nothing I would change.”
Kiley Giebel: Building Venture Foundations From the Ground Up
Kiley Giebel joined Groove when it was still in its early days. There was Reed, a small handful of partners and advisors, and interns like Kiley who were piecing together how the fund engaged with Minnesota’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The Inside of a Fund
What made the experience stand out wasn’t just what Kiley worked on, rather the experience of witnessing how the structure of a fund is actually formed. In building the sourcing function from scratch, Kiley did a lot of outreach, connecting with founders in every corner of Minnesota. “By the end, I think I’d met with over 250 startups. It was wild, but it really showed me the full layout of entrepreneurship in the state.” she recalls.
Reflecting on how the experience sharpened her intuition, she points out:
“Groove taught me that your perspective matters. At the early stage, you’re not just looking at numbers, you’re looking at the team, their why, their creativity. And you have to trust your own intuition about who can actually build something great.”
Transitioning Beyond Groove
After Groove, Kiley moved into roles that blended venture, portfolio management, and the founder’s lens. She worked with Finches, supporting an angel investor who advised 20+ venture funds and incubated his own startups. She also took on social media work for Techstars, managing community-facing platforms.
Eventually, Kiley’s focus shifted toward healthcare and biotech at Modi Ventures, where she works now. Having always envisioned a career in healthcare—initially dreaming of becoming a doctor growing up—Kiley knew she wanted technical depth but realized she also craved creativity alongside it. Venture has given Kiley a way to support healthcare innovation from the backend, which felt like the right fit for her.
Mental health is also a quiet but driving force in Kiley’s approach to investing. After losing a friend to suicide in high school and witnessing the human toll of SVB collapse first hand, she’s carried a deep empathy into her work—especially with founders.
“Being a good investor requires empathy,” she says. “Yes, you’re analyzing a company, but you’re also looking at a person who’s putting their entire life into something.”
Advice to Her Younger Self
When asked what she’d tell her younger self, Kiley shared how she learned to turn rejections into second chances. Having faced her share of rejections when applying to venture funds, she explained how she followed up with one-pagers, mock memos, market analyses, even making direct introductions to people in the firm's network. More often than not, it worked. That’s what she learnt: grit matters, and persistence often makes the difference.
Much of that grit and intuition, she says, traces back to the foundation Groove gave her.
Eli Cuene: From Code to Capital
Before Venture Capital, Eli Cuene thought he was going to be a software guy. During his time studying Computer Science at Duke, he realized he wanted to be closer to the people building companies, not just buried in code. What Eli had from the beginning was genuine curiosity, which drove him to intentionally reach out and carve out opportunities.
“I literally reached out saying, ‘Hey, I don’t have experience, but I want to help. What can I do?’” Eli remembers.
A Broader Lens at Groove
Eli started out his career at Connectivity Ventures, a future-of-work fund based in New York focused almost entirely on B2B software, SaaS, and cloud tools. At Groove the thesis was simple: any sector tied to Minnesota.
“You’re suddenly looking at whiskey companies, consumer products, even home improvement tools for millennials—stuff that has nothing to do with SaaS. It forced me to strip things back to basic business fundamentals. How does this founder make money? What makes this business work?”
And it wasn’t just the businesses that were more diverse, it was the people. Eli met entrepreneurs who came from retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and a dozen other diverse backgrounds.
Groove also taught Eli that early-stage investing is as much about people as it is about numbers. For Eli, one of the most valuable parts of his time at Groove was observing how Reed and Emmet engaged with CEOs.
“Founders can tell when you’re actually interested in what they’re building versus when you’re just ticking boxes. Curiosity not only makes your work more fun, it builds trust and better relationships.”
A New Stage
After Groove, Eli moved to Updata Partners, a growth equity firm in D.C. focused on B2B software.
Even with the later-stage focus, some things feel familiar. He still spends his days talking to founders, leading diligence calls, and making judgment calls on which companies are worth elevating to senior partners.
What's Next
So, where does Eli want all this to go? He’s not trying to over-engineer the answer.
Eli’s focus is on continuing to build a versatile skill set that keeps his options open. Whether it’s staying in growth equity, moving to earlier-stage VC, or starting something of his own one day, he values learning and growth.
The Thread
Eli learned by watching great investors, and said yes to experiences that stretched him. If there’s one piece of advice he’d give someone just starting out?
“Genuine curiosity,” he says. “That’s the whole game. It makes your work better, it makes your conversations better, and it makes you someone founders actually want to talk to.”
Georgia Paul: Investing in Community, On Both Sides of the Table
Georgia Paul’s path into venture was a series of small moves, showing up to reunions, staying curious, and reaching out to people already doing the work. By the time she joined Groove Capital, Georgia already had an MBA from the University of North Dakota and experience with Dakota Venture Group, one of the country’s longest-running student-led venture funds.
Both Sides of the Table
At Groove, Georgia got a crash course in volume, sourcing around 150 deals in a single month during Minnesota Startup Week and the MN Cup.
After Groove, Georgia moved on to Techstars, shifting from early-stage investing to more direct founder support. Her time at Groove gave her the investor lens she needed to add value at Techstars.
Today, Georgia works at Gudea AI, a Groove portfolio company.
“It’s full circle,” she says. “Now I’m the one sending investor updates and juggling what metrics to share. I understand firsthand how much founders have on their plate. And I also think more critically about what really matters. Like, does this metric actually tell the story investors need to know? Or is there a better way to frame our growth?”
That empathy, knowing what it’s like for both the investor and the operator, shapes how Georgia approaches client experience and operations today.
So, What's Next?
While Georgia doesn’t have a rigid five-year plan, she expresses the desire to continue seeing her impact:
“That’s my return on investment, feeling like what I do actually matters to people and communities. I’ll probably keep building operator experience, because it makes me better if I ever go back to VC. But whether it’s startups, venture, or something in between, I want to stay in spaces where I’m helping move things forward.”
What makes Georgia’s story compelling isn’t just the roles she’s held, but how she’s moved between them—student investor, deal sourcer, founder support, operator. Her journey underscores a lesson that ties it all together: Venture isn’t just capital, it’s about showing up, whether as the investor, founder, or somewhere in between.
What stands out in these stories isn’t just where these individuals ended up, but how their time at Groove shifted how they see the world. It gave them direct exposure to early-stage uncertainty, taught them to ask better questions, and showed them the value of community.
And even as their careers move in different directions, that mindset continues on.