Karen Robinson Cope

Karen Robinson Cope became a CEO in her late twenties and has spent the decades since writing first checks for other people.

Cope and Brad Banyas met at an event, somewhere around the Players Lounge, a company she had funded before anyone else would. She came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast and spent the first minute telling the crew that the McBastard Studio is the coolest place and that everybody should come hang out in it. Inside ten minutes she and Banyas had decided they were the same person in different bodies and proposed a weekly show.

She backs people before she understands the business. She met Keith Marshall through the ACG board, sat down with him at a dive barbecue place while strangers kept coming over to high five him, and had to ask whether he was famous. She knew nothing about sports or NIL. She told him to give back the signing bonuses from the consulting jobs he had been offered and she would write the first check, which she did when there was nothing but a small business plan. Then she brought in Tim Draper for the second. When she found that Christy Brown of Doctor Knows Best had a cap table full of men, she called time out, went and found about fifteen women, and put nearly a quarter of a million dollars in. She runs about fifteen angel investments now, and close to half are led by women or by people of color, which she says is a consequence of picking good companies rather than a quota she set.

In 1990 the president of National Data Corporation asked her to join a company he had invested in. She was the youngest sales VP there and told him he could not afford her, so she took no salary, all of her compensation in equity and a big commission. Two weeks in she quit, telling him she would sell it all day long and he would never be able to deliver it. Two weeks after that they fired the CEO and gave her the job. There were no women on her cap table and none in her board meetings. She would say something, get silence, and then hear one of the men repeat it back and get told what a good idea it was.

She sat on the board of Opportunity International when it loaned a billion dollars in amounts averaging about 180 dollars, more than 90 percent of it to women, with a 98 percent payback rate. She works with Mission Hope on trafficking prevention in Indonesian villages, where one of the children they started with is a doctor in Australia now. At mile 13 of the New York Marathon she wanted to lie down on the curb. Then she remembered everybody she loved was at the finish.