Eva-Maria Olbers carries her mountaineering spirit everywhere she goes. She is valiant, resilient, self-sufficient, and most importantly, a team player. Perhaps that is why she has succeeded in climbing the ladder in the male-dominated technology and finance sectors. Today, as the Head of Value Creation at Premji Invest-US, Eva is not only helping portfolio companies grow but also setting standards and examples for young women professionals. She is a role model for women aspiring to make a mark in the technology or finance industry.
Eva is passionate about mentoring. To her, empowerment means believing in people, often more than they believe in themselves, and then providing them with the guidance and mentorship to take the next step. She not only mentors early-stage founders and CEOs in building tech companies but also future female leaders. She encourages them to believe in themselves, not to hold back, and to maximize their full potential.
Leading Value Creation at an Investment Firm
The term “Value Creation” in Venture Capital is still somewhat nascent. Eva has been in a post-investment, operating role in Venture Capital for almost a decade across three different funds and played a pioneering role in coining what the term Value Creation encompasses in Silicon Valley and beyond.
“As we operate in the Venture Capital industry, our mission is to find and back the most groundbreaking companies, founders, and ideas,” Eva says. In her role as the Head of Value Creation, she aims to directly provide value and support to their (mostly AI-centric) portfolio companies post-investment, in order to increase their growth trajectory. For example, she provides advisory on topics such as Go-To-Market, AI innovation, and Executive Talent.
She also facilitates introductions to experts and key decision-makers at Fortune 500 companies. In addition to that, she supports the fund’s overall network and business development buildout. “I personally thrive at building out a Value Creation strategy and team from the ground up,” Eva says. She further elaborates that she works closely with portfolio company CEOs and founders, focusing on growth strategy and Fortune 500 customer introductions, developing a C-level Advisory Board, and leading the fund’s broader ecosystem development.
Prior to Premji Invest, when Eva was serving as an Operating Partner at Point72 Ventures, she built the Value Creation function for the fund’s AI/DeepTech investments. She has also led Portfolio Success at the Microsoft Accelerator in London and driven EMEA Business Development for the Machine Learning startup Knewton. Additionally, she has advised Fortune 500 companies as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group.
Eva holds master’s degrees from the London Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Exploring Different Cultures and Climbing Mountains
The seventeen-year-old Eva moved to Beijing, China, by herself to live with a Chinese family, who didn’t speak English. Even at such a young age, she was curious to know about people from different cultures and communities. “It was important to me to expose myself to a new cultural and linguistic environment to truly understand how other people work, live, and experience community,” Eva says. This was not a one-off adventure for her. Later, she worked as a primary school teacher in a rural town in Rajasthan, India. She also spent several summers in Accra, Ghana, to launch an Educational Academy for high school students with the mission to support young Ghanaians in workforce development and empower them to apply for their first employment post-graduation.
“These early life experiences have helped me to become highly adaptable,” she says. She can integrate into new circumstances and communicate and work with people from different backgrounds. Eva is fluent in six languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Luxembourgish, and Mandarin Chinese, and has worked across five continents. Now, as a European working in San Francisco, she is particularly passionate about building bridges between Silicon Valley, Europe, and the rest of the world.
Eva also took up mountaineering at a very young age. She says that for her, another pivotal early experience was seeking the outdoors and becoming a mountaineer as a teenage girl. She has been the only woman in nearly all the mountain expedition teams she has been part of. As a result, she has learned to be resilient, decisive, and act as a team player to those around her.
Eva recounts that, over the past decades, she has been a part of several “precarious situations” in the mountains, such as a team member getting acute mountain sickness or feeling too weak to continue the descent back to Base Camp. “Many of the mountain survival and expedition team skills have taught me to always support my team members and to trust my team, while being self-sufficient at the same time,” she says.
Working at Premji Invest
Premji Invest is a captive fund to the endowment that supports the Azim Premji Foundation, founded by the Founder Chairman of Wipro. The fund manages more than $15 billion in capital, which it invests across the lifecycle of a company – from early-stage to growth equity to public markets. To date, Premji Invest has invested in many high-growth AI and tech companies, including Applied Intuition, Canva, Carta, Cohesity, Hugging Face, Navan, Outreach, Writer, etc. The fund has also exited multiple companies, including Anaplan, Coupa, MuleSoft, Robinhood, Zuora, and the biotechnology company Moderna. Proceeds generated by Premji Invest flow back into the Azim Premji Foundation.
The foundation works on the ground, directly supporting almost 7 million K-12 students across 350,000 schools as well as multiple hospitals across India.
Eva has always been passionate about social impact and giving back to the broader community. “So, working for Premji Invest and its ‘for profit-investing, for good’ mission directly aligns with my values,” she says. In many ways, she feels like her career has come full circle from teaching in a classroom as a young teacher in India many years ago.
Additionally, Eva loves working for a deeper and more meaningful mission. When investing in high-growth AI companies, she enjoys directly supporting founders. But, at the same time, she knows that there is a deeper philanthropic mission behind their fund’s investment activities.
Roster of Achievements
Eva considers herself fortunate to have received a full scholarship to Harvard University, where she earned her master’s degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. When she was at Harvard, she co-founded a startup with the mission to inspire more teenage girls to code and to engage in the STEM fields via a wearable device. “It was a transformative experience for me where I learned invaluable lessons on company building and fundraising. The company even went on to win the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge,” Eva recounts.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to be asked to be a mentor to the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business,” she adds. “I am also an active member of the school’s ‘Oval Office’ program.” Another achievement she highlights is becoming a World Economic Forum Global Shaper. She was also selected to attend the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos as part of a youth leadership delegation.
Eva has many accomplishments to her name. But, for her, the proudest achievement has been mentoring and giving back in order to empower others.
A Woman in a Male-Dominated Space
Both the tech and finance sectors, as well as Silicon Valley in general, are typically male-dominated. As a woman who has worked across five continents and a number of different firms, high-growth startups, Fortune 500 companies, consulting, Venture Capital, and more, Eva brings unique and diverse perspectives to the table. She also hopes to add a different lens to decision-making in Silicon Valley.
“In parallel, I hope to play a role in international tech diplomacy and to build bridges between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world,” she says. She is also passionate about Ethics in Artificial Intelligence and the need for diverse datasets that are representative of the full, global population.
Aspirations for the Future
Eva aspires to achieve many things. Just as she makes a positive impact on society today, she is determined to continue doing so in the future. She also plans to continue building bridges in international tech and AI diplomacy.
In both the technology and finance sectors, women are underrepresented in leadership roles. As a result, there are not many female role models or mentors for young professional women to look up to or seek guidance from. So, along with leading by example, Eva wants to be a role model for women working in the Venture Capital and startup sectors. She is looking forward to encouraging the next generation of girls to start their own companies.
And on a more personal level, Eva aspires to be the first woman from Luxembourg to summit Mt Everest. She shares that she is actively planning a summit attempt in the next few years. “I am excited to start training and simultaneously raise funds for an important cause,” she says.
“Most importantly, I aspire to be a dedicated mother, wife, and daughter, and to spend time with my family and the people that matter to me most,” she adds.
Becoming More Powerful and Determined
Eva is the mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Emilia. She believes that motherhood has made her an even more powerful and determined version of herself: both on a personal and professional level.
As a mother to a daughter, Eva wants to set an example for her and the next generation of women. She wants to spark their aspiration to “reach for the stars” when it comes to their professional and personal ambitions. In parallel, she wants to empower other mothers, showing them the need to prioritize their own physical and mental health.
When she became pregnant, Eva feared that her mountain expeditions were over or that they might slow down. “But the exact opposite happened,” she says. “Rather than slowing down, I accelerated my quest to climb.”
One year postpartum, she summited Mt Rainier, a 14,411ft / 4,392m glaciated volcano in the U.S. Less than two years postpartum, she summited Ama Dablam, a highly technical 22,349ft / 6,812m mountain in the Everest region of Nepal. She recalls that the climb was arduous. She was climbing up near-vertical pitches, clinging on to exposed ridges, sleeping in tents pitched in precarious positions, and constantly gasping for oxygen. “There was one moment as we were getting closer to 6000m (~20,000ft) when I was hit with acute mountain sickness,” she recalls. She vomited for an entire afternoon and could not leave her tent. At that point, she thought that her expedition was over.
“But then I remembered I was climbing the mountain not just for myself, but for my daughter and in memory of a close friend whom I had lost to suicide the previous year,” Eva says. She managed to recover and took the rest of the climb one step and one breath at a time, until she reached the summit.
When she stood on top of Ama Dablam as the first woman from Luxembourg, it was the culmination of one year of training while juggling full-time work and being a new mom. “I showed myself that despite society’s hurdles and expectations, women do not need to lose themselves in motherhood but can in fact find themselves in it and reach for new heights,” she says.
Eva shares that becoming a mother has given her a new purpose in life: to be a role model for her daughter and for the next generation of girls. She wants to show them that they can climb any mountain they want — both in a literal and metaphorical sense — and encourage them to always be fierce and bold.
Advice for Aspiring Women Leaders
Over the years, Eva has learned several valuable lessons from the mountains. Her advice to aspiring women leaders is based on these lessons. She points out that there are several parallels between climbing a mountain and climbing the career ladder as a woman in a male-dominated professional field.
She advises aspiring women leaders to visualize their goal as if it were a summit, and then take one step at a time. She encourages them to trust their capabilities and believe that they are much stronger and more capable than they think.
“Lean on your (rope) team while also learning how to be self-sufficient when you need to,” she says. “Always be a team player and help others in need.”
“Spend your energy wisely” is another piece of advice Eva has for aspiring women leaders. She points out that the summit is only half the journey, so they must not forget the way back down. Just like one manages responsibilities in a career while balancing family and other life priorities, a mountain climb requires a thoughtful approach to spending one’s energy, time, and resources, Eva explains. And to take a rest when one needs so that one can come back stronger.
“Embrace the unexpected and adapt if you need to. When a mountain storm rolls in, be prepared to execute a Plan B (and C),” Eva says. “Always take care of yourself in order to show up at the strongest and best version of yourself.”
