24 Hours with Justine and Olivia Moore

Justine and Olivia Moore are venture investors at CRV, a venture capital firm that has been investing in tomorrow’s greatest technology startups for nearly 50 years. You may know them as the “Venture Twins” — identical twin sisters who focus on early-stage consumer and SMB investments. They get particularly excited about companies that touch the millennial and Gen Z markets and solve problems in core consumer areas like retail, transportation, housing, media, and entertainment. Take a look at a typical day in their lives.

7:30 AM

We get up around 7:30 am, and usually go through our email, Slack, and Twitter to see if there’s anything we need to address right away. After handling anything urgent, we get ready and grab an energy bar on the way to the office. We sometimes babysit a bernedoodle, Kai, and we’ll take her to the park before bringing her to the office with us! She’s particularly helpful with pet tech deals.

We’re only about 15 minutes from CRV’s Palo Alto office, but if we’re driving to the SF office, it’s more like a 45-minute commute. Justine typically drives in the morning, and Olivia connects to WiFi to start getting to work. This is also our podcast time — we start with news recaps like Pro Rata and Robinhood Snacks, and then listen to longer shows featuring founder and company stories like How I Built This, Repeat Customer, and Making the Brand. Another one we love is FBI Retired: Case File Review. The host, Jerri Williams, is a former FBI agent who interviews other agents about their most impactful cases. We actually got to meet her at a conference last year while we were doing a deep dive on the podcasting industry!  

8:30 AM

When we get to the office, we go through the general tech and venture newsletters, along with more sector or community-specific consumer newsletters — Lean Luxe, Oversharing, StartU, and Thing Testing are particularly great. As well as catching up on the main headlines, we pull interesting features, cool new apps, or job postings to potentially add to our newsletter, which we put together on Saturdays. It’s called Accelerated. When we were in college, we found it tough to figure out what working in tech or VC was really like, or how to get a job in the industry. We started Accelerated to offer a more approachable resource to navigating that process.

We’ve seen a lot of founders and investors start launching newsletters recently — it’s amazing how quickly you can build a really engaging community around that kind of content. Of our 9,000 subscribers, around 150 of them are ambassadors for us on their campuses, so they help flag new apps or trends that students are excited about. We launched a Slack group for the newsletter recently as well, and it’s been really cool to see our readers help each other out and share what they’re working on.

9:00 AM

We typically start meeting with companies around 9 am. On busy days, we’ll have 7-8 meetings with startups. We’ll carve out time in advance to go through each company’s product experience — whether it’s a social app, marketplace, or physical product — so we can ask good questions and spend the meeting time efficiently. We do some of our meetings and calls at the CRV offices, but love to stop by founders’ offices as well, so we can get a better sense of the company’s vibe and meet the rest of the team.  

Sometimes we’ll try to schedule days with fewer meetings so we have more time to work on developing investment theses, writing blog posts, mapping out markets, or catching up with our friends at other VC firms. There are so many different ways to find and connect with founders now, so it’s all about maximizing our coverage and then being able to quickly narrow in on the few companies each week that we want to spend a lot of time on.

12:00 PM

We often stop by Sweetgreen for lunch because it’s right across the street from our Palo Alto office. We’re vegetarians so we eat a lot of salad, and we love Sweetgreen! When we have Kai, we’ll take her for a walk when we grab lunch and then eat back at the office.

Aside from that routine, we frequently have lunch meetings with founders or other investors in SF. We also stop by the Stanford campus quite a bit, as there are some great lunch options at the GSB!

1:00 PM - 6:30 PM

During the afternoon, it’s back to the office for meetings followed by sourcing, diligence on deals we’re chasing down, or helping portfolio companies with projects. We sometimes use afternoon time to coordinate travel and events. We make trips out to LA and New York at least a few times each quarter and travel for conferences as well. The large scale, general tech events have been a little hit-and-miss for us, but focused conferences like ShopTalk and the Marketplace Conference have been great.

Some of the most helpful events have actually not been venture-oriented at all, but get us closer to everyday consumers. We spent a week at VidCon last summer in Anaheim with thousands of teenage YouTube fans, and we learned so much about how teens are consuming content and where brands can reach them.

7:00 PM

We leave the office around 7:00 or 7:30 pm — there’s a lot of evening events in venture, so we’re often at pitch days or networking events with founders or other VCs. When we’re not at an event, we typically go home, go to the gym, and make dinner.

8:30 PM - 10:30 PM

We’re usually back on email again in the evening because we don’t have time to process everything that comes in during the day. The two of us also sync up on the companies we met with — even though we’re identical twins, we disagree surprisingly often, and it’s helpful to debate between ourselves before we surface something to the broader team. We then update the rest of the consumer team on anything urgent, usually via email or Slack.

We also get a lot of inbound inquiries from students or recent grads who read our newsletter and are interested in getting into venture or starting a company — we try to respond to those and participate in our Slack community when we have time at night.

11:00 PM - 11:30 PM

We usually go to bed around 11:00 or 11:30, and often read a bit before going to sleep. We’ve always been big readers and will read a couple of books in an average week. We go to the library every Sunday and get at least five books, usually a mix of fiction and non-fiction. Two of our favorite recent reads have been Circe and Red Notice. We’re always looking for new recommendations!

Want to learn more about Justine and Olivia? Follow them on Twitter @venturetwins.