Cheryl Campos is opening the doors she once had to find

Cheryl Campos has a finance résumé, a runway portfolio and a reasonable objection to the suggestion that she ought to choose between them. She has worked in investment banking, helped grow an investment platform, cofounded a community for Latine venture investors and pursued acting. The tidy professional biography would like a word. Campos appears to have another appointment.

There is a serious purpose beneath that refusal to fit. The cofounder and CEO of LaFamilia Foundation has spent years working on a problem that becomes painfully clear when you are trying to raise money: people with ideas need access to people with capital. Between those two groups sit introductions, conventions and relationships. Knowing how the room works can matter almost as much as getting into it.

Campos’s answer has been to help people find one another. VCFamilia connects Latine venture investors; FounderFamilia serves founders; AngelFamilia brings angels into the picture. Her own path helps explain why she cares about the space between having potential and having someone recognize it.

A New Yorker learns the room

She grew up in New York, the daughter of a Peruvian mother. The household had financial difficulties, and her mother raised Campos and her brother with an expansive sense of what they could attempt. That combination matters: a large idea of the future, alongside an early understanding that resources are unevenly distributed.

Her education gave her experience of both opportunity and isolation. She has described attending an all-girls school and finding close friendships among minority students in a predominantly white independent-school environment. In college, she took on board positions in Latino student groups. Organizing offered a way to make an unfamiliar institution feel more inhabitable.

Harvard brought an economics degree with honors. Banking brought a different education. In a 2021 personal essay, Campos recalled an investment-banking class of 150 people in which she was the only Latina. She found support among colleagues of color. The memory gives her later work a specific starting point: professional entry did not automatically produce a sense of belonging.

Her early career included Barclays, working in financial institutions and structured finance, followed by a Connecticut private debt and equity firm focused on minority and women entrepreneurs. She learned the machinery of finance while encountering the question that would keep following her: who gets to use it?

Employee No. 10

In 2018, Campos joined Republic as its tenth full-time employee. The move took her from traditional finance into a startup working on access to investment. Republic allowed accredited and non-accredited investors to participate in startup funding, broadening the pool beyond the usual private-market circles.

She went on to lead venture growth and partnerships. The title sounds comfortably corporate; the underlying work involved founders, funding routes and the relationships that connect them. During her time there, Republic reached a billion-dollar valuation. Campos was part of a company growing while asking more people to participate in a market that could seem remote.

Her work also extended into direct investing, including scouting for Lightspeed and serving as an investment partner at The Community Fund. Those roles put her in several positions at once: operator, connector and investor. Each gives a different view of a founder’s attempt to make a business legible to someone else.

In a November 2020 conversation about her work, the subjects already included alternative funding, underrepresented founders and balancing pursuits outside the day job. The ingredients of her later public life were present before the nonprofit became its center. She was developing a career in which access and personal range could occupy the same sentence.

“Where are the rest of us Latinos?”

Cheryl Campos, on the question behind VCFamilia

Where are the rest of us?

That question became an organizing principle. By early 2021, Campos was publicly discussing VCFamilia as a community of investors supporting one another. LaFamilia dates its beginnings to that year. The point was to find peers and make collaboration easier in a field where the absence of familiar faces could feel like an instruction to leave.

The work runs in more than one direction. Founders need investors, and investors need relationships with the people who back their funds. An emerging fund manager may be choosing promising companies while still struggling to secure capital for the fund itself. Building connections among those groups addresses different parts of the same financing chain.

VCFamilia’s activities have included introductions to limited partners, deal sharing and gatherings. FounderFamilia has used pitch competitions and partnerships to support startups. Campos’s speaking biography reports more than $10 million in limited-partner funding facilitated through VCFamilia and more than $1 million directed to startups through FounderFamilia initiatives. These are distinct results, belonging to different parts of the organization’s work.

There is also the less photogenic work of keeping people connected after an event. A useful community needs reasons to return, someone to answer questions and enough trust for members to ask for help. A crowded guest list is pleasant. A relationship that survives the guest list is rather more useful.

Campos brings a personal understanding of that distinction. The early experience of finding allies in school and banking becomes, at LaFamilia, a task of organization. The welcome needs a structure if it is going to outlast the evening.

The other kind of casting

Meanwhile, there is the portfolio that makes a conventional finance biography fidget. Campos models and acts. Her work has included clients such as Tom Ford and Macy’s, runway appearances and an appearance in the trailer for HBO’s Mrs. Fletcher. The credentials sit alongside the investment work without asking it to surrender its place.

She has written about the less glamorous side of that work: unsuccessful castings, rejection from shows, studying the industry and taking acting classes. Being accomplished elsewhere does not make a casting room exempt you from the process. A Harvard degree cannot do a rehearsal on your behalf.

One of the more enjoyable collisions between her careers came when venture investors recognized her in an HBO trailer and sent messages. Finance had found her on television. She also describes performing as a small business of its own, requiring the functions of executive, finance chief and marketer. That comparison gives her another point of contact with founders trying to sell an unfamiliar proposition.

“I enjoy being underestimated,” she writes. It is a compact way to describe the pleasure of having more to offer than the room has anticipated. Her creative work makes that pleasure visible; it also makes room for an identity that a job title would struggle to contain.

An audition at business school

Stanford added another turn. Campos completed her MBA in 2024, but the business-school years also helped her develop an ambition outside business. A global study trip to South Korea prompted her to reconsider how talent is developed. Acting became something to pursue with intention.

She later described finishing an audition, seeing a last call for applications to Stanford’s Lowkeynotes program and recording her pitch in one take. The eventual speech required a less leisurely finish: she rewrote it and memorized the revised version with 24 hours to spare. Even a talk about allowing yourself to change can have an alarmingly fixed deadline.

Her phrase for this approach is “serial maverick,” a term she says she coined in Allison Kluger’s class. It describes permission to develop and pivot, rather than remain attached to a single professional path. Her ten-minute talk offered a public account of that thinking.

The people around it mattered too. She credited communications coach Kristine Schaefer and the wider Stanford community for helping her prepare. A story about individual reinvention still contains teachers, coaches and fellow travelers. That is a familiar feature of Campos’s account of progress: personal effort has company.

Making the next introduction easier

Based in Los Angeles, Campos now leads a foundation whose work extends across the United States and Latin America. Its ambition is to help shift $1 billion in new investment capital into the Latine innovation ecosystem by 2030. The figure is a goal. Its scale sets a demanding question for the relationships being built today.

Recent work puts practical tools around those relationships. LaFamilia’s member portal includes a directory, opportunities, community channels and ways for founders and investors to connect. Campos has described finding the right person and securing a warm introduction as recurring requests from members. The technology is meant to make that human exchange easier to begin.

FamiliaFund adds another experiment. Campos is a co-general partner in the foundation’s charitable program, which proposes recoverable investments that can recycle money to support subsequent founders. The published pilot treats its future reach as a model to test. The interesting question is how a financial structure might allow the same charitable capital to help more than once.

She is also willing to laugh at the language surrounding leadership. In a recent reflection on LaFamilia’s culture, she admitted that a familiar slogan about culture and strategy initially made her roll her eyes. Then came the work of repeating values, bringing on chapter leads and watching people choose to contribute. The slogan remained corny. Experience made it useful.

Campos’s story keeps returning to the next person: the colleague looking for peers, the founder looking for an investor, the newcomer wondering whether a second ambition belongs in the room. She has built a life with several entrances. At LaFamilia, she is trying to make those entrances easier for others to find.