Emma Off was happy with her job when the phone rang. She had built a career in mergers and acquisitions at Thompson Hine. Then a CincyTech board member suggested she apply to run the venture capital firm. The invitation put a different sort of transaction in front of her: exchange a successful legal practice for responsibility for an organization helping Cincinnati companies get started.
There is a familiar career story in which dissatisfaction supplies the plot. This one begins with satisfaction. Off liked her work and her colleagues. Leaving required a reason that could compete with staying. CincyTech offered the chance to make decisions about an institution she already knew, in a city where she had spent much of her life.
Her explanation is pleasingly plain: “I’m a builder. I like building things, growing things.” It is a useful sentence to keep in mind while looking at a résumé crowded with transactions, committees and board seats. The nouns change. The work of getting people and resources into useful arrangements keeps returning.
A lawyer changes seats
CincyTech announced Off’s appointment on December 14, 2023. She started on January 8, 2024, succeeding Mike Venerable, who moved into an advisory role after seven years as CEO and seventeen years with the organization. She arrived after more than a decade in legal practice and had worked with the CincyTech team earlier in her career.
The succession mattered because this was an established institution with an accumulated portfolio, relationships and obligations. A new leader would inherit other people’s long bets. Startups do not conveniently reset their clocks when the chief executive of an investor changes. Venerable’s continued advisory involvement gave the transition a connection to that history.
At the time of the announcement, CincyTech reported $87 million invested in 90 startups since its first fund launched in 2007, alongside more than $1.7 billion in co-investment. Those are organization-wide totals accumulated before Off took charge. They describe the size of the inheritance, rather than a scorecard for her tenure.
Firm totals since the first fund in 2007. These figures predate Off’s leadership.
Today, as CEO, president and partner, her remit includes strategy, business development, operations and fundraising. She works with the investment team on decisions and portfolio management and sits on the investment committee. The title bundles together several kinds of attention: the next company, the existing companies, the people doing the work and the money that makes further work possible.
Learning how companies change hands
Off earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Kentucky, graduating summa cum laude and joining Phi Beta Kappa. Her law degree came from the University of Cincinnati College of Law, with honors, in 2011. Ohio licensed her that year. The education placed her professional beginnings close to the city where she would eventually lead CincyTech.
Her transactional practice covered U.S. and international companies, private investment firms and funds. The work included acquisitions, divestitures, reorganizations, joint ventures, governance and capital raising. Each term describes a moment when a business changes its shape, its owners, its commitments or its capacity to keep going.
It is easy to regard those changes as paperwork because paperwork is what remains visible. But a transaction also has a cast: founders, buyers, investors, employees and boards, with different reasons to want it completed. A lawyer working across those interests gets a close view of how a company’s promise becomes something another party will pay for.
That background helps explain why Off’s move into venture investing was legible to the people recruiting her. She had advised the founders, investors and boards around growing businesses. The new position moved her into responsibility for the organization supplying early capital and support. Her experience traveled with her, even though her seat at the table changed.
- 2011Graduates from UC Law; licensed in Ohio.
- 2020Practicing as a Thompson Hine partner.
- 2024Begins leading CincyTech on January 8.
“CincyTech helps match these big ideas with experienced executives to help commercialize the idea.”Emma Off
The distance between research and a business
Once at CincyTech, Off described a regional problem she had encountered in private practice: Cincinnati had limited organized infrastructure for private capital. She was concerned about how the region compared with other Midwestern cities. A place can produce ideas and still struggle to supply the money needed to turn those ideas into companies.
In her account, many CincyTech investments involve intellectual property originating in research institutions or left behind by larger companies. The firm helps connect those ideas with experienced executives. That detail changes the picture of early investing. The work can include assembling the people who will make a business possible, alongside assessing the idea itself.
A researcher, an executive and an investor may look at the same invention and ask three different questions. Does it work? Can a company sell it? Can the company grow enough to justify the investment? Getting those questions into the same conversation is a practical task. A promising answer to one does not automatically settle the others.
Off’s emphasis on first-time founders also matters. An experienced entrepreneur may already know which introductions to seek and which decisions cannot wait. Someone starting a first company has to learn that while doing the job. Mentorship, market knowledge and help thinking through an eventual exit are part of the support CincyTech describes providing.
She has also spoken about supporting underrepresented founders. Access to a useful network is part of the capital problem: a founder needs people who can evaluate an unfamiliar proposal, make an introduction or help recruit a colleague. For a regional investor, building those connections belongs inside the work, rather than at the ceremonial edges of it.
At City Hall, the arithmetic gets specific
On June 4, 2025, Off took the case for CincyTech into Cincinnati’s budget discussion. She described a proposed reduction in city funding from $250,000 to $75,000. That was a 70 percent cut. Because the city money supported a matching state grant, she said the effective loss would be $350,000.
The distinction is easy to miss in a budget table. The direct reduction was $175,000. With the matching dollars at stake, Off described twice that amount in lost resources. The proposal shows why running a venture organization with a public purpose includes explaining funding mechanisms to people whose responsibilities stretch far beyond venture capital.
$350,000 effective reduction described by Off, including the state match. Proposal figures, not a statement of the final adopted budget.
Her argument connected company creation to high-paying jobs and the tax base. In that setting, an investor has to explain what the organization does for the city as well as what it does for founders. The public audience has its own test: what will this expenditure make possible, and what happens if it goes away?
The budget discussion adds a less glamorous scene to the venture story. A founder’s pitch and a council hearing both ask an audience to commit resources, but the audiences have different obligations. Off’s role carries her between them. The ability to make the arithmetic understandable is part of the leadership job.
A city needs more than term sheets
Off’s involvement in Cincinnati extends into the arts. She has supported ArtWorks for more than a decade and is a former board chair. The organization employs young people and professional artists to create public art. Her name also appears on its 2020 board roster, placing that commitment well before her arrival at CincyTech.
ArtsWave lists her among its 2025-26 trustees and executive committee members. She serves on the board of the Cincinnati chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth, too. Put those commitments beside one another and the range is striking: public art, community arts funding and the business of helping companies grow.
There is room for a little civic comedy here. A city’s ambitions arrive in separate committee packets. One contains a mural; another, a financing plan. Both eventually need people willing to attend a meeting and take responsibility for what follows. Off has chosen to spend time on several sides of that administrative divide.
In 2024, she appeared with CincyTech colleague Sarah Douglas on the philanthropy podcast What Gives. Their conversation brought legal experience, investment work and community involvement into the same setting. That combination is a fair description of her public career: business decisions made within an ongoing commitment to a particular place.
The next useful conversation
Recognition has followed her across professions. Her legal career brought a Chambers USA Corporate/M&A ranking in 2022, Ohio Super Lawyers Rising Star selections from 2018 through 2021 and inclusion in Best Lawyers in America. In 2024, Purpose Jobs included her among its women to know in Midwest tech.
CincyTech announced her selection for the Cincinnati Business Courier’s 2025 Forty Under 40 class in July of that year. The same announcement described collaboration with organizations including Cintrifuse, Lightship Foundation, Alloy Development Co., Main Street Ventures and UC Ventures Lab. It also credited her advocacy with helping secure a $67 million extension of Ohio’s entrepreneurial services program.
These are different measures of the same career: recognition from the legal profession, a move into investment leadership, and work alongside other regional organizations. The distinctions deserve their place. So does the quieter pattern beneath them, in which progress depends on people across institutions agreeing to keep working together.
The phone call that brought Off to CincyTech began with someone else recognizing a possible fit. Her work now includes helping make comparable connections between ideas, executives, founders and capital. A successful deal has a closing date. Building the conditions for the next company leaves the calendar rather more open.