In elementary school, Liz Wessel ran a side operation trading rare $2 bills with classmates. Not collecting them - trading them. For profit. The instinct was already there: find the gap between where value sits and where it's needed, and build a bridge.
That instinct got her to the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied political science, mathematics, and Japanese simultaneously - three disciplines with almost nothing in common - and founded PennEats (later UniEats), a platform giving fellow students discounts at local restaurants. Her first marketplace. Her first go-to-market problem. Her first version of the same question she's been answering ever since: how do you connect supply and demand when neither side knows the other exists?
After Penn, she joined Google's Associate Product Marketing Manager program in Mountain View, then relocated to India for a year to lead brand and product awareness initiatives in emerging markets. Then she interned at Blackstone in Tokyo, which taught her two things with absolute clarity: she had zero interest in private equity, and she had every interest in living abroad. Both lessons proved useful.
"Great isn't good enough."
- Liz Wessel, on the standard she held at WayUpIn 2014, at 23 years old, Liz co-founded WayUp with JJ Fliegelman. The problem was one she knew personally: college students couldn't find cool internships with companies that didn't recruit on campus, and companies couldn't find the students they actually wanted to hire. WayUp was originally called "The Campus Job" - a name that does the job of explaining exactly what it was, before the pivot to something with more room to grow.
She ran WayUp for seven years. That's a number worth sitting with. Not the kind of founder tenure that ends with a quick flip or a post on LinkedIn about "the rollercoaster." Seven years of founder-led sales. Seven years of building from SMB into enterprise. Seven years of navigating churn, customer success scaling, and the perpetual question of product-market fit. WayUp grew to seven million candidates and thousands of employer clients, raised over $40 million from General Catalyst and Index Ventures, and was acquired by Yello in 2021.
Along the way, she and JJ did something oddly specific and oddly successful: they invented National Intern Day. In 2017, they designated the last Thursday of July as a day for companies and interns to celebrate the relationship. It stuck. It's now an actual annual event observed by companies across the country. Very few founders can say they created a national holiday as a side project.
"The true 'mistake' you'd make is doing one wrong thing twice - meaning that you didn't learn from it the first time."
- Liz WesselAfter WayUp's exit, Liz joined Y Combinator as a Visiting Group Partner. She wasn't resting. She interviewed and selected companies for multiple batches, ran back-to-back office hours, and worked with over 110 early-stage startups on the problems she'd spent seven years living: enterprise sales, B2B marketing, positioning, pricing, storytelling, and fundraising. Her reputation at YC calcified into a phrase: the GTM whisperer. The person technical and product-oriented founders called when they needed to actually close their first enterprise deal.
She'd also been investing as an angel since 2016 - quietly, consistently, early. Forty-plus companies before she made it official. Ramp in 2019. Scale AI in 2016, before most people could explain what data labeling was. Ro in 2017. Artera in 2016. Multiple exits: Altru acquired by iCIMS, Weav acquired by Brex, Data Mechanics by NetApp. The portfolio reads like someone who understood where the puck was going before the puck moved.
In September 2023, Liz joined First Round Capital as a Partner in the San Francisco office. It was not a lateral move from operating. It was the culmination of everything that had come before it: the founder empathy, the GTM rigor, the angel track record, the YC network, the decades of pattern recognition. First Round's announcement described references calling her "top 1% of founders" and "hardest working person" - the kind of praise that only means something when it comes from people who've watched you in the room at 11pm.
Her investment thesis at First Round is specific: she backs domain experts and technical builders who need a partner as obsessed with execution as they are. Companies reimagining old-school industries, or ventures that exist because a breakthrough technology just made something newly possible. She goes deep - sales call coaching, funnel analysis, pitch feedback at the granular level. The 30,000-foot view is available if you want it. But she'll also sit on a call and help you rewrite your cold outreach.
In 2025, Forbes named her to the Midas Brink List - a recognition of rising stars in venture capital. It's a list for people who've already done enough to warrant attention, but whose best moves are still ahead. For Liz, that framing is probably exactly right. The $2 bills in elementary school. The three-discipline degree. The seven-year company. The 110 startups. The 40 angel bets. The First Round partnership. Each chapter built the next one.
She lives in San Francisco with her husband Matt Ross, their two children, and a cavapoo. She keeps investing in founders. She keeps showing up to office hours. She still thinks great isn't good enough.