She pointed to fintech startup Esusu as an example. The company reports rent payments to major credit bureaus, helping tenants build credit—a benefit rarely available since rent has historically not counted toward credit scores. 

“You know how many people are affected by that, and how you can’t build credit?” Williams said. “Your car bill works for credit, but your rent doesn’t. So that problem is facing [a huge percent] of the population. And so we try to look at companies that most VC people [would pass up because they] want to focus on that smaller number. These are trillion-dollar industries that we’re looking at that affect most of the population.”

Backing women and people of color

Since its launch in 2017, Serena Ventures has prioritized women founders and those from underrepresented backgrounds, as well as upstarts developing innovative solutions that seek to improve equity for women and people of color.

As of last year, more than half of the companies in Serena Ventures’ portfolio are women-founded. The portfolio also includes almost 50% Black founders and over 10% Latino founders. 

As a Black woman venture capitalist, Williams is uniquely positioned to bolster businesses run by people from underrepresented groups, she said, because “you have to start at the top. If you don’t change that, it doesn’t flow down at all.”

“It’s really about who writes the checks,” she continued. “Once you change who’s writing the checks, then you get different founders. When it’s the same people writing the checks, they’ll get the same investors, and it’s a vicious cycle, right?

“We have several women on our team. We find more underrepresented founders. We find more women founders. That’s why our portfolio has so much diversity—because we see things differently.”