Until last month, Jessy Wu was a Partner at a venture capital fund. In this piece, she explains how she made the decision to leave, and go all-in on building an AI-enhanced professional services company.
Last month, over spicy margaritas, I told a fellow investor that I’m leaving my job as a partner at a venture capital fund. She gasped, loudly enough to draw some stares. “Jessy, how can you leave a job that’s your whole identity?”
She was teasing, but the joke contained a grain of truth. Why would I leave a dynamic job at a well-regarded venture capital fund I had helped to build?
Being an investor at AfterWork Ventures was an enormous privilege. Our fund invested in 30 companies, built a community of tech enthusiasts, and met thousands of innovative founders. Joining the firm as its first employee was – and remains – one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Leaving was a decision I agonised over.
But after spending years discerning whether founders were doing their life’s work, I started to doubt whether being an investor was my own. Eventually, I found the courage to take a leap of faith, and leave to build something new.
As an investor, I was used to evaluating investment decisions rigorously. Here, I share how I evaluated the opportunity to start a new business, and how I built conviction to go-all in.
What am I building?
Today, Encour is a strategic communications agency that emboldens clients to command the narrative. In the future, my ambition is to scale a global professional services company that is a trusted advisor on all forms of communication:
- External communication with customers, partners, or the public – via press coverage, events, or social media.
- Internal communication with people within organisations – via emails, town halls, hiring campaigns.
- Investor communications with shareholders, prospective investors, creditors, and analysts – via fundraising materials, investor reports, or board meetings.
I saw how communication can alter a company’s trajectory. Great communication can attract customers in droves, pique the interest of top talent, and whip investors into a frenzy. Butchered communication can sow dissent, destroy trust, and precipitate downfalls.
Since soft-launching last month, I’ve worked with three clients and delivered two campaigns. I’m particularly proud of my work with Slice – an Aussie Fintech that helps customers access travel. We leveraged the announcement of their Seed round to build their awareness and credibility, and share the founders’ inspiring stories – which involved bootstrapping the business to 70,000 customers, surviving lockdowns which saw 90% of revenue evaporate, and their Hail Mary decision to launch in the US during the pandemic. Slice has already seen the campaign increase engagement from channel partners, travel agencies, and prospective candidates.
Seizing the opportunity
There’s a huge market for professional services. In the US, the professional services industry is worth US$2 trillion annually – that’s five times more than the B2B software industry. McKinsey, one of the most prestigious professional services firms, reported US$16 billion of annual revenue in 2023 with only 45,000 employees. This works out to a whopping US$356,000 per employee.
So why has venture capital historically shied away from seeding new professional services companies? Traditionally, services companies have been viewed as less scalable. This is because revenue is tied to labour, and so scaling revenue requires adding more workers. Human teams are harder to scale than lines of code! Although services companies have good margins, they’re capped by human capacity – compared to SaaS, where the marginal cost of serving each additional customer can approach $0.
The new hybrid workforce
With the advent of generative AI, it’s now possible to add leverage to a business without adding headcount. For example, you can recruit business development bots via Relevance AI, who book sales meetings on autopilot. Optech’s bots can work in your customer support team to resolve support tickets, and Springboards’ bots can even enhance the creative process by turning creative briefs into press releases or video scripts.
However, these companies face stiff competition. As foundational models improve, the outputs generated by specialised bots will become less differentiated. Over time, it’ll become harder to sell AI bots at a premium to the cost associated with pinging the underlying AI model.
When the dust settles, I believe a certain kind of company will emerge victorious. These are companies that can deliver high quality outputs using hybrid teams, where AI agents work alongside brilliant humans to amplify their ingenuity.
Pairing machine IQ with human EQ
In investing, there’s something called the barbell strategy. It balances risk and reward by combining two different kinds of assets – safe investments such as bonds, and risky investments such as venture capital.
Hybrid teams of AI and humans are another example of a barbell strategy. Significant value can be created by AI, but unique value is added by humans. Strategic communications is an industry where AI working alongside humans can unlock significant improvement in the quality of outputs.
Work that AI could potentially do better than most humans:
- Scan the news daily – unearthing emerging trends and anticipating cycles to ‘newsjack’ before they crest
- Analyse broadsheets – identify ‘gun’ up-and-coming journalists and understand the issues they cover regularly
- Turn an announcement into different messages for different audiences – trade press, internal comms, and investor comms
Work that the best humans could do better than AI:
- Hold high-trust relationships with clients and with media professionals
- Spot tension in a room and use empathetic communication to diffuse tension
- Strategically sequencing communications to build a feeling of momentum and trigger FOMO
The challenges I foresee
As AI continues to improve, there will be a premium on humans who can outperform AI in certain tasks. This talent won’t be easy to attract – and it won’t come cheap.
A powerful talent engine is one that can take ‘diamonds in the rough’ and polish them into something dazzling. This is a challenge that excites me – building a honeypot for ambitious people and becoming a launchpad for brilliant careers. I’ve made my first hire, and will be building a team of Associates.
Why me?
As a child, I loved dreaming up fantastical stories. But when my family immigrated to New Zealand when I was seven, my frolicking imagination became imprisoned by my incomprehension of the English language.
Creative writing used to be my favourite subject, but I came to dread the daily writing task at school. I had so few words; so few ways to give expression to the dramatic scenes playing out in my mind.
Two decades on, I’ve found my words. I’ve also been afforded many platforms – I’ve headlined conferences, published op-eds in prestigious publications, and built a large audience on social media. Learning how to communicate well has been a huge accelerant for my career. It’s convinced people to take a chance on me – to trust me, work with me, and invest in me.
Why now?
Through Encour, I hope to help more organisations command their narrative – not for the sake of sharing feel-good stories, but to pave a path towards successful endings. The opportunity to do this at scale, by building an all-star team augmented by AI, was one I could not look past.
Jessy Wu is the Founder and Managing Director at Encour, a strategic communications agency emboldening clients to command the narrative. Previously, Jessy has a venture capital investor at both early and growth stage funds.
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