Yoko Okano, Founding Partner, First Row Partners
Yoko is one of the Founding Partners of First Row Partners, a pre-seed stage venture capital firm based in Seattle and investing across North America. First Row Partners invests in technology that superpowers emerging brand builders, content creators and storytellers in a world transformed with new interaction modalities and AI. In addition to investing in pre-seed startups. Yoko teaches new and upcoming entrepreneurs through the Masters of Science in Entrepreneurship program at the University of Washington.

Before starting First Row, Yoko built a portfolio of 50+ companies as an angel investor through her active participation in angel networks like Grubstakes. Being in the heart of Silicon Valley while at Stanford connected her deeply into the tech sector, including 8 years at Google, working on product operations and partnerships for the launch of Google eBooks (now Google Play), and subsequently as a product lead for startups. With her “professional life,” Yoko loves to think about product-led growth and shortening an end user’s “time to delight.” Personally, she also fosters a deep passion for bringing more founders and funders into the ecosystem and balancing the power imbalance between the two sides of the table through education.

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Having immigrated from Korea to the US when she was 12 years old, Claire is bilingual and bicultural, which has always given her the unique perspective of being both an insider and outsider able to bridge different perspectives.

Combining her passions for connecting people and helping them realize their dreams, Claire launched a global accelerator in 2014 which impacted over 200 Korean startups’ ability to expand to the US market.  In 2018, Claire launched SVBeautyTech, the first-ever independent beauty-tech accelerator, to provide a cohort of mostly female beauty-tech founders access to the Silicon Valley resources previously enjoyed almost exclusively by male, locally networked tech entrepreneurs.  Leveraging her global accelerator network and broad brand connections, Claire is excited to work with passionate innovators and disruptors working at the intersection of technology, beauty & wellness.