Vera Shokina is a Managing Director with Silicon Valley Banks’s Global Gateway group. In this role she assists international venture capital funds and innovation companies in the emerging markets with their US and international market expansion.Prior to joining SVB, she was CFO and COO of Runa Capital, where she brought more than 20 years of finance and investment experience both in the US and Russia and a passion to build a Russian VC industry to the Runa team.
Prior to joining Runa in 2010, Vera spent five years as a VP with California-based Silicon Valley Bank, where she was responsible for building relationships with technology start-ups and oversaw a $50M USD venture debt portfolio for early-stage VC-backed software and services companies.
Additional Silicon Valley experience includes work with GE Capital Windows 7 Home Basic SP1 Clave and Goldman Sachs & Co. Before moving to the US, Vera worked for Citibank Moscow where she managed a portfolio of loans and traded Russian equities for institutional foreign investors.
Active in both professional and civic communities, Vera is a former president and board member of the American Business Association of Russian Professionals (AmBAR), a non-profit business association of more than 2,000 Russian-speaking professionals based in Silicon Valley, and founder and board member of Moscow-based ArtWeekend, Children School of European Art. As part of her work with AmBAR, Vera organized a delegation of 20 prominent Silicon Valley investors representing top-tier VC firms managing $60+ billion USD and brought them to Moscow to meet with Russian business and government leaders to cement ties between the high tech communities of the two regions. The result of this trip was $400 million of joint investments.
This will not be her first time at Startup Istanbul conference. In 2014, Vera Shokina attended the event and was one of the speakers at the Panel: What VCs Really Want. From the video below you are able to find out the answers of some important questions like: What are you looking for in a startup? What are the questions, which the entrepreneurs should ask the investors? What are the trending type of businesses that interest the investors the most?
