Meet Sarah: M13’s Investor Relations Leader on the Art of the 100-Year Relationship

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As M13’s investor relations leader, Sarah Tomolonius excels at cultivating long-term relationships with M13’s LPs. She believes in partnerships built on trust and nurtured over time, through market cycles and life cycles. 

Her background spans IR, public company board roles, and sustainability, shaping her unique perspective to venture. She acknowledges the evolving nature of the asset class and challenges misconceptions about “overnight successes.” Sarah’s no-nonsense approach has earned her a reputation for being pragmatic and unflappable—and her genuine connection to the people and projects she supports is a testament to her authentic core.

Anyone who’s ever had a video call with Sarah can’t miss her home office background: a credenza entirely covered with framed family photos spanning generations. It’s a visual metaphor for how she sees her work. Anchored in legacy, while still celebrating the potential of the future.

Sarah’s recent publications 

• Here’s What Makes M13 a Great Place to Work
• Our 2024 Predictions
• Paris Hilton and Elizabeth Stark: Crypto and the Creator
• The Future of Capital and ESG
• Our Holistic Approach to Investing: Introducing M13’s ESG Policy
• Future Perfect: What Wellness Means Today—and in the Future
• M13’s Propulsion Model Was Built to Help Execute

Investor relations and long-term relationships 

Tell us about how you approach working with M13’s limited partners. 

Venture is a long-duration asset class, and these are long-term relationships. Having been both an LP and a GP before joining M13, I intrinsically bring both a GP and an LP perspective. I think about alignment all the time. How are LPs assessing us? What are they looking for in their portfolios? How can we be helpful? 

These are very long legal and contractual partnerships, but they’re also human partnerships, and so I approach them with a human lens. 

Who are M13’s LPs? 

We have a range of LPs spanning family offices, foundations, pensions, endowments, and more. Some of our LPs have fiduciary duties to their own investors, and I take that very seriously. I believe there’s a great duty and responsibility when it comes to accepting capital from people working in public service, or from foundations that are providing a social good or helping people retire. 

How do you build trust in these relationships?

In a 10- or 15-year long relationship like this, there will be multiple market cycles. When everything is up and to the right, it’s easy for people to feel happy. But inevitably a recessionary environment will come, and that’s the real test of the relationship. 

At M13, we make sure to have a regular cadence of communications so our LPs feel in the loop, have access to our insights, and feel like they understand what’s going on. I find that open communication helps people weather the less rosy times and feel more supported and comfortable. 

Transparency is important, and building in the process muscle is essential in this role. As an LP in the past, I was scarred by an incident where a hedge fund PM was replaced and the LPs didn’t learn about it until six months later—by which time returns had deteriorated. This further impressed upon me that as a GP, I want to make sure our LPs have the most important material updates in a timely manner.

Are in-person interactions still important post-Covid?

In-person interactions are valuable! In my previous firm, I used to say it took six months before someone got comfortable with you and about two years of meetings to actually formalize a partnership through an investment. Pre-Covid, you would probably see an investor two or three times a year, but now annual meetings are the main venue for face-to-face connections. As you interact with people over the years, every interaction builds on each other.

How have you seen IR evolve? 

Prior to the global financial crisis, there was a very discrete model for fundraising. You’d raise a fund; you’d close the fund; and the investing team would start to deploy it. Only when they’d deployed around 65% to 75%, you’d begin to market the next fund. 

Today, everything is much more continuous.  IR work is less project-based, so there’s no “stopping point” in fundraising in the way there used to be. It goes back to what we were talking about with relationship building: You’re never not building a relationship. But that’s a good thing. These relationships wouldn’t truly be sustainable otherwise. 

What is a common misconception about venture that you’d like to clear up? 

Often when we see stories about unicorns or decacorns, it feels like an overnight success—and it never is. 

There are so many points of crisis, and near-failures, and feelings of catastrophe and agony and anxiety on behalf of founders along the way. We’ve been lulled into thinking that the Cinderella stories that seem to bloom before our eyes are instantaneous, and that’s never the case. There is a ton of work and effort going on behind-the-scenes for founders, investors, and LPs.

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A ‘heterogenous’ career path 

Tell us a bit about your career path pre-M13. 

When I was interviewing for my previous firm, the asset management arm of Continental Grain Company, I remember the CEO telling me, “You don’t have a straight and narrow background. It’s very heterogeneous.” It can make you a little nervous to hear that in an interview, but I think he meant it as a compliment! 

It was true that I had done a lot of different things. I had co-founded the Sustainability Investment Leadership Council (SILC); I had an MPA in International Finance and Policy; I had worked for Citi Private Equity and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

As a side note, when I worked in money management equity research, the founder of the firm told me his favorite major for employees was English. He said, “I can teach someone equity research, or money management, or trading, but having the ability to really put things together is the most precious asset.” So I’m glad I was an English major too. 

What made you decide to join M13? 

I had no desire to join a venture firm. None at all. I had helped manage Citi’s venture fund-of-funds portfolio which was invested in the late 90s/early 2000s, and those were tough, tough times. I also used to joke that I’d seen an episode and a half of Silicon Valley, so culturally I thought venture was just not the right fit for me. 

When I first met Matt and Latif, I remember telling them, “It doesn’t matter how good of a storyteller you are; you can’t raise a fund if you don’t have returns to show.” I was incredibly bald about it. I remember standing on the steps of the subway after that interview, calling my mom and telling her, “Well, I sure didn’t get that job.” But it turns out, Latif is the kind of analytical thinker who appreciates a no bullsh*t attitude, so he brought me back to meet Christine. 

When we met, Christine and I had a long conversation that ranged from environmental degradation to overpopulation to sustainability—and I remember looking at her and thinking, “This is not what I thought a venture partner was.” I had already liked the way M13 was taking the private equity evolution playbook to create portfolio value through operating expertise and applying it to venture, but that meeting really changed the way I thought about what that could look like in practice. 

It sounds like the early team made a strong early impression.

They did—but it wasn’t just meeting the M13 partners, although they all had exceptional backgrounds. It was seeing that they were all converging on this firm at this time, and thought they could build something truly special, and that they wanted to do this, despite the many other opportunities they had.

I also had come from a firm that was 210 years old and had 100+ year relationships, which had really shaped the way I thought about long-term partnerships. At M13 I saw the opportunity to build those kinds of relationships, which was thrilling. I was impressed that M13 was hiring really different people than I ever expected at a venture firm, but it was also the way the M13 approach to partnerships was baked into the firm that made it a compelling opportunity.

Mentorship and legacy 

Who have been some of your most influential mentors, and what have they taught you? 

When I was about eight years old, I started going to a camp called Something Different, run by a woman named Judi Friedman. We spent a lot of time in nature, and when we’d come across something like names scratched into a tree, she’d always say, Fools’ names fools’ faces often found in public places. The lesson was that we shouldn’t disturb nature, but we also shouldn’t disturb the next person's enjoyment of what we were enjoying. It was also a call to be a good steward, to think beyond ourselves as individuals, and to preserve what is beautiful and worthy for our communities. 

The other mentor I’d highlight is Laszlo Birinyi, who managed Birinyi Associates, an equity research money management firm. While I was getting my Master’s degree at Columbia, I joined their team with no experience in finance, and I sat right next to him. You can read all the books about capital and efficient markets and trading that you want, but there’s nothing like sitting next to someone who’s watching the ticks go up and down. It was amazing to watch him work. 

I remember one interesting thing he said to me was that 80% of the time he wanted me to be doing the work that he gave me, but the other 20% of the time he wanted me to save for my own projects. It impressed upon me that your mind needs to breathe. You need to shift focus and spend time on things that are genuinely interesting to you to be your most successful self. Inevitably, the projects or reading that I focused on during that 20% (one of my main focus areas was emerging and frontier economies) informed the work I did in that other 80%.

Can you describe your own leadership style?

I definitely don’t micromanage. When I see talent and aptitude, I nurture it by giving people more autonomy to help build their confidence. I don’t think you should just toss people into the deep end and tell them to learn to swim, but I do believe in building independence and cultivating a sense of ownership. 

Your home office background is very distinct. Can you tell us about it? 

I have more than 50 family photos sitting on the table behind me. When I was just about seven or eight, I remember staying with my grandparents, who had a whole wall of family photos. My grandparents would sit with me and my brother and tell us who was who. 

I imagine your family members inculcate this kind of thing into you—so now I have my own spread of photos. There’s my daughter, my brother and sister, my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, friends, and other family. It does give this feeling of being buttressed by everyone that came before you, with you, and maybe even after you. It goes beyond your personal legacy; it’s the legacy of people who brought you into this world. 

Lightning round 

First job? 

Babysitting 

Guilty pleasure? 

I asked my 10-year-old daughter what she thought my guilty pleasure was, and she reported, “working and eating chocolate.” 

Book rec? 

The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune, by Conor O'Clery.  Chuck Feeney was the founder of Duty Free, and he anonymously gave away about eight billion dollars during his lifetime. The magnanimity and accomplishment of anonymous philanthropy is really striking to me. His obituary in the New York Times is worth a read as well. 

Movie rec? 

Koyaanisqatsi is epic, almost like a space odyssey. It starts in nature, then zooms out into the industrialized world in such a way that the major highways almost become like arteries or rivers. Beautiful, beautiful movie. 

Hidden talent? 

I’m a good letter writer. I still believe in the handwritten letter. 

Favorite app? 

Photos.