Joy Fairbanks
Managing Principal
Joy is an experienced change agent. She is a builder/founder, investment evaluator, and advisor to high growth, innovative companies across sectors. She works with early and growth stage tech startups on market assessment, customer validation and acquisition strategy, product development/MVP iterations, milestones and performance measurement, financial forecasting, fundraising, international scaling, and partnerships.
Joy has extensive experience advising companies across geographies from M&A and strategic planning to process improvement and supply chain optimization.
Joy develops incubation programming and is an active advisor across university startup communities and accelerators including: Blackstone Launchpad (powered by Techstars), Black Ambition, The German American Chamber of Commerce (GACC-Step USA), Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), Venture Out, Inventor to Founders (I2F) Cyber NYC, StartEd’s NYU New Media Lab, Stanford University’s Hacking for Recovery Lean Launchpad, and Columbia University’s various entrepreneurship initiatives. Joy helped launch the Long Beach Accelerator, a public-private partnership on the West Coast.
Joy is an alumna of Columbia Business School (Roar Lion Roar!), The London School of Economics and Political Science, and The University of California at Berkeley (Go Bears!).
Joy serves as an adjunct assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School with a demonstrated expertise in entrepreneurship, finance, innovation, and strategy. Joy is highly supportive of impact ventures and organized Columbia’s inaugural Hacking for Humanity Startup Hackathon.