Founder turned investor Hayley Barna is now a general partner with the early-stage venture firm First Round Capital. The appointment comes roughly one-and-a-half years after Barna — who cofounded the seven-year-old Birchbox, a start-up that mails monthly packages of beauty samples to subscribers — joined First Round as a venture partner.
Barna is based in New York and focused largely on e-commerce opportunities.
Barna is among few female investors that First Round has brought into the fold. Christine Herron, a director at Intel Capital, spent a couple of years as a principal with the firm earlier in her career. CeCe Chang formerly spent two years as director of First Round’s Dorm Room Fund and worked as a junior member of its investing team for a year before that.
Barna had stepped down from her role as co-CEO of Birchbox, which is a First Round portfolio company, in 2015. Her cofounder, Katia Beauchamp, has been steering the company since.
In a Medium post, Barna says she has so far led a handful of investments for First Round, backing both first-time and experienced founders. She also thanks the First Round team for providing her with a “try before you buy” experience by hiring her first into a venture partner role.
“Given that I co-founded a business built on the principles of sampling, it’s poetic that I’ve applied it to my career,” she jokes in the post.
Birchbox has raised $86.9 million to date, including from Forerunner Ventures and Accel Partners. In August, Recode reported that the company was in talks with several retailers about an acquisition, including Walmart.
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Walmart, the country’s largest employer, has bought two other Forerunner-backed companies in the last 15 months: Jet.com and Bonobos.
Barna remains a director on the board of Birchbox. She also serves on the boards of the hair products company Madison Reed (which closed on a fresh $25 million just last month), and RAB Lighting, a 71-year-old lighting and electronics manufacturing company where her brother is CEO.
According to a recent study of women in venture capital by Crunchbase, among the top 100 venture firms, the percentage of women partners has edged up to 8 percent from 7 percent over the last year.
