Vanessa Cho

Design Partner

Vanessa Cho

Design Partner

Vanessa Cho is a design executive who is an expert in building products for consumer and enterprise customers across the globe. She has started and grown design teams in industries ranging from cloud and productivity software to consumer marketplaces and hardware. As GV’s design team lead, she has counseled more than 300 GV portfolio companies on design, product-market fit, and product strategy and advises on scale and team building.

The daughter of Korean immigrants who worked at the United Nations in Austria, Vanessa has always approached design with a global perspective. “Growing up between Asian and European cultures gave me a more inclusive approach when I started my career in design,” she explains. “I never fell for the classic pitfall of designing something just for myself.”

Vanessa says she sees her primary role as a coach to help accelerate business decisions. “In my work advising portfolio founders on design, I often notice the same thing: Startups tend to focus on what to design, when how we design is just as critical.” She advocates listening to customers early and often throughout product development and enthusiastically promotes diverse thoughts and experiences to foster innovation.

Before joining GV, Vanessa led a team of 250 at Google as head of UX for Google Workspace. She delivered communication and collaboration experiences for products like Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Drive. She also served as head of UX at GoPro and Walmart Labs, where she scaled their product design and research teams.

Vanessa is a graduate of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design.