Allison believes in the adage that you can’t connect the dots going forward, having followed a winding path. All of her experiences have contributed to a feeling of being in the right place at the right time: helping venture-backed companies tell their stories.
Marketing
Allison Light
Brand & Marketing
Highlights
A view from the epicenter of the Great Recession
Allison began her career on an asset-based securities trading desk at Goldman Sachs, having earned her securities licenses while still an undergraduate studying cultural anthropology. She cites this as the inception of a career-long love for economics, finance and fintech.
Entrepreneurial ecosystems in SEA
Following an urge to immerse herself in a new cultural context, Allison spent several years in Malaysia as a fellow at the Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, reporting directly to the Country Advisor to the Prime Minister. Her focus was on understanding how entrepreneurial hot spots like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv form and designing initiatives that might kickstart activity in Kuala Lumpur.
Heading back West
With skills in production, writing, and strategy, Allison found her way back to the Bay Area and joined West Ventures, a creative agency built to work with venture-backed companies like Twitter, Impossible Foods, Prelude Fertility, Chegg, GetSetUp and Newfront Insurance. She then struck out solo and opened Lightweight, a consultancy for startups and venture funds, before joining TheGP.
Allison has a unique ability to recast a founder’s vision and read it back to them, making them feel seen. She lives for the moment when their eyes light up, and they say, Yes! That’s what I’ve been trying to say!
Superpowers
Framing and reframing
Allison helps founders examine their positioning from the outside—investors, buyers, potential hires, new audiences, and the culture more broadly.
Cultural consumption, turbo-mode
Mainlining podcasts at 3x speed, keeping up on internet culture, speed reading and even consuming stacks of print magazines across sectors and domains is instrumental to understanding and communicating on behalf of technical founders, making sure their message resonates.
Finding simplicity
Whether it's positioning, messaging, or visual language, Allison can cut to the core of what matters, arming teams with the cleanest possible language to make their story click.
Doing a lot with a little
Working with startups requires budgetary discipline and an investor mindset. Allison helps orchestrate in-market programs that move the needle efficiently to unlock nonlinear growth.
