“I remember getting Adobe Illustrator when I was younger. It was more fun than drawing with a pen and paper because you could experiment and play around with layers. I would spend hours in it.”
Natalie grew up playing competitive volleyball and was a middle blocker on the Harvard Women's Varsity Volleyball team.
“I love believing in a founder and their product long before others do,” she says. “There’s nothing more rewarding than working with the underdog founder who has a vision of the future that commands that their product exist.”

Natalie Sandman

General Partner, Early

Natalie Sandman has understood the power of technology from a young age. Growing up in Silicon Valley, she experienced firsthand how computers and software could shape the world around her. “I remember sitting in our living room as a child and my dad would take apart a computer and put it back together,” she says. “I’ve always had a deep connection with technology and building things.”

After studying applied mathematics and economics at Harvard, Natalie joined Zenefits as one of the first product managers, where she built insurance, payroll, and HR products during the company’s hyper-growth from tens to more than 1,000 employees. From there, she led the product team at Ravelin, a London-based machine learning fraud detection startup, and founded Dabble, a mobile shopping app. Her venture career began at Shasta Ventures, where she developed an appreciation for supporting founders at the earliest stages of their journey. 

At Spark, Natalie focuses on early-stage, enterprise software companies reinventing the way people work. She likes to back product-led companies with bottoms-up adoption and vertical software companies that are reinventing legacy industries. “Whether you’re building a product for a knowledge worker, a developer, or a subcontractor, I get excited when companies are tapping into strong communities,” she says. “These could be existing, organic communities or ones you’re building yourself.”

Companies
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