Sara Barek, a Founding Team member and Managing Partner responsible for Operations, spent 17 years at various tech start-ups serving in client-facing, operational and strategic roles before joining Oceans in 2018.
Sara brings the same focus, creativity, discipline and energy the Oceans team devotes to helping founders to launch and scale Oceans’ operations. Sara has been getting things done behind the scenes, honing her skills building just enough process to be efficient, bridging the gap between the tech and business sides of companies, and managing cross functional teams across many continents over the course of her career. Sara spent 9 years at ClearForest, a natural language processing software company acquired by Thomson Reuters. Pre-acquisition, as Director of Professional Services, Sara ran engagements with Fortune 500 and other prominent companies leading all client relationship management and internal coordination efforts. Post acquisition, Sara held various roles at Thomson Reuters including Director of Deployed Solutions where she built a new function and team across Israel, India and the US from the ground up that was fully operational within 30 days and delivered 100% of its target in less than 12 months. As Director of Business Value Delivery, Sara ensured the development team’s efforts focused on key strategic initiatives by assessing opportunities for potential solution benefits and maximizing returns of delivered solutions.
As operators, we know how much hard work goes into building successful companies from the grounds up. Great investors provide more than just capital, they provide the hands on support founders need. We created Oceans to help founders build strong foundations and benefit from all the lessons we learned the hard way.
The caliber (personal and professional), depth of technical expertise, how complementary the founders' skills are, what drove the founders to start the company and how that is reflected in their passion and subject matter expertise
We are super hands on, available and responsive. We like to tackle the hard stuff and encourage founders to reach out anytime to ask for support --- if we don't have the answers, we will find someone in our network who does. Founders who are openminded to ideas and feedback really love our approach.
Relax and be authentic, the rest comes.
We don't get as far when we do things alone: nothing is more important that building a great team around you -- whether it's family, work colleagues, or friends and neighbors. We need each other to succeed and have to foster those relationships by helping people (even when they don't ask), asking for help (even when it's hard), and holding ourselves and others to high standards (even if others don't). At Oceans we invest in amazing founders and teams and view our relationships with founders as long-term "marriages".
As a native New Yorker, I've always loved how energizing NYC is and that it draws incredibly diverse and talented people from all over the world who have big aspirations. The future of tech in NYC is bright - unparalleled expertise across so many industries combined with NYer's grit, perseverance and creativity will make magic.
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