Vanessa Colella

Vanessa leads the corporate venturing team in seeking, evaluating, investing in and working with start-ups to commercialize their technologies and drive growth for Citi. She joined Citi Ventures in April 2013 coming to the team from Citi's Consumer Business where she was Head of North America Marketing for the prior three years. Prior to Citi, Vanessa held a variety of leadership positions in venture capital, media and marketing, product development, and financial services innovation. She was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with US Venture Partners, leading efforts to evaluate investment opportunities in media, technology and financial services and advising portfolio companies on marketing, distribution and business models. Vanessa spent two years at Yahoo! restructuring B2B marketing and building a global data analytics and insights business as Senior Vice President, North America Marketing and Senior Vice President, Insights, respectively. In addition, Vanessa was a Partner at McKinsey and Co. working in strategy development and organizational change for media, technology and entertainment companies. She co-led the firm's West Coast Organization Practice and oversaw research focused on building teams to support innovation and growth. Vanessa serves on the advisory board of the NVCA and Beckon, a startup working to bring actionable data to marketers. A charter member of Teach for America, Vanessa received her BS in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and subsequently returned there for her graduate studies at the Media Lab, earning both her MS and PhD degrees. Vanessa resides in San Francisco with her husband and their son.