Abigail "Abby" Alder

Abigail "Abby" Alder is a former Growth Equity Associate at Sorenson Capital and current MBA candidate at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she is pursuing her MBA as part of the Class of 2026. Originally from Mesa, Arizona, Alder has built a career at the intersection of product management, consulting, and venture capital, with a particular passion for investing in innovative product leaders within emerging industries.

Alder graduated with honors from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Science in Sociology, complemented by minors in Business Strategy and International Development. Her academic background reflects a blend of human-centered thinking and business acumen that has informed her career trajectory. During her undergraduate years, she gained early international experience through summer analyst roles at Mercer Talent and Fairtrasa Peru, which exposed her to talent management and social enterprise work in developing markets.

After graduating from BYU, Alder joined Bain & Company as an Associate Consultant, where she served clients in the Healthcare Services and Energy industries. Her consulting experience spanned mergers and acquisitions, operational transformation, organizational design, and results delivery—giving her exposure to high-stakes strategic projects and operational improvement work. This experience at one of the world's top consulting firms provided her with frameworks for analyzing complex business problems and executing transformation initiatives.

Following her time at Bain, Alder transitioned into the technology industry as a Senior Product Manager for CRM & Integrations at Podium, an AI-powered lead generation and management platform for local businesses. At Podium, she led cross-functional teams including engineers and designers, and was responsible for product strategy, roadmap prioritization, and the development of customer relationship management tools and integrations. Her role required deep collaboration with engineering managers and designers to determine priorities and strategy for product development. This product management experience gave her hands-on insight into what makes product-oriented companies successful—an expertise that would prove valuable in her subsequent move to venture capital.

In her role as a Growth Equity Associate at Sorenson Capital, Alder focused on evaluating and investing in product-oriented early and growth-stage B2B software companies, particularly in the cybersecurity, developer tools, and analytics/ML/AI sectors. She is passionate about backing adaptive, human-centered products and teams, and believes that these qualities are what produce powerful, lasting outcomes. Her experience as a product manager at a high-growth SaaS company positioned her uniquely to assess the product-market fit, product quality, and execution capabilities of portfolio company candidates.

Alder is currently pursuing her MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business (Class of 2026), where she is deepening her business knowledge and expanding her network in Silicon Valley. Outside of work and school, she enjoys hiking, contemporary dance, and traveling with her husband.

Abby Alder's investment philosophy centers on backing innovative product leaders within emerging industries. She fundamentally believes that adaptive, human-centered products and teams will produce powerful outcomes, and she seeks to identify companies where product excellence is the primary driver of competitive advantage.

Sector Preferences:

Investment Approach:

Value-Add to Portfolio: Given her product management background at Podium and her consulting experience at Bain, Alder is well-positioned to help portfolio companies with:

• Cybersecurity: Application security, cloud security, identity and access management
• B2B Software: Enterprise SaaS, developer tools, computing infrastructure
• Analytics, Machine Learning & AI: Data platforms, product analytics, AI-powered applications
• Application & Developer Tools: Infrastructure, automation, DevOps tooling
• Alder focuses on product-oriented companies where the quality of the product and the strength of the product team are central to the investment thesis
• She looks for companies with strong product-market fit, exceptional user experience, and teams capable of iterating and adapting quickly
• Her background in product management gives her a unique lens for evaluating product roadmaps, engineering capabilities, and customer adoption metrics
• She values human-centered design and believes in backing founders who prioritize user needs and customer feedback
• Product strategy and roadmap development
• Go-to-market planning and execution
• Operational scaling and organizational design
• Customer success and retention strategies
• Integration and partnership strategy