Karla McNeilage once asked a question that many professionals might hesitate to admit they did not know the answer to: “What’s a VC pitch deck?” Five years later, that simple question sits at the beginning of a very different professional journey. Today, Karla McNeilage works as a Strategic Partner to Founders & C-Suite Leaders, helping ambitious leaders think about one of the less obvious assets behind commercial growth: reputation.
The most interesting part of Karla McNeilage’s story is not that she eventually became familiar with venture capital, finance, founders, investors, or executive positioning. It is that she initially believed some of those worlds were simply not meant for her.
At school, accounts and finance were difficult. Maths required a second attempt, and even a tutor could not immediately remove the anxiety associated with numbers. Those experiences created a conclusion that many people quietly make about themselves: if something does not come naturally, perhaps it is not something they are capable of doing.
For Karla McNeilage, that conclusion became part of her identity. She even told herself that she would never own a business because she was “bad with money.” But eventually, she challenged the assumption behind that belief. Difficulty was not proof of inability. It was simply evidence that she was still learning.
That distinction can change a career.
Karla McNeilage became comfortable with being a beginner. Instead of pretending to understand unfamiliar subjects, she started asking questions, researching, writing, connecting with people, and gradually developing expertise.
Five years ago, venture capital and pitch decks were unfamiliar territory. Four years ago, when a founder asked about investing in her business, Karla McNeilage had another reason to understand what investment actually meant. Rather than avoiding the unfamiliar, she moved toward it.
Her learning became increasingly practical. She wrote an extensive ebook on accounts and finance to make financial concepts easier for others to understand. She worked on executive positioning and brand strategy for a firm serving VC-backed startups. She ghostwrote content about venture capital and developed LinkedIn strategies for financial advisers.
Each experience added another layer.
Karla McNeilage then moved closer to the startup ecosystem. She helped shape a VC podcast, newsletter, and newspaper column. She attended CEO dinners and learned directly from founders building significant companies. As a Brand Ambassador for VivaTech, she travelled to Paris and met investors, founders, and people working across the technology ecosystem.
Those experiences demonstrate an important principle about professional growth: knowledge often becomes more valuable when it is connected to real people and real situations.
Karla McNeilage continued building relationships with founders, angel investors, venture capitalists, and other specialists. Over time, her understanding of the ecosystem expanded beyond terminology. She began seeing how leadership, positioning, communication, reputation, and commercial opportunity intersect.
That evolution eventually led Karla McNeilage to advise founders operating at an entirely different scale. She consulted with a founder launching a £100 million hedge fund on brand positioning and advised another founder whose company had reached a $9.9 billion IPO valuation on LinkedIn strategy.
But the progression was not about collecting impressive associations. It was about developing the ability to understand what leaders need when their businesses become increasingly visible.
Today, Karla McNeilage focuses on strategic reputation for VC-backed founders and C-suite leaders. Her work highlights an aspect of fundraising that can easily be overlooked: investors are not only evaluating a business model. They are also evaluating the people responsible for building it.
Can the founder communicate a compelling vision? Can customers trust the person representing the company? Can the leader attract strong talent? Can they become associated with a category or point of view? Does their reputation make the business feel more credible and reduce uncertainty?
These questions show why reputation is more than personal visibility.
For a founder, reputation can influence how opportunities arrive, how conversations begin, and how stakeholders interpret the company before they have examined every detail. A strong reputation does not replace a strong business, but it can shape the context in which that business is understood.
Karla McNeilage’s journey also offers a broader lesson for professionals who feel intimidated by unfamiliar subjects. Being a beginner is not a permanent identity. It is a temporary position.
The person who struggles with finance today may understand it tomorrow. Someone unfamiliar with venture capital can learn its language. A professional who has never written for executives can eventually develop a strategic voice. The gap between “I don’t know this” and “I understand this” is often filled by curiosity, repetition, relationships, and a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions.
Karla McNeilage did not need to know everything five years ago. She needed to be willing to ask what she did not know.
That may be the most useful message in her story.
Careers rarely develop in perfectly predictable straight lines. They are shaped by questions, unexpected opportunities, conversations, mistakes, and decisions to explore something that initially feels outside our comfort zone.
Karla McNeilage’s experience shows what can happen when a person stops treating unfamiliarity as a limitation. The question “What’s a VC pitch deck?” could have remained an embarrassing moment. Instead, Karla McNeilage treated it as a starting point.
Five years later, the question is no longer evidence of what she did not know. It represents the beginning of everything she decided to learn.
For founders and executives, the lesson is equally relevant. The next stage of growth may not always require knowing more from the start. Sometimes it requires being willing to ask better questions, enter unfamiliar rooms, and build credibility one experience at a time.
Karla McNeilage’s career is ultimately a reminder that expertise does not always begin with confidence. Sometimes, it begins with admitting that you do not know and having the courage to find out.
