Elisa La Cava is a Principal and member of Trilogy’s investment team. Prior to joining Trilogy, Elisa spent five years as an investor at Madrona Venture Group where she focused on funding early-stage startups building enterprise software applications. She also held positions at MATH Venture Partners and AT&T Corporate Development / M&A. Before receiving her MBA, Elisa worked at Deloitte Consulting, where she held roles as U.S. West Region chief of staff and consultant. Earlier in her career, Elisa gained early-stage company building experience at a biofuel startup where she wore several hats, including business development, project management, and HR.

In addition to her work at Trilogy, Elisa actively supports the Washington student and business communities as Advisory Board Chair for the Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (WE Lead) Program at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, Finance and Investment Committee Member at the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship, and Advisor to Find Ventures. As a Seattle native, Elisa takes every chance she can to hike in the Cascades, bike around the city, or kayak on Lake Union. She is also an avid tennis player; in college she played for four years and captained her NCAA Division III tennis team, and she continues to play often in her free time.

Elisa has a BA in Environment-Economics-Politics and Spanish from Claremont McKenna College and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Lessons Learned

Building startups is, first and foremost, a people business. Making the time to build trust and strong relationships across your team, partners, customers, and investors will take you far.

Sell, sell, sell — even when the product “isn’t quite ready yet.” The sooner you can get in front of customers, the more efficiently you will be able to iterate toward product-market fit.

It’s hard to improve that which you don’t measure. Be thoughtful in choosing your KPIs, intentional (and empowering to your teams) about who owns what, and diligent about driving improvement over time.

Why Entrepreneurs Love Trilogy

“It’s no question that Trilogy is the best early-stage source of capital in Seattle. It’s not even close,” “Truly founder friendly,” “They are with you through thick and thin,” “They roll up their sleeves and work for you,” “Extremely down to earth” “Strong, empathetic, kind… told me what I needed to hear,” – These are all direct quotes from Trilogy portfolio company CEOs when I joined the team in 2023. I am honored to be part of this team which has such a strong reputation of working hard for the founders and entrepreneurs we invest in, and look forward to building on that strength with each new founding team that we welcome into the portfolio.