The Mercury News said Joanna's story "reveals the kind of grit it takes." A mother, mentor, education advocate and entrepreneur, Joanna grew up in a boisterous Italian-American family in Montclair, New Jersey. Her grandparents emigrated from Europe. Her father was an entrepreneur who worked in housing development, railroads and shipping. Her mother was a school teacher following in the footsteps of her grandmother. Joanna's father was the first in his family to go to college and he was a passionate believer in the democratization of society through education.
A competitive gymnast in high school and at Duke University, where she earned a BS in psychology, Joanna learned early in life that reaching goals mostly involves a stubborn willingness to fall down and pick yourself up. Her first job was with a multinational advertising agency in New York City, where she started as a media planner making $12,000 a year. Soon she won a promotion, moved on to become director at a leading global consumer products firm where she was managing brand with revenues of $500 million, and earned her MBA from Columbia University. She got married, had an infant son and when it seemed Joanna "had it all," her husband suddenly left the family. Things went from bad to worse. With her father's health failing, she moved back home to Montclair to manage the family's struggling 42-room inn. A working mom mired in debt, she drew from her parents' example, put her head down and managed to return the business to profitability in just three years.
A SAN FRANCISCAN BY CHOICE
In 1993, following the loss of her father and the birth of her daughter, it was time for a new beginning, and Joanna headed west. She'd long admired San Francisco for its beauty, energy and unabashed diversity. Like thousands of others before and since, Joanna fell in love with the City, and she discovered first-hand that San Francisco is a place where you can be who you are and make no apologies.
With her second husband, an award-winning chef, Joanna opened a restaurant in Rincon Center, which won national attention for concept and cuisine. Unfortunately, after just two years, the business was forced to shut its doors, providing a valuable long-term lesson in the practical realities and challenges of running a small business.
BREAKING "INTO THE OLD BOYS CLUB"
Meanwhile, as Joanna worked a day job in the Financial District, she continued to make bigger plans. In 1996 she took the risk of a lifetime, plunging headlong into the traditionally male-dominated world of venture capital. As Forbes Magazine would later write, "With no history of investing or personal wealth, she bootstrapped her way into the clubby venture capital world. She did it by being as resourceful and imaginative as the entrepreneurs she backs — raising seed money, living on no salary, dealing with repeated rejection, surviving the loss of two initial partners."
With a beginning investment of $50,000 cobbled together from savings and personal debt, Joanna formed Venture Strategy Group together with a partner (later renamed VSP Capital). Within four years, they built a $200 million fund.
BRINGING GREAT IDEAS TO LIFE
Joanna's business was based simply on identifying smart entrepreneurs with great ideas and making them happen. Investing in and advising early-stage best-of-breed innovative ideas, VSP helped build more than 60 Bay Area companies, moving innovative concepts from the drawing board, through the research, planning, and financing stages, and establishing dozens of solid, sustainable companies with long-term value. Over fourteen years, VSP weathered the dot.com collapse and helped start firms in a diverse range of industries including technology, retailing, consumer products, wireless networking, cognitive learning software, and financial services for the unbanked. VSP companies have created thousands of jobs across the Bay Area.
INDEPENDENT LEADERSHIP
An active teacher, mentor and education reform advocate, Joanna believes passionately in the need for greater innovation in the arena of public education. She teaches at Santa Clara University and has served for eight years on the Bay Area Board of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which brings business -building skills to students in low-income communities. Joanna is an advisory board member of the San Francisco School Alliance and serves on the board of the New Schools Venture Fund, which helps education entrepreneurs "scale" their enterprises to effect systems change in San Francisco and across the country. Joanna also serves on the Global Board of Directors of Endeavor, a non-profit that assists high-impact entrepreneurs in developing nations.
Selected by the World Economic Forum as a "Global Leader for Tomorrow," she is winner of the "Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award" by the San Francisco Chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners and was named among the "Most Influential Business Women in the Bay Area" by the San Francisco Business Times. In 2002, she was named an Aspen Institute Crown Fellow where Texas Governor Ann Richards became her mentor.
"THE REES BUNCH"
Joanna is married to John Hamm, a venture capitalist, author and CEO advisor. She is the proud mother of four in a blended household comprised of her 21 year old son Arthur, her 17 year old daughter Taylor, and her step-daughters, Andie, 13, and Perry, 11. The family is topped off with two dogs, Jack and Jill. Joanna has two brothers and one sister. Her mother now lives in San Francisco, the place where she always told her kids she had left her heart when they were growing up.
