Primary Job Title Venture Partner Primary Organization 
Disruption
Location Arlington, Virginia, United States Regions Washington DC Metro Area, East Coast, Southern US Gender Female
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What might be surprising - and it was to Brooke - is that reporting the news and founding a company require much the same skills.
When Brooke was 22, after two years in Washington, D.C. and having graduated from Stanford, Brooke got in her beat-up Honda Accord and drove across the country, from small town to small town, looking for a reporting
job. Pitching.
Brooke learned that her audience in Eureka, California cared about logging and fishing and jobs, and then that her audience in Abilene, Texas cared about cattle and high school football and jobs. Market research. She made mistakes on the air. Testing. By the time she got to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she was weirded out seeing her enlarged face in promotions on city buses, Brooke had also performed every unglamorous role in the production and delivery of her product. Executing.
Brooke spent 11 years reporting national stories for NBC News in Washington, D.C., from financial crises and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to covering President Obama?s first inauguration live from Capitol Hill on an insanely freezing day in January of 2009. It was 17 years of creating, packaging and delivering value to an audience across the country every day. For half that time, it was waking up at 2a to start her shift.
So for Brooke it was a natural extension of her reporting experience to identify an information gap felt by a mainstream audience and to fill it. She launched her first company in 2012 aimed at solving an information need among working parents. Now, on a bigger scale with Paul, Brooke is on a mission to help fill a critical information gap in the maturing private market.
As venture partner with Disruption, Brooke helps founders of high-growth companies in Crystal Tech Fund tell their stories to mainstream audiences. She helps mainstream media better understand the forces and the opportunities associated with the private market. Most importantly, Brooke wants to make sure ordinary Americans understand how they too can access the growth and upside of the private market, the true engine of our economy.
