Jennifer Scherbel (2019, MBA) began her BYU Marriott experience with one goal: to learn all she could in order to start a business. “I come from an entrepreneurial family,” she explains. “I had a few business ideas and just felt the itch.”
Fresh off a role at PwC in the Bay Area, Scherbel dove into her MBA, participating in competitions and serving as the Graduate Entrepreneur Association’s first female president. But the biggest influence for Scherbel was her experience with Cougar Capital, the MBA-run venture capital and private equity fund led by Gary Williams. “I owe a lot to Gary; he hates when I say that, but I will say it all day long,” notes Scherbel.
As Scherbel’s MBA was winding down, she received a call from Spencer Tall, then a partner at venture capital firm Allegis Capital. Although the two had crossed paths through work and social circles in the Bay Area, for her, the call came out of the blue. When Tall offered Scherbel a job at Allegis, which had just raised $250 million in funding, she hesitated. “Allegis is a dream job, so people are fairly shocked to hear that I originally told Spencer, ‘Probably not,’” Scherbel recalls. “But I wasn’t sure if it would be an environment in which I could fulfill my entrepreneurial goals of building companies and helping people.”
Tall followed up—this time offering an internship for Scherbel to test the waters. “After two days at Allegis, I realized: This is my dream job,” she says. “It combines everything that I love about business, and the founding partners had built a wonderful, team-focused, startup-building firm. I will be forever grateful to Spencer for giving me a chance.”
Scherbel now serves as a general partner at Allegis, a role she enjoys for its day-to-day variety. “We’re always searching for the next company to invest in,” she says. “But once we invest, it’s important that we’re also building the companies; if they’re successful, then we’re successful.”
Since many of Allegis’s investors are strategic investors, Scherbel helps create partnerships between them and the startups. In this process, “I get to meet some of the most amazing, incredible humans ever,” she says.
Creating connections—whether between businesses or strangers—is an area in which Scherbel excels. “This is one reason why I love playing pickleball; I get to build a community of people I wouldn’t normally meet in my everyday life,” she says.
Scherbel, who’s based out of Afton, Wyoming, also enjoys woodworking. “My goal is to start building cabinets,” says Scherbel, who makes custom frames for pieces from local artists and gives them as Christmas gifts. “I’ve started building spec homes for fun because I want to better understand the construction industry.”
In addition, Scherbel helps women gain confidence through travel. She plans trips for friends and family members, such as her teenage nieces, and teaches them everything from planning the itineraries to navigating big cities. “They learn that they can do hard things—that they’re smarter and braver than they thought,” she says. But the most important takeaway is “that our world is filled with people who we have more in common with than we realize.”
Scherbel loves helping people see opportunities they may not have considered before—a sentiment that also reflects her unexpected path to Allegis: “There’s so much beyond what’s right in front of us if we’re open to expanding our perspective.”
