About pericus ventures
We Are Your Life Raft
In The Turbulent Seas
Of A New Business
Our Mission
To support early stage entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds in building impactful tech businesses.
About Us
Our Story
Pericus Ventures was founded to help pre-seed and seed stage founders from across the country access the Silicon Valley marketing talent they need to build successful companies.
This mission was born out of our founder, Lara Jordan’s, experience meeting & working with hundreds of founders of color, women founders, and founders building businesses outside of the Silicon Valley “bubble.” She saw first hand that these underrepresented founders had to have stronger traction to raise funding and prove their products to investors. Furthermore, from her first hand experience working in a startup outside of Silicon Valley, Lara found that access to good resources & knowledge were not easy to find or readily accessible.
She witnessed the ever present chicken before the egg problem for startups— they needed traction to raise funding, but needed funding for the resources to raise traction!
Hence, Pericus Ventures was born. Lara wanted to offer her expertise in digital marketing and experience growing startups to her favorite kinds of startups, those at the early stages. Since inception we have built a business model and pricing structure to meet our clients where they are on their journey and help them to get to the Series A & beyond! In our 3+ years, we have helped over 20 startups drive millions of customers to their websites and sign up hundreds of thousands of customers — and we’re just getting started.
Our Vision
Entrepreneurs at all stages from all backgrounds have access to the high-quality resources & connections they need to build successful tech businesses.
Who You'll Work With
Lara Jordan
Founder & CEO of Pericus Ventures
Lara Jordan is the Founder & CEO of Pericus Ventures. Pericus Ventures merges Lara’s two passions — digital marketing and startups.
In her work with Pericus Ventures, Lara uses her expertise in digital marketing to help B2B, SaaS, and ecommerce startups from across the country to build successful businesses. Clients have gone from 0 to 20,000 customers and seen their best sales days of record. Everyday Lara is grateful to get to partner with awesome clients to build impactful brands and make a difference in the lives of their customers.
Prior to PV, Lara led content for 500 Startups, a global venture capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley. While at 500 Startups, she focused on helping underrepresented founders gain better access to funding and resources, which was her inspiration for starting Pericus Ventures.
Before that, Lara worked in-house for an early stage event tech startup called Magency Digital, where she headed up international marketing and sales. There, Lara partnered with top Fortune 500 brands like Procter & Gamble, Novartis, and Deutsche Bank to incorporate digital technology into their global events. She helped the company achieve 2x YOY growth, multi-million dollar revenue, and $5 million in Series A Funding.
Lara began her career working in digital advertising at top agencies in New York City, picking up her skills in strategy, display advertising, and paid search.
Ally Gsell
Digital marketing associate
Ally joined Pericus Ventures as a Digital Marketing Associate in 2020. She received a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor Mass Communications with a concentration in creative writing from Washington and Lee University. Ally brings in-house startup marketing experience, and her passion for brand storytelling through digital strategies to the PV team.
From the Founder
About The Name
Pericus Ventures was named in honor of my father, who owned a sailboat called Pericus for over 50 years. His entrepreneurial spirit and love of life inspire me every day to pursue my passion and build a business I’m proud of.
The name Pericus comes from the Pericú (also known as Pericues), extinct aboriginal inhabitants of the southernmost portion of Baja California Sur, Mexico. They were an amazing group of people that were only recently discovered to have inhabited the area 30,000 years ago, thousands of years before the Ice Age. This means they likely came from Polynesia or Asia on canoes — talk about an adventurous pursuit!
As a Sociology & Anthropology major, I love learning about indigenous cultures and have traveled extensively around the world to understand tribes and people. Upon discovering the Pericú were also shamanic culture, the name clicked, as I am trained in shamanic practices and actively explore spiritual traditions around the world.
The name Pericus brings together many different things I love – family, sailing, travel, indigenous cultures, adventure, and spiritual practice. A perfect name to build a business I love with founders I am passionate about helping to grow.
The word ventures was chosen from the dictionary definition, “a risky or daring journey or undertaking.” We love working with risky, daring startup founders to help them in their pursuit to navigate & charter new territory. We are not currently making venture capital investments.
