New year. New function! Meet Ata & Eline, promoted to associates

January 23, 2023

New year. New function! Meet Ata & Eline, promoted to associates

Meet Ata A.K.A. Ata Hazes

Born and raised in Ankara (TR) Ata studied operations research, but never did it. He always wanted to break into venture capital after he had fallen in love with it. He was 20, it was the summer of ’17. So, straight outta college Ata started working at venture funds, including Prime Ventures, HPE Growth and Taptrove Ventures before he discovered Rubio. First as an analyst, now as an associate

The world of entrepreneurship is so rich that no multiple or SaaS-metric can capture its entire essence. And that’s why Rubio, according to Ata, is so special. His obsession with the entrepreneurial spirit is what drives him: it takes another level of creativity to build a world changing impact business  for people and planet. But even though he takes his work very seriously, he never takes himself seriously.

And that has not gone unnoticed in the Amsterdam nightlife scene either. Ata loves karaoke (and parties. Although he can’t fluently speak Dutch (yet), his karaoke skills will show who the kroegbaas is. It’s with a reason why everybody at Rubio calls him “Ata Hazes”.

Meet Eline – our event queen

As a Dutch smalltown girl turned Amsterdammer, Eline has been walking around the Rubio hallway for the last two years. She rolled into VC because of her belief that impact driven companies should be the status quo and she loves the dynamic pace of the start-up/scale-up ecosystem. No wonder that she holds a MSc. In Entrepreneurship. Before Rubio, Eline worked at Uber and was national lead of the student exchange program at AIESEC.

Within Rubio, Eline has seen both the people and planet side. By joining as an analyst she got a crash course in the challenges of the energy transition and worked on a number of investments aiming to provide a solution (Taylor, de Warmte, RIFT). She is now fully diving into our people domain and her favorite question to ask an entrepreneur is: what drove you to start this business. What’s great about VC according to Eline is that the investment we make is only the start of a long partnership.

Speaking about long, the Rubio team wonders how long the list of activities, games and events is that Eline will organise. From ski-trip to bingo night, she takes her role as partyco very seriously (and the rules to these games as well). After seeing Ata Hazes shine, she put her negotiation skills into practice so Rubio is now the proud owner of a karaoke set.

Don’t feel shy and feel free to congratulate Ata and Eline with their next step!