Hotfoot Plumbing, built on a border town in the Arizona desert, was the center of gravity for the Gonzales family.
It was the pride and joy of Ramon “Monchi” Gonzales, who put away savings through years working as a coal miner, janitor and any number of odd jobs to found the service and repair business. Run out of the Douglas, Ariz., home Monchi shared with his wife Adela, Hotfoot was a family-run company through and through: Monchi fixed the pipes, Adela ran the business, and their six daughters and son held various roles in the small venture.
On some days — when she wasn’t organizing Hotfoot’s payroll, preparing documents for the IRS, or going to 6th grade — 11-year-old Adrianna Samaniego joined her grandfather as he fixed his customer’s plumbing problems. Monchi, who at Adrianna’s age was the Arizona state marbles champion (and at 13 would take third at nationals), installed pipes while instilling advice to his granddaughter, who he nicknamed “la tremenda.”
“My father would take her and her sister on jobs and say, ‘Work is hard, but you have options. There’s nothing to be ashamed of doing manual stuff, but there’s a key that if you go to school, you can do something different,’” Corina Monnin, Adrianna’s mom, remembers. “He’d tell her it’s not just about making money; it’s about serving others. ‘If you make it, how are you going to help all those other people coming along to give them a hand so they can do what you’ve done.’”
Samaniego’s grandparents, who she called tata and nana, provided her the example of giving back and serving others. They were foster parents for more than 40 years, and Monchi was a Little League coach for half a century. The Douglas Little League field is named in his honor.
“It took a community to raise us, and my grandparents were the hardest working people I knew,” says Samaniego. “My tata was a miner at the Phelps Dodge smelter, which was one of the main businesses back in the day. But that coal mine closed, and he ended up doing a lot of other jobs and got up enough savings to build a plumbing and construction company. My nana ran everything — from accounting to customer service — so when I was a kid, she taught me the basics of accounting. I used to manage the checkbook, I used to issue checks to our employees, and this was all at the age of 10 and 11. That was the first insight into what it is to run a business.”
Fast forward 20 years and Samaniego, a 2010 Terry alumna who followed earning a degree in finance with an eight-year stint creating programs and startups at Google, embodies the promise of her grandfather’s words. As Investor at Female Founders Fund, she provides early-stage capital to female-founded companies to gain the early financial footing to excel and thrive in the marketplace. Since its 2014 founding, Female Founders Fund has invested in more than 50 of the fastest-growing female-led technology companies in the country.
“I could give you a list of all the deals I have done, and you probably haven’t heard of (the companies),” Samaniego says. “But you will.”
“Adrianna’s going to do what her heart is, and that is to continue to bring others along with her,” Monnin says. “She is anxious to serve women who don’t feel like they have an opportunity or think it could never possibly happen for them. She wants to show them that it has happened, and it can happen for them too.”
***Douglas is a town of 16,000 along the Sulphur Springs Valley in Arizona’s southeastern corner, boasting a semiarid climate, where on even the hottest summer days it cools to the lower 60s at night. Across the border from Douglas is Agua Prieta (AP as the locals call it), a Mexican city of 180,000 initially built (like Douglas) on mining and railroads.
If you live on the U.S. side, many days are spent going from country to country. Douglas’ population is nearly 85 percent Hispanic — mostly Mexican — so AP was merely a suburb (albeit a large one) for the town’s residents. And there was just more to do there.
“You are daily or weekly crossing into Mexico for whatever needs,” Samaniego says. “Whether it is to go to eat, or for myself to go to the doctor, which I had in Mexico for affordability reasons. But in Douglas, there weren’t a lot of opportunities. We had a movie theater with one screen; there was a lot of playing outside. You had to get creative. I have 30 first cousins, so that helped keep me busy, plus my business activities with Hotfoot Plumbing.”
Samaniego threw herself into school and sports. Growing up in a single-parent household of humble means, she understood that education was the way to a different kind of life. Always at, or near, the top of her class, she was a constant ball of positive energy.
“Just staying focused was critical — I had a lot on the line to ‘make it out,’ and I knew this from a young age,” she says. “My mother put a large emphasis on education and staying out of trouble. I always loved school and I loved sports, so that was easy. It was my outlet to staying on the right path.”
But as she was about to enter Douglas High School (presciently nicknamed the Bulldogs), her life in the only hometown she’d ever known was about to change. Her mom was getting married, and Adrianna and her sisters Crystal and Bianca were leaving Douglas for Buford, Georgia. Her new home was not only far from where she grew up (some 1,700 miles), it proved a huge difference in culture and education.
She first noticed Buford’s cultural diversity. Most everyone in Douglas was Mexican, but Buford was a mix of white, Black, Hispanic, Asian and people of two or more races. There were more families of means — the median family income in Buford was 27 percent higher than Douglas. It was a culture shock, but she viewed her setting as a great opportunity.
And then she started high school and was hit with another kind of shock.
“I quickly realized the education I received in Arizona was not at par,” she says. “They put me in equivalent classes that were advanced, and I immediately started to struggle. I put such an emphasis on doing well in school, and I couldn’t believe how far behind I was to my peers.”
It was a critical point for Samaniego — school was never difficult before. But falling back on the lessons of her grandfather, who turned challenges into openings by pushing forward, she did whatever she could to catch up. She worked with tutors, putting in extra work so she wouldn’t fall behind. “I always heard my tata saying ‘con ganas’ or ‘echala ganas’ — give it your all,” she says.
“She had to work twice as hard as everybody else,” her mom says. “I remember my husband would worry about her. He’d say, ‘It’s 2 in the morning, and she’s still at the table doing homework.’ She never gave up. She always pushed herself until she felt like she was at the same level as everyone else.”
By her sophomore year, she was. By senior year, she was ahead of almost all of them, finishing her high school career fifth in a class of more than 600. The next challenge was something that hadn’t been done in her family — going to college.
“I had not been on a lot of campuses, but after I first came to Athens, with all the buildings, the lawns, everyone walking around — it was utopia,” she says. “But somebody who is first gen you always have to consider finances. I was not getting support from family to cover college expenses or tuition, so I was very focused on a full ride to school.”
And that’s when Samaniego learned another benefit of moving to Georgia — the HOPE Scholarship. Her grades put her in a position to have full tuition paid to a state school, and after visiting Athens, she knew which school it would be.
That she got into Georgia was not a surprise; that she stayed might have been. After learning she was accepted to UGA with HOPE Scholarship money in tow, she received the Gates Millennium Scholarship. Each year the GMS is awarded to 300 students from low-income households nationwide, and it pays for everything at any college.
“I had the chance to go elsewhere,” Samaniego says. “But I fell in love with Georgia. I was excited to stay.”
* * *
“I don’t remember the first time I met Adrianna; it was probably in class. But given how she is, it was not long before I realized who she was just in terms of her personality and what she contributed to class. She is so special,” says Dawn Bennett-Alexander, a longtime professor in Terry’s Legal Studies Program who retired in January.
Though Samaniego had experience in accounting through helping with the family business, she chose to be a finance major because its versatility appealed to her — “it’s strategic, it’s not just input-output, and that’s what makes it complicated,” she says. “And there’s a variety of ways you can leverage that degree.”
The adjustment to college was not a problem. She focused on her finance degree, gathering internships (such as a Goldman Sachs), joining the Banking and Finance Society and the Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting. Outside of class, she was a member of Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority and Order of Omega, the Greek honor society, while also starting the mentorship program Latinos investing in the Students of Tomorrow (LiSTO).
She received guidance from Management Leadership for Tomorrow, a group providing visibility to corporate careers, which coached and prepared her to succeed.
But what she wanted to do after college was still in the works. Looking at where some of her fellow finance majors were headed, she saw a corporate career track in a New York City skyscraper — and she wasn’t sure that was her passion.
And then she took Bennett-Alexander’s class.
“Her area of focus was around equity, how the law applies in business, employment law, and it was the first time I started to see an emergence of me being able to bring what I was so passionate about,” Samaniego says. “I always felt I was the underestimated individual who didn’t have all the opportunities, so I wanted to ensure I am creating opportunities to provide a more equitable future. It was the first time I had a class that provided that lens, which gave me the thought I could potentially be the amalgamation of business and inclusion. I felt very empowered.”
So empowered that instead of seeking an analyst job on Wall Street, where she knew she had plenty of suitors, Samaniego applied online, without any referrals, to a position at Google. The tech giant has for years been one of the toughest companies to get a job offer from: the success rate for candidates is somewhere between .2 and .4 percent.
“They said, ‘You know we don’t meet a lot of people from Georgia,’ and I was like ‘Well, it’s great to meet you,’” she says. They agreed, and she got the job.
“It was such a good placement, and she seemed perfect for it,” Bennett-Alexander says. “It was empowering for all the students because it was like, ‘Oh my god this is what we want.’ And not only does she get a job — she got a job at a place we all admire.”
Starting as an account strategist, she moved to account manager, where she worked with chief marketing officers and business leaders to develop and execute digital media strategies. By 2014, she started on the path she realized in Bennett-Alexander’s class years before.
She co-founded the Hispanic Googler network HOLA, an employee resource group committed to the representation, advancement and inclusion of Hispanics at Google. HOLA educates Googlers about Hispanic culture, provides mentorship opportunities, and empowers growth and volunteer opportunities in the Hispanic community.
She made products — like how to find Hispanic- and black-owned businesses on Google maps and providing them the tools to create a website and digital presence — while pitching her bosses the business case for building programs and products targeted at minority-owned businesses. They listened and made her the Global Supplier Diversity Manager, a job description she wrote up herself. Samaniego filled a variety of roles in the venture — finance, sales, diversity — and within two years created over $1 billion in opportunities for diverse-owned businesses. Google was the first high-tech company to build such a program, and Samaniego went on to consult peers at Facebook, Airbnb and Twitter to follow along.
When given the chance to start her own business within Area 120, the company’s startup incubator, she took it. Called Emporium, its mission was to empower minority and women-owned/led businesses to unlock untapped economic potential for their businesses and community. Her team created and launched a marketplace for Fortune 500 companies to procure from diverse-owned companies. Like many startups, the venture didn’t work out, but the experience doing it was invaluable.
“What influenced me most was my grandparents,” she says. “They were entrepreneurs and small business owners. So how can I try entrepreneurship and phase it into something that I love to do? So, I joined Area 120 with a close friend, and we embarked on this startup journey. It was fantastic. I would do it all over again.
Every day is different for Samaniego, which is how she likes it. Curious since the day she was born, she is a generalist when it comes to daily work at Female Founders Fund. “I get a variety of work because we invest across all sectors, so I have to know a little about a lot,” she says.
The fund recently invested in more software startups but boasts companies such as Zola (wedding planning), Billie (razors for women), Eloquii (fashion apparel), Rent the Runway (online designer dress rentals), Tala (global lending platform), and WinkyLux (cosmetics) in its portfolio of investments.
Samaniego sources and evaluates all kinds of deals, doing the due diligence to help execute the deal, and then supporting the founders to get them through future rounds of funding.
She honed her VC expertise by getting an MBA at Columbia Business School.
“I did what I always wanted to do,” says Samaniego, who was a UGA 40 Under 40 honoree in 2018. “As a first-generation college student, I wanted to get an MBA to change the trajectory of our family. I’m not going to get my MBA just to get my MBA. I’m going to get it for me, and I am going to ensure I am leaving with an intended next step. It was also for the younger version of myself, who needed to see myself in these rooms and know it was possible.”
With internships at New Media Ventures and JetBlue Technology Ventures in San Francisco and Harlem Capital in New York, she crafted a knowledge base where tech meets venture capital meets equity. And she narrowed her focus to investing in businesses just at the point where they can take off.
“Less than 3% goes to all female-founded companies, only 12% of venture capital dollars go to teams with at least one female founder. Latinx and Black women-led startups lag behind peers — only 0.27% went to Black women and 0.37% went to Latinas,” she says. “But it’s not only about being the right thing to do, it’s about outsized returns. We believe female founders are creating the next $1 billion businesses, and we want to back them. We don’t look at this as charity. This is a really good business.”
Her achievements since graduating Terry 11 years ago are impressive, it doesn’t seem possible to do so much in so little time. But then you realize she hasn’t been working 11 years, she’s been working her whole life. She’s as august as someone with three decades of experience — because she has 33 years of life experience.
“It makes me quite proud knowing this amazing woman, who I shook my head at many times worried her curiosity would get her in trouble,” Monnin says. “But it has been good trouble, and she journeys on making her mark — mentoring others and helping to create world changers.”