Deborah is co-founder and managing partner of New York City-based StarVest Partners, founded in 1997 to invest in technology-enabled business services. StarVest is one of the largest women majority-owned venture capital firms. In addition, she is a director of NCR, Inc. (NYSE: NCR), Ceridian HCM Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CDAY), and RedBall Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: RBAC), and has chaired all major board committees. Formerly, she was lead director of NetSuite (NYSE: N) prior to its acquisition by Oracle in 2016. Earlier in her career, she was CEO of Victory Ventures, a multi-strategy investment firm headquartered in New York City, a managing director of Asian Oceanic Group in New York and Hong Kong, and an investment banker and division director of Merrill Lynch in New York, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. She began her career at the Chase Manhattan Bank.

She has been named multiple times to the Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Venture Capitalists and in 2018 received the Foreign Policy Association Medal for Achievement in Financial Services. She received an MBA from the Harvard Business School where she has served on the Visiting Committee and is a graduate of Smith College where she has served on the Board of Trustees.