We serve entrepreneurs who transform industries and build great companies. As active, long-term partners to our entrepreneurs, we contribute capital, strategic advice, and a deep network of relationships to fuel their success.
Stage Focus: Early-stage and seed
Sector Focus: Digital media, e-commerce, fintech, education, adtech, mobile apps, software and services.
Geography Focus: Primarily New York Metro but anywhere our networks and great entrepreneurs take us.
Investment Size: $100 thousand to $4 million in a company's first institutional round
Our Culture and Guiding Philosophy
We are entrepreneurs too and hold ourselves to the same standards that we expect of companies we have the privilege of backing. We operate with the highest ethical standards and believe in intellectual honesty, transparency and humility.
Investment Philosophy
We invest in people:Entrepreneurs are the ones who create and build great companies. Our mission is to act as a partner and service provider to entrepreneurs by helping them build companies by adding financial fuel and strategic value. We are most attracted to entrepreneurs with domain expertise, creative problem-solving skills, and, above all, a passion for their product or service.
We back Radical Innovation vs. Incremental Improvement:If you’ve got a big idea to create or transform an industry or fix a broken one, we want to talk.
Big markets make it easier:We look for companies creating or attacking multi-billion dollar markets. That’s easy to say and hard to do. In practice we love teams who can see and combine the confluence of macro trends with an enabling technology or business model insight to create a huge market or radically disrupt and capture the value chain of an existing one.
We like capital efficiency: We believe that capital efficiency leads to the greatest chance of success and look for opportunities where a small amount of capital can either launch or accelerate a product or service in the marketplace. After we cross the “dog eat food” line, we work closely with our companies to scale and maximize value in the most capital efficient way possible. Recurring or transaction-based revenue models are ideal:While we realize that not all great businesses possess this attribute, we believe that recurring revenue models enable managers to plan for future growth while maintaining strategic flexibility. And, stating the obvious, selling once and getting paid regularly for a few years is lot easier then selling a new deal to every custom every time.
Each opportunity that we evaluate has an internal champion that leads the due diligence process. As part of the process, we will conduct a thorough review of the management team, market opportunity, competitive landscape, business model and operational plan. We will introduce companies to customers, partners and market experts. It's diligence for us and an opportunity for the company.
Importantly, this is also the time when our team gets to know the founders and employees of the company we’re working with. We have found over the years that the best diligence, for both us and the company, is working together.
Once we have done our work we will have a final investment meeting with the company and our whole team. We meet formally once a week, but we sit next to each other and talk a lot about companies too. If we decide to move forward we will share our offer with the entrepreneur and begin working quickly to both document and execute the investment. We try to default to simplicity at every turn and our deal structures reflect that.