What Is Our Purpose?
As we head into 2022, it seems a natural time to look anew at the fundamentals of our funds. Our company culture centers on the concept that everything we do must help our teams accomplish our shared goals. We don’t just take action, we serve a purpose. Looking ahead, these represent the core components:
Create and manage legendary funds. We want to always be creating new opportunities, new investment vehicles, new approaches to early-stage venture. The purpose of all this activity is to be far beyond ordinary. We want to become one of the storied funds that other funds envy and emulate.
Find and support companies that impact the world positively. We want to, and will, make dramatic returns for our investors. But making money alone isn’t our goal. When the curtain comes down, we want to look back with satisfaction on having a hand in helping create new companies with positive impact on the world around us. We want to improve individual lives and to do that, we also have to improve the planet where those lives transpire.
Stand in the vanguard of early-stage investing transformation. We think venture capital is far overdue for a fundamental remake and we want to be a prime driver of that shift. We feel data must be more central to investment discovery and evaluation. We believe that traditional barriers between GP and LP must be torn down. We seek ways to back a more diverse set of founders and companies than the traditional venture model can.
Be a group that loves and supports one another. We believe a small group of humans who love one another and love what they are doing together can, essentially, achieve anything. We are dedicated to being such a group.
Establish strong new LP relationships. Our funds have reached this point — from $4M AUM when we started to $180M today — through the support of a coterie of committed LPs. To drive our current goals and our next phase of growth we will need to find a new generation of LPs who share our vision and want to work alongside us.
Deliver dramatic wealth to our investors and financial independence to the whole team. We see financial return as an effect, not a cause. Our work focuses around founders, promise-keeping, hard work, and help for our portfolio companies. But we recognize and celebrate the power of return for everyone involved in early-stage investing. We want our LPs to receive returns that open new possibilities for them to use wealth for impact and good. We want everyone on our team to transform their personal financial situation as a result of our mutual work.
Always seek the truth. At the heart of the matter, we see all these goals as deriving from seeking the truth. Finding truth and acting on it sounds simple, but it is hugely difficult. We must have dedication, discipline, and openness to even have a hope of finding glimmers of truth in the stew of activities and information around us. Most of all we need mutual trust. If, as a group, we can get outside ourselves and stay outside ourselves, looking at the world before us, rather than within, for our key reference, we can accomplish extraordinary things.
By Managing Partner Mike Edelhart
@MikeEdelhart
Related posts:
Our Second Generation: Growth and Change at Our Funds
What are the Real Superpowers of Startup Success?
Why We’re A Data-Driven VC
