Bill Ericson has been working with startups for his entire career, and partners with strong minded entrepreneurs who want to create big markets and recognize that the right help can accelerate their vision.
“It’s important to have a clear view of the largest unsolved problems and very deep domain expertise to be able to help great entrepreneurs tackle those problems,” Bill says.
“Our mission is to partner with entrepreneurs at the very earliest stage of development and work with them to launch on the best possible trajectory,” he says. “That requires patience and stamina from both the investor and entrepreneur — its like a marriage that way. All of the best companies we’ve funded have had to launch against the odds and build and maintain momentum. We help entrepreneurs make as few mistakes as possible by applying our extensive experience and networks to give them an edge in emerging from the Traction Gap period of their lives.”
Wildcat partners believe in focus, and work three initiative or thesis areas at a time, driven by equal doses of passion and analysis. Bill’s current areas of investment focus are the Digitization of Health Care, Cloud Enterprise and Infrastructure and Quantitative Marketing and Advertising.
Over the past decade, Bill has led investments in transformative technology companies including now public Rocket Fuel (NASDAQ: FUEL), Pacific Biosciences (NYSE: PACB), and Adamas Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ADMS), and successfully acquired companies Ticketfly (acquired by NASDAQ:P), Verinata (acquired by NASDAQ:ILMN), OpenDNS (acquired by NASDAQ:CSCO), Sabrix (acquired by NYSE:TRI), Rosetta Inpharmatics (NASDAQ: RSTA, acquired by NYSE:MRK), Sequenta (acquired by Adaptive Biotechnologies) and Parallele (acquired by NASDAQ:AFFX). Bill’s current private companies include Altiscale, Healthtap, Splice Machine, Navera, Neon Labs, Visible Measures, Audience Science, nLight Photonics and RainDance Technologies.
FACTS & STATS
- He serves on the Board of Northwestern University School of Law.
- Bill received his B.S.F.S. from Georgetown University of Foreign Service and J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law.
- He is a die-hard Warriors fan and season ticket holder for many years.
