Wildcat: Run lean. Stay sharp. Learn fast. Win big.

After investing together for 7 years at Mohr Davidow Ventures and helping talented entrepreneurs build products that shape the way businesses interact with targeted customers and users, we (the Wildcat Venture Partners Founders – Bill Ericson, Bryan Stolle, and Katherine Barr) realized that we had our own entrepreneurial spark that we needed to ignite. Founded in 2015, Wildcat Venture Partners represents the culmination of insights from our own entrepreneurial pasts and over 30 years of combined venture experience working alongside brilliant founders and market-changing companies such as Rally, Rocket Fuel, Ticketfly, Coupa, Kabbage, Pacific Biosciences, BuildDirect, and many more. All Wildcat Founders and the extended team are actively engaged in the operations, investments and portfolio company boards at both MDV and Wildcat Venture Partners.

We’ve learned that building a high quality and cohesive team is the single most important variable in successful startups, and the same rule applies to our own team. We’ve built a team designed, simply, to help our companies win big.

Our strategy: Invest in targeted verticals where we have built deep domain expertise; we avoid the overharvested, overhyped, and already done. As a team we’ve seen it all – numerous market cycles, various models, multiple strategies – and we’ve discovered that the best companies are created by inventive risk-takers who stay focused on a few core principles… just like us.

We decided to analyze what truly works and does not work in venture, to define how we can be the best partners and add the most tangible value to our entrepreneurs, and to approach building our own firm the same way that we advise our entrepreneurs to build their companies. Our battle cry: Run lean. Stay sharp. Learn fast. Win big.

We’ve tested this model, and have unpacked the four principles we are wholeheartedly committed to here:

1. 1. Run lean. Recent venture models have emphasized building large teams, in part to build out extensive networks of support services. That is not us. We want to back entrepreneurs that are bold, that can recruit great teams, and that want to build independent greatness. We like to do our own work and share our energy, time and specific experience building a business in your market. With that mindset, we have built a small, nimble team of extraordinarily high leverage senior professionals, specifically to help you build your company, nail your go-to-market strategy, and evangelize your unique value. We want the capital we raise to be invested outside our firm, not inside. We want a team and fund size consistent with general partners making one to two full-up investments per year and taking an active, constructive role in each.
2. 2. Stay sharp. We preach focus, we teach focus, and we make each other stay focused—that is how we de-risk venture investing. Our strategy allows us to see risk differently by both identifying true risks and taking other risks off the table that other investors might not. Disruptive technologies and business models have the potential to release tons of trapped value, but only if you know how and where to take dead aim. Our first job is to make ourselves expert in a targeted set of high-value problems crying out for transformational change and to get deep enough into them to see where the bottlenecks are that are holding things back. Our second job is to find, fund, and support the entrepreneurs who will create and deploy the platforms and solutions that can bring about the disruption required in the target market.
3. 3. Learn fast. In military matters, it is said no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The same principle holds true in venture. The goal at every stage is to win, but if you don’t win, then it is to learn and iterate your actions accordingly. This requires open communication based on mutual respect and trust and genuine intellectual curiosity. It also requires hard data about actual facts regardless of how unpleasant they may be. Not all personalities do well with these challenges. Win or learn—it is a principle that separates true entrepreneurs (and value-adding VCs) from their peers.
4. 4. Win big. Venture risk demands venture returns. Wildcat is not an incubator. We play for big stakes, and we invest in entrepreneurs who want to do the same. Every one of our investments is intended to build a big, market-leading company in a large, fast-growing market. Some people call such companies “unicorns,” which is a mythical creature that doesn’t exist. We prefer to think of them as baby rhinos—real-world powerhouses – point them in the right direction, and then get the hell out of their way. The world has big problems to solve. We don’t want to spend our time majoring in minors. We hope you don’t want to either.

If this sounds like a firm you want to do business with, please email us at founders@wildcat.vc.