Crescendo: advising and investing in courageous companies. help with monetization and growth. Past/present companies include Clay, Ernest, Fyxer.ai, HeyGen, Owner, Procense.ai, Render, etc. More here.
Rhythm: Rhythm is holding company that invests in and grows businesses that cultivate human connection and wellbeing. More here.
Stage: founder/CEO, Kara Nortman’s thesis on Stage, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, Twitter. tools for seamless billing automation and experimentation. often reminded of how little I know. Returned capital in December 2023. Many lessons.
Loom: early PM, loomSDK on VentureBeat, Product Hunt; Integrations with Slack, Atlassian, Asana, GitHub, etc. learned the power of organic selling, how hard “simple and easy” is, and a bit about distribution and brand (Acquired by Atlassian for $975M).
Private Family Office: “carried the bags” for Lars; invested in Personio, Gloat, Affinity, TraceHQ (acq.), ChartHop, etc. learned about building and scaling software businesses; met some smart people, but the passionate founders were the best. got on the field. so far, TVPI well above 10x.
RapidSOS: Product intern and advisor. APIs to get location data to 911 from Apple, Google, and Uber in an emergency; built patented AI analytics tool to bring social media data to 911, reminded of the difficulty and importance of selling software to the public sector.
Stanford GSB: good classes, better people. Interviewed Michael Moritz (Managing Partner, Sequoia) and Oscar Munoz (United, CEO). tried a startup. learned the importance of ownership and self-awareness.
Deloitte: sold, designed, built, and integrated a lot of software for the State Department, DOD, Amtrak, etc. mostly not public. learned a lot about how large organizations buy and use (or don’t use) software. Scaled Deloitte Digital from 20 to 200+ and helped win hundreds of millions in new biz.
Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University: read and wrote a lot. helped Prof. Galambos on Entrepreneurial Multiplier Effect, The Creative Society, Corporations and Citizenship, etc. started a small biz. helped a few friends found startups.
pdg 