The business leaders that I admire most are not household names. Instead, they are the incredible entrepreneurs and CEOs I’ve worked with over the years. These leaders have become friends with whom I’ve shared life shaping experiences. We’ve shared in successes and disappointments, both personally and professionally. Fundamentally, we value treating people right, serving our customers, and building great, lasting companies.
The meaning behind “Delta-v” is the total effort required to change from one trajectory to another. Nothing fuels me more than helping management teams build their company into a highly scaled, durable business.
When I co-founded Delta-v in 2009, our strategy was novel. We focused on providing liquidity for minority shareholders in great companies (ie secondary directs). Today, we support teams with both secondary liquidity and primary capital (ie cash on the balance sheet). The evolution of Delta-v and our strategy is similar to the evolutionary path many of our portfolio companies have traced. In 2009, secondary directs was a nascent, unproven market. It took perseverance, steadfast belief in our true north, and grit to build the team into the institutionalized growth equity firm that we are today.
Before Delta-v, I was a partner at Centennial Ventures. I learned so much about investing in great companies during the dot-com bust of 2001 to 2003. In 2008, Centennials’ founders were retiring, giving me the opportunity to create something of my own. I had conviction that innovation would continue to march forward during and after the financial crisis, and that revolutionary tech companies led by great entrepreneurs would emerge.
Since the founding of Delta-v, we’ve partnered with technology companies that I am truly honored to be associated with and whose success I'm proud to have played a role. I remain as excited today as I did then, to creatively, flexibly, and humbly support the next wave of category-defining companies.
