High Alpha Capital

Scott Dorsey: I began my entrepreneurial journey co-founding a company called Exact Target, and we empowered marketers to connect with their customers using digital marketing technologies. And we had an extraordinary experience. We were able to grow the company to about 2,000 employees, offices all around the world, went public on the New York Stock Exchange, and then about a year later we were acquired by Salesforce. And I always thought that if I had the opportunity in the future to be an investor and to be able to coach and mentor next generation entrepreneurs, that's exactly what I wanted to do. And High Alpha is really the platform that affords me and all my amazing colleagues the opportunity to support founders and support entrepreneurs as they work hard to build tremendous companies and create opportunity for so many. When we started High Alpha, we conceived of this new model called the venture studio, which is one part startup studio and one part venture capital fund called High Alpha Capital. We have a deep conviction that operating through our studio really makes us better investors. We're very close to the metal. We're still in company building mode, and I think that keeps our skills and our point of view, our outlook very relevant to support founders at this time in this unique environment in which we're operating.

Katie Kopan: I've always been attracted to the model that we have, having cross-functional support, as well as being able to provide capital to founders, and I think that's a true value add. We're investing in early stage, B2B SaaS founders really focused on seed and series A stage investments. It's really unique that we come from a team of operators that have that experience scaling from 0 to 1, 1 to 100, and have been fortunate enough to see multiple acquisitions and even a company go public. It's a really powerful force and it's really nice to have a deep bench internally. We're going to do everything we can in our power to help them be successful.

Seth Corder: We work with a variety of different founders. Sometimes it's a first-time founder who maybe has been a part of a startup before, but saw the movie from a few rows back. Sometimes it's a repeat founder who's had a chance to start previous companies and this is their new venture. And other times it's someone who maybe came out of a big company and decided to go more early stage, identified a problem to go work on and start a new company.

Blake Koriath: High Alpha has a really robust team of functional experts across a lot of different areas: design, marketing, product, HR, finance. And those experts and experienced individuals can plug in with any company at any stage in the enterprise software space to help them grow and succeed in ways that they wouldn't be able to on their own. We have strong relationships to help with executive hires. We have relationships with prospective customers that can be game changers for a growing software business. And lastly, we have a tremendous number of relationships with strong financial partners who can provide follow-on capital to help these companies grow and succeed throughout their life.

Mike Fitzgerald: The best companies take 6, 8, 10 years to build to their full potential. We want to be involved with entrepreneurs for that full journey. That's how we're built. If you look at where High Alpha has invested, where we have built relationships, where we've had success, it really is all across North America. Particularly proud of, for example, Lessonly, of Socio, Saleloft down in Atlanta. All those companies had very good exits for their stakeholders and employees. We've got this very specific focus on software companies who are trying to sell to other businesses. We've got areas that are of interest to us where we feel there are tailwinds. The disruption of consulting, LogicGate is a really good example of disruption of consulting. They, in their consulting world, were delivering services in the governance, risk and compliance area. And after doing the same thing over and over, they said, "Hey, we're going to build software that could do this." We've got another one around the decentralization of marketing. And then a third one would just be the evolution of commerce. Events and programming are a really important part of what we do, and I think it's because relationships are so important; that is using not only the relationships we have with the CEOs of these companies, but also their leadership and involving Heads of Sales and Head of Product, making connections with one another. And so that community aspect, the events that we do, are really the fabric that lets us weave those relationships together. And it's very powerful. We're told over and over again that the community that we've built and the people with whom are associated are a really important part of someone's decision to come be part of the High Alpha family. Ultimately, that drives the best return is when you've got a good match and you're connected to people who share the same values and are striving for the same outcomes.