Riff City Strategies’ Post

🚨 Myriad Venture Partners launched in January 2024 with $100 million in initial capital commitments from investors to back early-stage AI, cleantech, and B2B software startups. Its founder and managing partner Chris Fisher joins us for VC Wednesdays.🚨 ✒️ How has your prior experience helped you as an investor? I started in structured finance before a career in big law, doing M&A for multinationals and private equity firms. I joined Xerox in 2019, where I was the chief strategy officer, ran global M&A and founded and built Xerox Ventures from scratch. All those experiences across business operations, finance and law set me up for a really nice segue into VC to look at markets and teams and how they can interact with corporations. ✒️ How does that inform your investment approach and differentiate it from other firms? We're completely returns-driven. That said, because we started at Xerox Ventures, our thesis was built on bifurcating this idea of returns and strategic value. We invest for returns, but we also make introductions early to corporations in our network, often way before we invest in a company. That gives founders access to large corporations that they wouldn't otherwise have had, and it gives corporations access to the best business intelligence they can find. We also have an Executive Advisory Board, which are current or former C-suite executives that have expertise in things like go-to-market motion or a customer or technology segment. Just to give you a sense of the scale we’re talking about, we made 152 commercial introductions across 134 corporations and 93 startups between March and September, which has resulted in 36 proof-of-concepts and 10 commercial contracts. ✒️ What areas are you most excited about right now? For me, it's really about what allows enterprises to be more nimble and efficient, and helps them save costs and scale — whether that’s supply chain, sales, lead-gen or legal and HR operations. Anything that takes stuff off employees’ plates, lets them do higher value, strategic work and provides for a happier experience. I've made two investments recently in HR and legaltech, which are both agentic AI solutions. Cascade, for example, is building something that will allow HR teams to scale by upward 50 to 80%. ✒️What's the most atypical piece of advice you give your portfolio companies? Bring someone on the customer success side a little earlier than you normally would, just to sit really close to customer feedback and be able to tie it all together into the product with the founder. In the last two years, we’ve really seen startups pivot from the ‘move fast, break things’ mentality to controlling the burn rate. And that’s fair and responsible, but sometimes the answer is to go faster. Doing this empowers founders to make some strategic decisions and run faster. #VCWednesdays #vc #venturecapital #startups #TechonLinkedIn