1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Max Brickman, Founder at Heartland Ventures (Part 1)

Max Brickman, Founder at Heartland Ventures, talks about his firm’s investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a little bit of introduction about your background.

Max Brickman: I’m from Wisconsin. I started in the entrepreneurial space early on. I bought my first property in northern Wisconsin when I was 14. It was money from a landscaping company that I had.

One of our clients was going to sell their property, so we were going to lose an account. I, foolishly, raised my hand and said, “What if we were to buy it?” We were able to fix it up and rent it out and build that to about 450 units for high school and college. I had an education startup that we licensed out. I found myself in Indiana. My wife was going to grad school there and didn’t know anyone in the community.

I ended up falling in love with the city and seeing that you don’t have a lot of technology companies that are based there at that time. You have a lot of these family businesses. These are doing a billion in revenue in manufacturing, logistics, and construction businesses that are huge consumers of technology. I built the fund around those people that no one has ever heard of. Those are the users. We built Heartland.

We’re at $100 million under management now. We raised exclusively around a hundred of these family businesses. We can look at a technology and do the diligence ourselves. We take it to our investors and say, “Is this something you would use?”. It’s built around those aligned incentives.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. What sector of technology companies are you looking at? Is it all B2B SaaS there?

Max Brickman: It’s all B2B SaaS driven by who our investors are. These are technologies that can sell into manufacturing, logistics, and construction. HR is a bit of a catch-all.

Sramana Mitra: Stage-wise?

Max Brickman: Seed and A. We’re in that area where we believe that it’s most valuable to have those early customer introductions where there is a product but where they don’t still have customer validation figured out.

Sramana Mitra: You would take a product that doesn’t have customers yet.

Max Brickman: Possibly if they’re short of that inflection point of finalizing the product. If our network wants to be a customer, that’s where we want to invest.

Sramana Mitra: Do the companies also have to be in the area or can they be from anywhere?

Max Brickman: Anywhere. Most of our investments are from the coast. There are a couple of international investments as well. We want to act as that connector between tech hubs around the country and around the world and the industrial Midwest.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Max Brickman, Founder at Heartland Ventures
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