Venture Catalyst Partners Venture Catalyst Partners is a team of experienced entrepreneurs and business professionals who work closely with the founders and managers of promising ventures to create successful, high-value businesses. We specialize in start-up and emerging growth companies in the software and Internet-related industries with a particular focus on developers of front office, ERP, e-commerce, and e-business applications and tools for small to mid-size companies in large vertical markets. A Venture Catalyst is ... ... A seasoned business professional who knows the route to the entrepreneurial summit. ... The voice of experience and reason. ... A designer of bridges across the chasm. ... An entrepreneur's partner, advocate, strategist, negotiator, advisor, mentor and reality check. Venture Catalysts vs Venture Capitalists The financial pioneers who established the first venture capital funds in the late 1970s were themselves talented entrepreneurs and businessmen with years of hands-on experience creating and building successful companies. When these early venture capitalists financed a new enterprise, they knew that the hard-won knowledge and skills they brought to the table were as important as the capital they invested. In those days, the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist both rolled up their sleeves and worked as partners to achieve the company’s strategic objectives. This “partnership” model of venture capital began to change in the late 1980s. A decade of unprecedented financial success attracted vast amounts of investment capital and a different breed of venture capitalist. These new VCs were younger and less experienced, more likely to come from the ranks of investment banking or straight out of business school than from successful entrepreneurial ventures. As venture capital funds grew both in number and the amount of capital under management, their appetite for deals increased proportionately – but the number of truly high quality deals could not and did not keep pace. Consequently, a new venture capital model emerged, one that emphasized quantity over quality. Needing to invest their capital one way or another, many VCs began doing more deals as a specific strategy to spread the risk. Rather than making a few carefully selected investments and then working closely with the entrepreneurs to do everything possible to achieve success, these VCs simply increased the number of investments they made and let probability do their work for them. Today, most VCs tend to be reactive rather than proactive. They wait for deals to come to them rather than seek them out. But being reactive means that today's VCs are more likely to see the best packaged deals rather than the deals with the greatest potential. That’s where a venture catalyst earns his keep. Venture catalysts are experienced, successful entrepreneurs and old-fashioned venture capitalists who get far more pleasure out of building companies than just reading business plans and analyzing monthly financial reports. A venture catalyst is adept at discovering and polishing “diamonds in the rough,” those rare ventures which have enormous potential but aren’t quite ready for venture capital or are ready but don't know how to go about getting it. For more information, please email us at: info@venturecatalyst.net.