It has been something of a whirlwind 6 months, but here we are in October 2021 and officially celebrating the launch of QDS Capital. If the reader will indulge us for a moment, we wanted to briefly kickoff our launch week with “how did we get here” and a “why are we doing this”.
How did we get here?
I came back to Charlottesville in September 2019 after 20+ years in San Francisco, working with a range of high growth tech startups. I had recently left my job at Chief Operating Officer of a network intelligence SaaS company called ThousandEyes (which has subsequently been acquired by Cisco) and was doing some early stage investing and advising. As I got to know the venture scene in Charlottesville, I met Dr. Nikki Hastings, a veteran of the tech space locally who was the two-time Operations Executive of biotech companies and the Executive Director of CvilleBioHub, an industry nonprofit focused on supporting biotech startups in the greater Central Virginia area.
Why Are We Doing This?
As Nikki and I began meeting (weekly at the Quirk hotel rooftop here in Charlottesville — shameless plug if you’ve not been it is one of the most special places in town), Nikki and I would meet with entrepreneurs regularly and started talking about what we were seeing across the landscape of growing tech and a few things stood out:
(1) At base, there is an abundance of smart, investable founders in Charlottesville, throughout Central Virginia and beyond, which is absolutely a fundamental building block of any viable tech community.
(2) There is a lot of capital searching for new asset classes to invest in, and the venture space is attractive to an ever expanding circle of investors because of both the returns and perhaps as importantly the impact beyond the spreadsheet
With the building blocks set, however, as both Nikki and I talked to founders and to young companies, we also were hearing thematically consistent feedback presenting unique challenges (and ultimately the opportunity that we see for QDS). Specifically:
(1) Founders expressed frustration with the pace of capital deployment — while an abundance of angel groups and government support programs exist to fund startups, these organizations were not moving at the pace required by entrepreneur founders in 2021.
(2) Founders also need a wide range of support and guidance as they attempt to surmount the myriad of challenges that a growing company faces – whether how to hire scalable sales support, building our product launch plans or developing pricing strategy, they need to draw upon the support of experienced C-level executives who have been down this road before. There exists no coordinated and central place for these founders to go to find the help they need.
(3) Finally, what was truly interesting is the last piece of the puzzle — venture investors — also expressed frustration that they wanted to play in the VC space, but were struggling to find transactions and have the impact that they wanted. The fragmented angel space allowed something of an ad hoc network of small investments, but these angel type investments were not large enough for investors to lead early stage funding rounds and impact young companies in a powerful and organized way.
Enter QDS. For all these reasons, Nikki and I came to the conclusion that what we need is a VC firm dedicated to connecting investable founders and early state CEOs with a powerful network of experienced operators (you’ll hear about the amazing team of QDS Operational Partners who have agreed to come aboard to support these companies in upcoming posts), and deploy capital through QDS’ venture funds (the first of which is launching concurrently with the launch of QDS Capital) in an impactful way that positions portfolio companies for scalable and explosive growth in their Series B, C and beyond.