The best teams need great players who also play well together – all too rare in the workplace. At Scale Venture Partners we practice what we preach, investing time & effort in scaling our own firm. We are successful when we invest in the best markets, companies and entrepreneurs who scale to deliver the target return that our investors are expecting. The first step on the path to Scale’s success is building a best-in-class investing team. We also strongly believe in the apprenticeship model which is how Rory, Stacey, Andy and I learned the practice.
The story in 2016 as we move into investing our newly closed Fund V, has been the demonstrable growth and the impact of our teammates on our funds, our portfolio companies and our partnership. Here is the latest in what is happening across our team.
First, we are excited to announce the promotion of Susan Liu to Vice President. Susan has been part of the Scale investment team for four years focusing on the SaaS and mobile sectors with an emphasis on digital marketing, sales automation and HR technology. Her investing savvy, perseverance and incredible networking skills brought two great investments to us in WalkMe and Wrike. We are thrilled to have her as a partner in the fund.
When Scale thought about what we could contribute to our portfolio companies’ success, we focused on what we are known for – helping portfolio companies scale. It has never been more important than today to use the principles of smart growth. A year ago, we hired our own best-in-class “Scaler,” Dale Chang, as VP of Portfolio Operations. Dale has incredible knowledge on how to successfully scale market-leaders having worked with LinkedIn, Splunk, DocuSign and Box when he was a partner at the Alexander Group. At Scale, he has created a unique, data-driven approach to scaling the sales process that allows our CEOs, CFOs and heads of sales to systematically benefit from Scale’s record of success.
Finally, it is important to develop and foster the next generation of leaders in the firm. Ariel Tseitlin, joins Rory, Stacey, Andy and me as a manager of Fund V. I am thrilled, not only to have a brilliant technologist on the team, but someone who learned how to scale highly functioning teams from one of the best leaders today, Reed Hastings of Netflix. Having Ariel beside us thinking about how we continue to evolve to be the best has already had an impact on how we work internally and with our teams.
Furthermore, Alex Niehenke and Cack Wilhelm who are the next generation of leaders at Scale have dramatically improved how we evaluate the markets we want to invest in. Not only have they sourced great deals (Alex sourced CloudHealth in Boston and Cack sourced Realm for us – two early Fund IV winners), they have also helped take our associate team and our entire sourcing capability to a whole different level.
Scale Venture Partners invites entrepreneurs, peers and investors to come say hello or visit our site to get to know us better.