Meet our newest Accomplice, Cack Wilhelm
We always say that hiring top talent is the hardest challenge facing our portfolio companies, and the same is true for us. We’ve been scouring the country for the last six months for the next person to join our investment team. After sourcing ~4,000 applications on AngelList Talent, putting out a $100k bounty to anyone who introduced us to a candidate we ended up hiring (we didn’t end up having to pay that out), and doing 60 interviews in Boston and 45 in San Francisco, we found our person.
Cack (rhymes with “Jack”) Wilhelm is now an Accomplice partner. She is based in San Francisco alongside portfolio companies like AngelList, Skillz, and Plastiq. While Cack is helping build out the West Coast, we don’t have a separate team or strategy for the region. Expect to see Cack all over the map as our strategy at Accomplice is to find and back the best early-stage projects in the market areas we like, regardless of geography. In Boston, where approximately 60% of our portfolio resides (companies like DraftKings, Carbon Black, Hopper, DataRobot), Cack will assume board responsibilities. As a native Minnesotan, she is excited to experience winters in Accomplice North (AKA Canada), where we’ve done 15 investments in the last three years including FreshBooks, Joist, Unsplash, and Transit.
We had met Cack previously and we always thought she had the right entrepreneurial zeal and approach like ours at Accomplice. Her resume speaks to her strengths in later stages with investment roles at Scale Venture Partners and Montgomery & Co. and sales experience at Cloudera and Oracle, but in spirit Cack has a reverence for entrepreneurs, a passion for tweaking the craft, and a history of breaking conventional wisdom (including foregoing “Catherine” for “Cack” as a young child). We run fast at Accomplice, and we are pretty sure Cack can keep up: she raced the 5k professionally for two years as a sponsored Nike athlete.
We asked what she saw in us for this post, and she said, “I love the team, earlier stage, broader mandate, and huge opportunity to build stronger brand recognized nationally…it’s a culture of entrepreneurs, people-driven, and experimental in a sector (venture capital) that has been surprisingly slow to evolve.”
Look for Cack if you’re building an early stage company in the enterprise SaaS, cloud, infrastructure, DevOps, and big data spaces…or if you want to get smoked on a run. She’s cack(at)accomplice(dot)co and @CackF on twitter. Stay tuned for further team announcements planned for early fall.
