Maria Gonzalez-Blanch’s promotion to Partner

Today we are excited to announce the promotion of Maria Gonzalez-Blanch to Partner at Crescent Ridge Partners (“CRP”).

Maria joined us in January 2020 to lead CRP’s venture investments. This meant sourcing, underwriting, and recommending new deals to the Investment Committee, and overseeing our existing portfolio. Over the last two years, Maria has refined and formalized CRP’s investment thesis, streamlined our due diligence process, and established new ways we can assist our portfolio companies. Maria has skillfully built the foundation that will enable CRP to meaningfully increase its investment activity over the next decade. Under Maria’s leadership, Crescent Ridge led two seed rounds in the second-half of 2021, joined the board of Kegg and Verity Packaging, and took two Board observer roles at Needed PBC and Cooler Heads.

At CRP, we take a multi-dimensional perspective on defining success. In addition to generating financial returns, we also seek to generate relational, social, and intellectual returns (more on that in a separate blog post here). Maria has the unique ability to bring structure and process to the highly uncertain nature of early-stage investing, while underwriting all four dimensions of success. She has an intuition for leaders who do not fit the traditional mold and has an uncanny knack for sniffing out strong business models and founders who have found early product-market fit.

Beyond Maria’s success as an investor, we are especially proud of her promotion to Partner since it comes in the same year that she had her second child. At CRP, we are incredibly proud to put family, health, and purpose first, and we give a lot of flexibility to our team. This philosophy has brought efficiency and focus to our team and helped us build an incredible culture that allows us to maintain the highest standards in the work we do, while also living fulfilling personal lives.

Maria’s diverse background as an operator, strategist and investor makes her unique at understanding what it takes to create and run a successful business. She started her career as an international strategy consultant at Bain & Company and then led portfolio operations at Altamont Capital, a private equity firm based in Palo Alto. Maria further refined her expertise building brands during her tenure at Red Bull, where she led the sales operations team. Maria is an industrial-electrical engineer by training and holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

We could not be more excited about building the future of CRP together. Please join us in congratulating her!