My next adventure: Ground Up Ventures

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to have a front-row seat to the exploding startup and venture capital scene. Along the way, I’ve met truly extraordinary founders, investors, and mentors who have helped me “level up” and guide me to where I am today.

I’m excited to share the next “level” of my journey: Ground Up Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm investing in US and Israeli startups. At Ground Up, I’ll be joining David Stark and Cory Moelis as they bring a completely new energy to the venture industry.

• What I’ll be focusing on: As the first employee at Ground Up, I’ll be focusing on everything from sourcing investments to supporting their impressive and growing portfolio. (More on what kind of startups I’m looking for in my next post.) If you’re building something, it’s never too early to get in touch, but it might be too late!
• What sealed the deal for me: When presented with the opportunity to join David and Cory, one thing kept popping into my head: if I ever go on to be a startup founder, there’s no one I’d rather have at my side than them.
• What makes Ground Up different: A while back, David wrote a post called, “Why Rod Tidwell Is Our Kind Of Founder”. In the post, David perfectly articulates our mutual view on what a founder-VC relationship should look like.

“At Ground Up our founders are taking a bet on us, just as we are on them. Our relationship with our founders is one in which we intend to grow together, learn from each other and hold each other accountable. We think that long before our IRR will be a meaningful metric, our most important metric to track is our NPS — how likely our founders are to refer other founders to us. That is truly the test of how well we are doing in building the type of portfolio culture that we aspire towards.

The promise we make to our founders is that we will work harder. We will wake up every day trying to help them succeed and listen to their feedback along the way to get better. So the more they help us, the more we can help them. That is what real partnership means to us.”

A founder-first approach changes the dynamic of the founder-VC relationship. A founder-first approach reminds us that the founder is the dreamer and we, as investors, are here to help them make their dreams a reality. At Ground Up, we join our founders in the trenches to help them build better, more sustainable businesses from the ground up. (sorry for the pun!)

Finally, I’d like to thank all of my colleagues at OurCrowd for an exceptional three years. It’s been a wild ride and it’s exciting to look back and see how far we’ve come since I joined in 2015!

I’m looking forward to diving into this next chapter and can’t wait for what’s to come. Feel free to follow along on Twitter and say hi at jordan@groundup.vc!