We’ve been working on this for a while now, so we’re happy to announce the launch of our Operating Partner strategy.
The idea of Operating Partners arose from our desire to help our portfolio companies be successful. You all know that the expression “smart-money” is overused by VCs and, in all honesty, all of us in this industry need more operating experience for that to become a reality.
Generally we investors are dealmakers, we can put all the will in the world to connect our entrepreneurs with people that can help, but internally we do not have the required operating knowhow at every single level. It’s hard to be at the same time super-engineers, master designers, or experts in operations and marketing.
Clearly the concept of Operating Partners (OPs) does not cover this need completely, but we think it does get us part of the way there and is a step in the right direction to make K Fund a VC with greater operating experience. Our objective is to boost operating knowhow in both the fund and in the portfolio companies.
The idea that we have is a team comprised of 15 OPs, which are distributed in four core areas:
- Engineering
- Design
- Operations
- Marketing
These OPs will meet the right members of our portfolio companies as often as they agree to. These are people they can share ideas with and use as a sounding board; in turn, they will challenge their thinking at all levels of the company. This will be useful for many of the issues that entrepreneurs have identified themselves.
For example, companies in our portfolio will have the chance of reviewing product design topics with Javier Cañada, define their international expansion strategy with Mauricio Prieto, optimize growth with Thomas Petit, improve client acquisition with Lluis Font or identify the hiring needs of technical profiles with Erik Schultink and Ramon Egea (our Chief Talent Officer). And these are just a few examples.
We believe that the traditional role of advisor/mentor is overused in the industry, their experience is usually generalist, not necessarily remunerated and combined with a relationship that can be intermittent and with no follow-up.
In our case we’ve put a lot of effort in finding operating profiles, remunerated by K Fund and where we want an ongoing relationship with our portfolio companies. Sometimes there will be more interaction than others — this is normal — but we aim to ensure that the value added continues in the future.
We believe that this strategy is important both at the early or growth stages, but it’s especially critical when you are an early stage investor, where most help you can give the startup adds value.
We would like to underscore that we are doing this for the first time. We will improve the structure as the companies evolve, in the same way that a startup improves its processes, and we will adapt whenever we can.
