An investment platform built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. We back exceptional people, difficult ideas, and futures that sound improbable to almost everyone else.
Heron Rock is an investment platform built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. We invest before there is consensus, before there are metrics, and often before there is even a fully formed company.
Most of our investments are made when all that exists is an exceptional person, a difficult idea, and a future that sounds improbable to almost everyone else. These are the missions that most excite us.
We are exclusively first-check investors. If a founder has already raised more than $250k, we are almost always too late.
Institutional venture capital has largely become an asset allocation business. Most firms optimize for signaling, portfolio construction, downside protection, and consensus validation. We are not interested in any of those things.
We believe many of the most important companies are damaged early by investors who introduce unnecessary complexity, encourage premature scaling, dilute founder ownership, optimize for fundraising instead of resilience, or panic the moment reality deviates from a spreadsheet.
We are extreme generalists and intentionally resist becoming over-conditioned by institutional expertise or market consensus. Some of our best investments have come from industries where we initially had little or no technical background. This is not because expertise is unimportant. It is because expertise can sometimes anchor people too tightly to the assumptions of the present. We try to know just enough to recognize what could matter before it becomes obvious.
Our analysis is not ideas, go-to-market, team or technology. All of these can change along a long journey. We invest in founders. We know what greatness looks like and our genius is that we can spot the undiscovered geniuses. Our General Partner is a 9th grade drop-out that doesn't value "pedigree" the way most institutional investors do. We know how to coach crazy geniuses into highly performant CEO's. While others might know how to do so, we earn the trust of the founders we coach in ways that we know no one else to be able to do.
While we will consider investments in almost any part of the World except China, the portfolio is concentrated in North America. Outside of North America, we are most excited about India. Having proactively sought a single investment to gain a better understanding of the market back in 2018, we led the Series B of Jumbotail and amongst many bold non-consensus bets, it remains one of our proudest investments in a portfolio full of pride.
We are exclusively first-check investors. Once a founder has raised more than $250k, we are almost always too late. We arrive before validation.
Not ideas, go-to-market, team or technology — all of which change along a long journey. Our genius is spotting undiscovered geniuses.
We coach crazy geniuses into highly performant CEOs and earn founder trust in ways we know no one else can. We want founders to own more than we do at exit.
We seek to be the preferred capital partner through the entire life of the business, staying active in the boardroom until the investment exits.
In the fall of 2019, Tom agreed to meet me after I cold contacted him via LinkedIn with a half-baked idea of a breast milk startup. Immediately, Tom encouraged me to pursue my crazy idea with conviction to create the world's first biosynthetic breast milk. Since that very moment, Tom has been an ally and mentor with unparalleled and honest advice that has been the driving force for my personal success and all of Helaina's biggest accomplishments to date. He has been instrumental in interviewing and onboarding Helaina's top tier scientists, raising a pre-seed and seed round from world class investors, and pushing me to follow my ambitions of building a globally recognized brand and product. Working with Tom is easily the best decision I've made for Helaina thus far.
Tom has been a fantastic first investor in AI Fleet, but more importantly, advisor, mentor and friend. In start-ups, most days are challenging, especially for a first-time founder. There is nothing more comforting than knowing Tom is always reachable with his entire rolodex of seemingly unlimited connections ready to support the company. He has been instrumental at helping us shape our growth trajectory and has played a pivotal role in financing the Company to profitability. We are extremely grateful to have him.
Tom is one of the main reasons behind Sortly's success thus far. He has helped us make the right strategic decisions every step of the way. He is extremely smart, very responsive, and provides valuable guidance drawn from his own experiences and knowledge advising other startups.
Tom was not only our earliest conviction investor, he also helped us by pushing back when we were off the rails. Because of that pressure testing we were able to make sure our boldest decisions were successful.
Our General Partner is a 9th grade drop-out who doesn't value "pedigree" the way most institutional investors do — and treats that as an edge, not a limitation. We gate our initial investment decision both by whether we want to have a relationship with the entrepreneur for life and whether we believe the entrepreneur can quickly use our capital and advice to build the right foundations by which a very large company can be built.
Because we invest at the very beginning stage, prior to any validation of an idea, we only expect one to three new investments a year will result in us helping create companies that are big enough to warrant our continued investment of time, energy and capital. In those companies, we seek to be their preferred capital partner through the entire life of the business and almost always play an active role in the boardroom, preferring to stay active until the investment exits.
The ultimate sign of success for us is that the founders we invest in become investors with Heron Rock. We do not accept institutional capital and only invest on behalf of individuals that we feel share our values.
We want our founders to own more of their company than us and other investors do at the time of exit. While this is not possible for some scientific endeavours that require significant capital before commercialization, it is certainly possible for any digitally native or largely software-driven business that we fund today — and we expect our software-focused investments to get to cash-flow break-even as quickly as possible.
The sign of true success is when the founders we back join us in coaching the next generation of entrepreneurs we invest in. Indeed, some of our very best founders are now actively coaching our newest entrepreneurs building in biotechnology, precision fermentation and applied AI.
The only form of solicitation we will review are pitches via direct messages to our General Partner's LinkedIn profile, and interested LPs can also make contact there. All emails and any press inquiries of any kind will be ignored.
We invest only on behalf of individuals who think the way we do. Tell us about yourself.