Entrepreneurship and startup investing is a long game. It requires patience, resilience, capital, commitment, and much more.
But even so, the average life of a venture capital investment is seven to ten years. It is rare for it to go longer than that. But it can happen.
Yesterday marked the end of an almost twenty-year relationship between me and what was once a startup and is now a fairly large company called Return Path. We announced yesterday that Return Path is being acquired by Validity.
My former venture capital firm, Flatiron Partners, that has not been actively investing since 2000, made its final investment in Return Path in mid-2000. I joined the board shortly after that and have been working with the founder and CEO Matt Blumberg ever since.
In many ways, this company and this entrepreneur define my career more than any other. Matt and I stuck with this company and each other for almost twenty years and in the process built an incredibly trusting, supportive, and, ultimately, profitable relationship.
We had partners in this long game. Brad Feld and Greg Sands joined the board a year or two after I did and they are among my closest friends in the venture business now. And we have had incredible independent directors like Scott Petry, Jeff Epstein, and Scott Weiss. The management team has turned over something like a half dozen times in twenty years but a few leaders have stuck it out including Jack Sinclair, George Bilbrey, and Ken Takahashi. All of these people are responsible for an incredible journey that I have gone on for the last twenty years with this company.
Matt and I have been through a lot together. We had a least four or five near death experiences when we should have lost the company but did not. We had a deal to sell the company fall through the night before the closing. We sold lines of businesses, we bought lines of businesses, we did several large reductions in force, we did several big expansions. We hired and parted ways with many executives.
Through all of that, we celebrated with each other, yelled at each other, cried with each other, annoyed each other, frustrated each other, and supported each other. Matt has made me a much better investor. He has taught me so much about supporting entrepreneurs, building and leading a great board, and hanging in there against long odds for a very long time.
When you see me do something, say something, explain something, here or elsewhere, my approach and philosophy comes from my experiences and nowhere did I get more experience than my time working with Matt and Return Path. So if you are getting any benefit from me, you are getting that benefit from Matt too.
I hope to work again with Matt and his team on another company or two or three. Hopefully they won’t all take twenty years.
