We found startups and buy lovingly-built small businesses. We sometimes also invest in high-growth companies.
Portfolio
(Co)founded
Active Shareholder (BoD/A)
Shareholder
People
Dhruv Singh
I love what I do because I get to be around entrepreneurs and I get to feed my curiosity about everything. Outside entrepreneurial endeavors, I am an advisor to GiveDirectly and a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, I was an management consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York. I graduated from Harvard College with a concentration in Economics, though I spent much of my time studying psychology, philosophy, sociology and history. I transferred from the joint-degree program at Penn between Wharton and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. I went to high school at Choate Rosemary Hall. Liz and I are Upper West Siders at heart though we have recently moved to Tuxedo Park, NY.
Elizabeth Wilkes
I love building and supporting people-first organizations that spread joy. Formative past roles include Ben & Jerry's ice cream scooper, international event producer, ski lift operator, venture capital portfolio advisor, and Christmas lighting business owner. I'm currently Founder and CEO of Exubrancy, a company acquired by Tishman Speyer in 2017 that manages corporate wellness programs facilitated by inspiring trainers, teachers, and therapists across the US. I'm an alum of Columbia Business School and Amherst College and serve on Columbia University's Entrepreneurship Advisory Council.
About Us
We're founders first.
We love small companies in high-potential moments. We are flexible in how we help: (co)found/self-fund; acquire micro-cap, usually profitable companies; or passive invest and be responsive when called upon.
We believe our unique approach of founding venture businesses and acquiring ’small’ businesses is powerfully complementary:
founding | acquiring
creativity | discipline
cap gains | cash flow
build to exit | never sellWe're a husband-wife duo that don't believe in hard lines between personal and professional — its just life. Great people, good process and fun are what's most important to us. No committed LPs, no restrictive mandate, no time horizon.
Quotes
Some of our favorite quotes:
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. - Jacob Riis”
“If I had an hour to save the world, I’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes finding solutions. - Albert Einstein
”
“When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. - Phil Knight”
“When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. - Steve Jobs”
“Champions keep playing until they get it right. - Billie Jean King ”
“Entrepreneur ’til I die I deserve this bye. - Issa Rae ”