Here are a few thoughts to help you decide if our style and stage of investing is a good fit for your company. We are a growth fund, although that can be interpreted broadly since there are many flavors of growth investing these days. At DFJ Growth, we like to engage in the early, mid, and later growth stages but have a strong affinity for early growth. We look for inflection points that demonstrate product-market fit. We are active investors seeking to be partners with you and your team during the rapid growth stage of your scaling journey.
We don’t focus on the alphabet soup of letters of your financing rounds to indicate the stage of development, such as Series B or C. We care more about the stage of development of your technology and product suite. Table stakes for us are you have your initial product built and in market, where you are seeing market validation in the form of customer adoption and testimonials. That is not necessarily measured by revenue and unit economics but more by the external signals that indicate your potential and durable advantages. Your product works, and, as we like to say, the dogs are eating the dog food.
We love big ideas and bigger aspirations. We were investing in electric vehicles, new space, and crypto when few were paying attention. Of course, we invest broadly in IT, but we also like hardware and systems. We have deep operational understanding of the unique opportunities and advantages available to hardware companies, including robotics, automation, and smart systems. We invest in companies that sell to both commercial and government customers and have experience in the unique rhythms of these different go-to-market motions. We are actively investing in life technologies, the confluence of biology and info tech, and have a team of specialists immersed in this area. We have strong appreciation for consumer sentiment and the waves of innovation in the consumer sector. And, of course, we are very excited by the current AI megacycle and the profound impact it will have over everything in the next decade.
All we do is tech, which is very dynamic and constantly evolving. So we are completely open-minded to new areas of innovation, what some firms call “other.” This is exciting stuff for us, and we’d love to chat.
We are always mindful that Silicon Valley is trend-driven and runs in streaks. Perhaps you have created something that isn’t one of the “in” things at the moment but is amazing. Don’t be shy. Ping us. We go where others don’t. We like to get there before others even realize something new is happening.
Perhaps you are well along on your journey and are facing the challenges of scaling. Our team includes people who have been entrepreneurs and have built large, successful enterprises. We stand ready to help you avoid the pitfalls and quicksand that so many young companies encounter.
We hope this helps you understand a bit more of what we are about. Feel free to give us a shout. We are easy to find … we’re the ones looking around the corner and hoping to run into you.
