Traction and Trapped Value Wildcat Venture Partners

Wildcat believes and invests in early stage companies that solve massive problems and deliver solutions for a better world. And those solutions can tap into powering those movements around economic equality, diversity and inclusivity. Ruby Ribbon is one of their portfolio companies that have done just that. 
Clint McKinlay is Ruby Ribbon’s CEO. He believes that to determine how to cross chasms, there's a great deal of humility and listening that’s needed. 
In this episode, Clint shares Ruby Ribbon’s story and values, the steps they have taken to realize their mission, and how the Crossing the Chasm framework has helped them along the way.  
Resources:
Follow Clint McKinlay Follow Wildcat Venture Partners on LinkedIn Visit Wildcat’s website Visit Ruby Ribbon  
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Traction and Trapped Value is produced by Flywheel Associates

Crossing the Chasm is a valuable framework to drive early stage venture investment decisions and serve as an operational guide for companies throughout their duration with Wildcat. But having a framework isn’t sufficient enough to build and scale a category-disrupting business. 
Jennifer Trzepacz, COO and Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners says that it’s the talent that makes a company come to life. It’s necessary to deeply evaluate these entrepreneurs and their teams to determine who will have a higher likelihood of success in crossing the chasm. 
In this episode, Jennifer, also known as JT, dives into critical talent characteristics that drive a higher likelihood of success in crossing the chasm. 
Resources:
Follow Wildcat Venture Partners on LinkedIn Follow JT on LinkedIn Visit Wildcat’s website


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Traction and Trapped Value is produced by Flywheel Associates

Crossing the Chasm is a critical framework that the Wildcat team has experienced as operators, executives and investors, using it throughout their careers.
Geoffrey Moore, Author of the best-selling book Crossing the Chasm, and Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners, shares that this B2B market development model is the lowest risk, highest return play in venture. 
In this episode Geoffrey, Founding Partner Bryan Stolle, and COO & Partner Jennifer Trzepacz, known as JT, dive deeper into this strategic and operational framework. 
Learn more, and find the complete show notes, at
www.wildcat.vc
 
Resources:
Follow Wildcat Venture Partners on LinkedIn Follow Geoffrey on LinkedIn Follow Bryan on LinkedIn Follow JT on LinkedIn Visit Wildcat’s website


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Traction and Trapped Value is produced by Flywheel Associates

In early stage venture, determining those important signals that indicate investment potential and traction are critical. 
One way to do so is through this concept of power as Geoffrey Moore, Author of Crossing the Chasm, Speaker, Advisor and Venture Partner at Wildcat shares... 
“Power is an attempt to say, what are the leading indicators of success in business just as performance it’s a trailing indicator of success. And what you find in investing is, an investor buys a share of your future earnings, not your past earnings.
And so therefore how can they expect you to perform in the future? So you're always looking to say, how powerful could this company become? Cause that's, what's going to increase its market valuation. Now that's true in public investing, but it's even more true in venture investing because the power is so nascent.”
Power is actually a hierarchy and the prioritization of this structure is based on the impact each step has on a company’s future performance. In fact, this ordering comes from public markets and is adjusted to venture dynamics.
As such, this hierarchy can be leveraged as an investment framework to determine where the trapped value lies and how to identify the traction behind it. 
 
Power Concepts - A Five-Step Hierarchy
 
There are five steps to this power hierarchy: Company power, Category power, market power, offer power, execution power. 
Category Power - Growth born from category expansion.  How much money is coming into your category? What’s the size of the opportunity?  Company Power - Growth born from category share Within a given category who’s the leading company that provides that product or service?  Market Power - Growth born from customer relevance Market share of a company within a target market segment defined in terms of an industry and a use case. Offer power - Growth born from unmatchable offers How well do your offers directly stack up against competitors? Execution power - Growth born from managing a portfolio of commitments How well can your team actually deliver such that you are meeting and beating plan? Category power is at the top of this hierarchy because venture investing is focused on nascent categories that are expected to blossom. In fact, the category may not exist quite yet but the technology does. So when doing an investment, you inevitably start with the question “what categories are we in and are these categories getting traction?” 
Market power is different from company power in that markets are defined by a set of customers and categories are defined by a set of competitors. 
An early stage company delivers market power by winning devoted customers who advocate on its behalf, thereby speeding up sales cycles and creating a local market that can attract a local ecosystem.  It’s growth from customer relevance because the offers address segment-specific concerns with domain expertise. And the end result is company power in a niche that is both persistent in its own right and a potential stepping stone to greater things to come.
Offer power is defined as the feature/function/performance status in comparison to competitors. In established markets Geoff tells us that product managers are always looking to have the best set of these points of differentiation in their competitive positioning charts.  But in venture, it’s more asymmetrical.  
Early stage companies need need to find at least one dimension where there is a 10X advantage, something that will warrant customers and ecosystems going through the pain and strife of disruption to adopt the offering. 
The last step in this 5 step hierarchy is execution power.  It’s about getting to the next milestone in a timely fashion because growth ultimately stems from managing those portfolio of commitments. 
To create that necessary performance traction, the team must redirect its execution power from building and serving everyone in the ea

Much has changed in the past year and there's no question that digital transformation initiatives across every business have been front and center. There’s been a lot of forced experiments that have accelerated the adoption of these technology efforts, as the pandemic has catalyzed a shift in how companies approach  optimizing their operations. 
Grahme Taylor, Associate at Wildcat Venture Partners is a firm believer in the power of technology companies to fight inefficiency at scale and solve massive, costly problems for industry and society alike. 
In this episode,  he shares key trends on the digital transformation front and perspectives on where the Wildcat team sees trapped value. Further, Grahme offers insights on factors that influence a portfolio company’s ability to capture its market opportunity
Learn more, and find the complete show notes, at
www.wildcat.vc
 
Resources:
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Traction and Trapped Value is produced by Flywheel Associates

Where we work and how we work have been completely disrupted by the pandemic. Behaviors, processes, systems and tools have fundamentally changed, and this seismic shift in the way businesses operate is one of the areas that Wildcat focuses on. 
It’s called digital transformation -- which the Wildcat team defines as how enterprises use technology to change their businesses processes in order to unlock trapped value and optimize operations. 
In this episode, Bryan Stolle discusses the impact of Covid 19 on the working landscape, the future of data, privacy, and the customer experience - and the opportunities to be found in these areas.
Learn more, and find the complete show notes, at
www.wildcat.vc
 
Resources:
Follow Wildcat Venture Partners on LinkedIn Follow Bryan on LinkedIn Visit Wildcat’s website


Subscribe to Traction and Trapped Value:
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Traction and Trapped Value is produced by Flywheel Associates