The Long Way to Venture

After 12 years of founding and leading Formative, formerly CloserIQ, I am transitioning to Partner Emeritus and handing the firm over to Alexandra Beal, my longtime business partner and one of the top executive recruiters for GTM. Formative has been a defining chapter of my career. As I step back from my role as a founder and operator, I wanted to share how that journey ultimately led me into venture investing.

I started Formative in late 2013 with Dan Zhou in New York City. Coming off my time running one of the largest field sales teams at ZocDoc, I had strong opinions about how startups should scale sales.

Our original idea was ambitious. We wanted to build the GitHub for salespeople. A digital profile for modern sales professionals that could power a vertical talent marketplace. We built an audio-based screening product where candidates recorded standardized phone screen responses as part of their profile.

We did many unscalable things. We met every candidate for coffee and persuaded them to record their responses. The manual onboarding worked. Every meeting resulted in a completed profile.

Our clients at the time, including Oscar Insurance, Justworks, Compass, and Trello, could browse hundreds of vetted candidates and, with one click, hear their pitch. In many cases, this eliminated phone screens and accelerated hiring. Along the way, we expanded the New York talent pool by surfacing exceptional candidates from nontraditional backgrounds who otherwise would not have been interviewed.

The business model was challenging. The market wanted platform pricing, not agency economics. Rather than force venture-style growth, we repurposed the technology into a tech-enabled recruiting firm.

Over the following years, we bootstrapped Formative to nearly $10 million in annual revenue. We navigated rate hikes, the pandemic, the end of ZIRP, and every recovery in between. I learned firsthand how difficult it is to build a consistently compounding business in a cyclical industry like recruiting.

During those years, founders and early-stage investors pulled me into conversations far beyond recruiting. I became a trusted partner on speed dial. Most founders were doing this for the first time, often alone, learning on the job while making real-time decisions across product strategy, positioning, pricing, sales motion, and talent. My eclectic background was built for that early-stage chaos. That intersection became the work I loved most.

In countless conversations, I found myself translating abstract investor perspectives into tactical guidance founders could use day-to-day. Bridging that gap became my calling. It also gave me the conviction that I had earned the privilege of investing. CoFound was built for founders in those exact moments, when the decisions matter most and the support is often thinnest.

After deep dives with hundreds of startups across industries, first principles began to emerge around go-to-market and founder judgment. In 2019, I raised a small prototype fund to validate my hypothesis and investment acumen. A few early bets became unicorns and fund returners. That momentum eventually became CoFound.

Working with more than 1,000 startups gave me an unconventional apprenticeship in venture. Instead of coming up through a large fund as an associate, I developed my investor instincts through thousands of repetitions as a recruiter. I watched startups struggle with go-to-market and saw how founders’ execution decisions compounded over time. Living the founder journey myself, I developed real founder empathy, pattern recognition, and a real sense of purpose, things I could never have replicated doing only traditional venture investing.

I could not have asked for a better training ground as an early-stage investor. I am forever grateful for the people who shaped this journey. The dynamic go-to-market leaders I served. The founders and early-stage investors who welcomed me onto their cap tables. And the colleagues I had the privilege to work alongside over the years. Thank you.

As I now shift my full focus to CoFound, I do so with deep gratitude for this journey and immense pride in the brand and legacy that will continue.