What is the first company you invested in?
Before I became an investor, I was in tech, and I invested sweat equity in my company! I started my career at Applied Predictive Technologies, an enterprise SaaS company in the predictive analytics space. I was fortunate enough to join at a moment of considerable growth for the company, and very early in my career was given tremendous responsibility to help build the company across markets and geographies. By the time we exited in 2015 (via acquisition by Mastercard), I was a Senior Vice President in Client Services helping lead business engagements and sales / BD efforts. APT truly invested in me, and created the foundation for my work on the growth team at BCV today.
What is actually the first company you invested in?
I started my career in growth investing at KKR, and my first investment was in a company called ForgeRock in the infra and security space. The company offers identity and access management software for companies managing all types of authentication and authorization, like consumers accessing their accounts, employees accessing their applications, and IoT devices accessing the network. ForgeRock figured out a more secure way to offer this access, and the need at the time was exploding — it was right time, right product in a big horizontal market that was expanding quickly.
The company was started as an open source project by founders from Sun Microsystems. They then converted that product to an enterprise offering that had a lot of passion built-in from the support of the developer community, so they were able to quickly demonstrate why it was such a critical part of their security posture. Identity and access management is high stakes, and they entered enterprise with an excellent product that developers already understood and trusted.
