On every side of the table
We’ve spent our careers on every side of this – as founders raising money, as operators building companies, and as investors writing checks. From all three seats, the same things looked broken. We started Red Bear Ventures to fix them.
Three beliefs anchor everything we do
Founders are the heart and soul of the economy, and they deserve better. We know what it feels like to pitch people who don’t understand your business, to chase intros that go nowhere, to walk out of a meeting that felt less like a conversation and more like a hazing. Founders are doing some of the hardest work in business. The least we can do is make it faster, more useful, and a lot less humiliating.
Expertise is everywhere – and it’s about to matter more, not less. The person who knows an industry best is almost never sitting in a venture office on Sand Hill Road. They’re running a hospital system in Cleveland, or a logistics company in Memphis, or a farm in upstate New York. As AI commoditizes everything that can be written down, that hard-won, tacit knowledge is what’s left. It’s the edge.
The chance to back great private companies shouldn’t be reserved for a lucky few. For our entire careers, the opportunity to invest in promising early-stage companies has been gated – by geography and by relationships. We don’t think that’s right, especially as companies stay private longer. We’re building toward something more open: a network where what you know earns you a seat.
– Dan & Gus
Dan has spent his career at the intersection of emerging technology and market development – as a co-founder and operating executive, and as a corporate strategist. He was a co-founder or early employee at four technology companies, including Bindle Systems, a self-sovereign identity platform whose technology was acquired by iDen2, and Gridmetrics, an energy grid intelligence company that spun out of CableLabs and now operates as GridVisibility. Earlier in his career, Dan helped define the earliest days of the online advertising industry, holding executive roles at SiteSpecific (acquired by CKS Group) and developing marketing strategies for Microsoft’s first internet properties. After more than a decade in a series of strategy and business development roles across Time Warner, Dan finished his corporate career as Group Vice President, Corporate Strategy at Time Warner Cable.
Gus has spent his career working with early-stage technology companies – as a founder and operating executive, and as an investor. He was an early employee or co-founder at five technology companies: NetMarket (acquired by CUC International), Internet Profiles (acquired by Engage Technologies), Spot Runner (acquired by Harris Media), Disconnect, and Bindle Systems (acquired by iDen2). He began investing in parallel, starting at Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco, and has since managed venture funds for British Telecom, Samsung, Time Warner, and Texas Instruments, and served as a Venture Partner at FirstMark Capital in New York City. His investments have included InfoGear (acquired by Cisco), Digital Fountain (acquired by Qualcomm), Speakeasy (acquired by Best Buy), BigBand Networks (IPO), and Visible World (acquired by Comcast), among others.