A Wildwood Welcome

The Wildwood team welcomed 60 of our closest friends (read: portfolio company founders, LPs, and community builders) to Boulder the last week of September. We joined together to talk about our work, our portfolio, and what the collaborative future looks like.

Founders First

“At other AGMs, it feels like the founders have intense pressure applied to perform on stage.”

That’s how one of our LPs described the difference after this year’s Wildwood Founders Forum. We gathered together for 48 hours at the Moxy Boulder. Founders Forum is our version of an annual general meeting, but we built it to be half founder summit, half AGM, and the founder half comes first.

From the first planning conversation, the question we kept asking was how this could benefit our founders. Not our LPs first, but our founders first. If we serve founders well through big and small actions every day, our investors win over the long run.

Highlights from the Program

Wildwood’s brand is distinctly pro-human in a very techie corner of the world, so the agenda leaned into topics you might not expect at an AGM. We talked about how world-class expertise can kill a startup, how to protect your mental performance through the ups and downs of building, what founders can do that professional management can’t, how to communicate at multiple altitudes, how to get over yourself to drive founder-led growth, and how to think about your own purpose.

A few moments that stood out:

  • Joey Cheek, Olympic gold medal winner, talked about how his experience training to be the top-performing athlete in the world in his sport did a disservice to his ability to build startups. He had to strip away what he knew from his athlete life in order to be a successful startup builder and advisor.
  • Kim Quigley of Onrise and world champion Rebecca Rusch got real about sustaining peak mental performance, a fitting topic for a room full of people who tend to push hard and rest last. Both Kim and Rebecca have realized the need to have the right amount of stressors in life to achieve peak performance, and how to determine when you need to push yourself harder or pull back to avoid burnout.
  • David Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Techstars, made the case that in a world where software alone is no longer defensible, the real moats are trust, brand and data. Those take time to build, which is exactly why they’re hard to copy. Not surprisingly, he is bullish about investing into Colorado startups.
  • Cam Mulvey (Weekend), Georgina Dukes-Harris (Swishvo) and Larz May (Ginko) shared how they’ve used their own voices to drive growth, even when it feels intimidating to put yourself online. Their stories are all rooted in building trust with their audience.

We also heard from communications coach Kirsten Holmberg on executive presence and from Reece Brown of the Harvard Human Flourishing Program on building a venture on purpose.

Before all of these great speakers joined us, we asked people to start the day with a morning hike at Chautauqua Park, allowing our visitors from different parts of the country to experience the beauty and wonder of the Flatirons.

Culture You Have to Experience

Culture is hard to describe and you can’t really capture it in pictures. You have to experience it. That’s why Founders Forum matters so much to us. It’s the one place each year where founders, LPs and fans of Wildwood are all in the same room to connect as humans, to laugh, to learn each other’s stories, and to find commonalities in business that may accelerate many.

Most people arrive with a few questions when they walk into a room of unfamiliar faces. Are people approachable? Can I walk up to anyone and start a conversation? Will the speakers be useful? Will 48 hours in Colorado be worth my time? The feedback this year told us the answer was yes. People kept telling us the Forum felt different from other early stage funds, that it helped strangers get to know each other, and that it showed a side of venture that rarely gets talked about: the human one. As one first-timer put it, “I finally got to experience the Wildwood culture for myself. And wow!”

Some of our favorite moments happened off stage. We sat down with several of our founders for short interviews, and every one of them had a different take on how they want to help the world. After programming ended, the room stayed full of people continuing their conversations even when they could have gone back to their room or out to Pearl Street to explore Boulder more. Our favorite piece of feedback came from two founders at different companies who each mentioned how great their 4:30 AM ride to the airport was, because they spent it riffing on each other’s businesses.

Thank You

Thank you to everyone who traveled near and far to be in Boulder, to our speakers for getting us thinking, and to the Moxy Boulder for hosting us and taking such good care of the group. Most of all, thank you to our founders, who are working every day to help people flourish. We’re proud to stand on the sidelines, and sometimes in the field, helping them make it happen.