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Do you have a Culture Minister?
Do you have a Culture Minister?
A great set of thoughts from my colleague David Siegel (www.linkedin.
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Rick Patch reposted thisRick Patch reposted thisBridgefy is the #19 app in Social Networking right now on the App Store, above apps with multi-million dollar budgets like WeChat, TruthSocial, Bluesky, Grindr, Line, and Kik. 11,500,000 downloads and counting. People are downloading via word-of-mouth in Iran, LA, Palestine, Ukraine, and many other countries where situations are dire. We did this with a team of 4 engineers and a shoestring budget. Build products that matter. Create value. The rest will follow. (We are fundraising. Please reach out to Jorge Rios if you're interested in a near-future unicorn that is making the world a better place)
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Rick Patch reacted on thisRick Patch reacted on thisIf there is one thing that is certain in the life of building a company, that is change and evolution. And after 8 years of both founding and leading FloatMe from zero to signifcant scale and profitability, I’m excited to announce Ken Rees as our new CEO effective this week. In fact, I’ve always believed that part of my role as a founder and CEO is to bring on leaders who are excellent at what they do, so we can take the company to the next level. That is exactly what we’re doing by hiring Ken. From our first conversation to every conversation thereafter, I could tell he was not only excited, but he also knew the various pain points tightropers in America face. As for what’s next for me, I will continue to guide the business from a board level, but also support it in an operator role as President. Since starting the company, I’ve always had an obsession for helping America’s backbone stretch their pay to make ends meet, avoid late fees, get gas for work, or simply get groceries. These are examples of the numerous stories we’ve been a part of and I’m beyond proud to share that we've done this for over 1% of the U.S. population. With Ken now at the helm, we will accelerate this scale even further, expand our platform, and continue to push towards a vision where people can build and prove their financial potential. To our team and everyone who has played a role in our journey, I am so proud and grateful for what we’ve accomplished. It has truly been an honor and I can’t wait to see what more we accomplish next. #floatme
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Rick Patch reacted on thisRick Patch reacted on thisIn 2018, I predicted Amazon would eventually take on UPS and FedEx directly (see link to my blog in the first comment). This week, Amazon announced doing just that. Both UPS and FedEx’s stocks dropped ~10%, and my feed is full of takes about who wins and who loses. I think that’s the wrong conversation. If most of your sales come from the Amazon marketplace, using their supply chain service probably makes a lot of sense. Plug in, scale up, move on. But if owning your customer is strategic to you, the equation changes dramatically. Whoever you ship packages with sees your customer names and addresses; zip-level demand concentration, volume levels and patterns, growth rates, transit times, repeat purchases and all of your supply chain flows. That is highly valuable market intelligence. And once you hand that data to your biggest competitor, you don’t really get that decision back. Anyone who saw Toys “R” Us going bankrupt after outsourcing their ecommerce operation to Amazon understands how getting in bed with a competitor could be a fatal mistake. At the same time, it is clearer than ever that legacy carriers are not the answer. Which means brands now need to decide: Who do you trust with your customer at the door- legacy carriers or your biggest competitor? A true ‘catch 22’. THAT is the real conversation. And that’s the exact problem Veho is built to solve: Provide an incredible delivery experience, drive down your shipping costs, and always, always continue to own your customer. And to be clear - real respect for what Amazon built here. This has been 20 years in the making and it’s objectively impressive. Competition sharpens everyone. But for brands competing with Amazon, the strategic questions are no longer theoretical: Do you own the customer experience at delivery? Or does someone else? And if you compete with Amazon, would you hand them your last mile? #supply_chain #shipping #logistics #disruption
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Rick Patch liked thisRick Patch liked thisEveryone talks about the start and the finish. The idea. The launch. The fundraise. The IPO. But most of building a company lives in the middle. The long stretches where the signal is messy. The hypothesis — about a product, a channel, a leader — isn’t proven yet. Progress is uneven. No headlines. No dopamine hits. Just the work. And plenty of uncertainty. That’s the moment to reframe things. To fall in love with the work itself. Talking to customers. Fixing what’s broken. Keeping the team moving forward. It’s not glamorous. The outside world may not notice. But your team will. And it’s where almost all the value gets created. The middle isn’t the part you survive. It’s the part that matters.
Experience & Education
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SpringTime Ventures
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Honors & Awards
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2005 Duane Pearsall Entrepreneurial Award
Rockies Venture Club
The Duane Pearsall Entrepreneurial Award was established by the Rockies Venture Club in 1993 upon Mr. Pearsall's formal retirement from Columbine Venture Funds. Throughout his life, Mr. Pearsall has been an active member of the Denver venture capital community and an avid supporter of the entrepreneurial spirit. It is his steadfast belief in entrepreneurship and innovation that led the RVC to create this award honoring a person, team or organization that shone brightest through the…
The Duane Pearsall Entrepreneurial Award was established by the Rockies Venture Club in 1993 upon Mr. Pearsall's formal retirement from Columbine Venture Funds. Throughout his life, Mr. Pearsall has been an active member of the Denver venture capital community and an avid supporter of the entrepreneurial spirit. It is his steadfast belief in entrepreneurship and innovation that led the RVC to create this award honoring a person, team or organization that shone brightest through the year.
Past recipients of this prestigious award include Governor Roy Romer, John Elway, Bill Daniels, and Governor John Hickenlooper. -
1993 Entrepreneur of Distinction Award
Boulder County Chamber of Commerce
Due to the success and growth of Micro Decisionware and involvement in the business community.
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Tim Ericson
🚀 Meet PACT, simplifying SBA-backed acquisitions with investors. Think YC’s SAFE, but built for Main Street M&A. 📘 What is PACT and why we built it PACT (Partnership Acquisition Commonsense Terms) is a free, balanced starting point for the agreements used in SBA-backed acquisitions with outside investors. For too long, SBA-backed acquisitions with outside investors have been the wild west: every deal is different, inefficient, and confusing, especially for first-time searchers raising capital. PACT gives everyone a common baseline so reviews are faster, expectations are clear, and operators can focus on acquiring the business. 🧩 SAFE for ETA Y Combinator’s SAFE gave startups a shared template that made early investing easier to execute. PACT brings that same idea to ETA. It teaches the key concepts in plain English, aligns searchers and investors on the economics, and sets a fair place to start. Our goal is for PACT to become the default baseline for investor-backed small business acquisitions using SBA loans. 🤝 Who contributed 🏛️ Legal input from top SMB M&A attorneys: Joseph Spina (Cullen and Dykman LLP), Mark Dittrich (Groundswell Advisors, LLP), and Eric Hsu (Clear Focus Law, PLLC) provided feedback on drafts. 💼 Early investor adopters: Jordan F. (Shareholder Ventures), Grant Hensel (Entrepreneurial Capital), Jason Ehrlich (Fruition Capital), Sean Smith (Search Fund Ventures), Adam Kaplan (ETA Funding Partners), Jacob Hall (Kando Capital), Tony Cappaert (Workbench Capital) and Adam Markley (PROX Search Capital) have adopted PACT on new deals. 🎓 Community support: Chelsea Wood and Walker Deibel at the Acquisition Lab and Buy Then Build have committed to start educating the community on how investor deals work using PACT. 👉 What to do next 🔍 Searchers: download the docs and ask your lawyer to start from PACT. ⚖️ SMB M&A Law firms: review the templates and send feedback so the next version is better. 💸 SMB investors: adopt PACT as your starting point and share redlines from real deals. This is a community-led standard, and we will keep versioning PACT as feedback comes in from all sides. 📝 Thanks: Special thanks to Joseph Spina for leading the legal drafting with me and helping shape a true middle ground. 🔗 Download PACT and see the key terms: ETAPACT.com (link in the comments) Let’s make investor-backed acquisitions clearer, faster, and fairer for everyone. 🚨 DISCLAIMER: PACT is not legal advice. Searchers must engage experienced SMB M&A counsel to review and tailor these documents to their deal.
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Lucas Wright
Why Raising Venture Capital Feels Like Going on First Dates... I just got off a meeting hosted by Fidelity Private Shares and Metal and moderated by Kristen Craft and Adam Roberts. It was an incredible discussion about the transition from pre-seed to seed, what investors are actually looking for, and the realities founders face during the fundraising process. But while listening to the conversation, something hit me that I’ve been noticing for a while now. Raising venture capital feels a lot like dating. And the parallels are kind of hilarious. When you pitch a VC, it’s essentially a first date. You want to highlight the positives. You want to show confidence. You want to be optimistic about the future. But if you come across too eager, too polished, or too desperate, it’s a turnoff. Sound familiar? On the flip side, if you’re too pessimistic or overshare all the risks too early, you can scare people away before they’ve had a chance to see the bigger vision. Dating advice and fundraising advice suddenly start sounding identical: • Be confident, but not arrogant • Be honest, but not overly self-deprecating • Show ambition, but don’t oversell Then there’s the follow-up game. After a pitch, maybe the VC doesn’t respond immediately. So the founder asks the same question someone asks after a first date: How long do I wait before following up? One day? Three days? A week? And just like dating, double-texting energy is real. Send too many follow-ups with no substance and suddenly you’re the founder version of: “Hey… just checking in 🙂” Which is rarely a good look. The funniest parallel came when the VCs talked about turning founders down. Often they really like the team. They like the vision. But the market isn’t big enough or the timing isn’t right. And instead of giving a clean “no,” founders sometimes hear things like: “We love what you’re building, but the timing isn’t right for us.” or “We just don’t have the capital allocated for this right now.” One of the speakers said something that stuck with me: If a VC really wants to invest, they’ll find a way. Which again sounds exactly like dating advice. When someone is truly interested, the signal is clear. They make time. They follow up. They lean in. When they’re not, the responses start sounding suspiciously like a polite breakup. At the end of the day, fundraising really is a two-way relationship. Founders are looking for partners who believe in the vision. Investors are looking for founders they trust to execute. And just like dating, the goal isn’t to convince everyone. It’s to find the right match. Huge thanks again to Haley Bryant of Hustle Fund and Renny M. of First In for sharing their insights during today’s discussion, it was incredibly valuable. For any founders out there raising right now… Stay confident, keep building, and remember: Sometimes fundraising isn’t about pitching better. It’s just about finding the investor who’s actually ready to say yes. --Lucas
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Harvrinder Athwal
Automation may be transforming every industry—but few sectors are more ready for disruption than education data. Verif-y is an AI-based SaaS that replaces outdated record systems with secure, verified automation. THE OPPORTUNITY - Governments and schools struggling with data privacy and accuracy - Employers demanding instant, verified academic credentials - Regulators pushing for secure digital record networks THE TECHNOLOGY - AI-driven ingestion and analytics - Modular APIs for rapid deployment across agencies and enterprises - Built-in compliance and reporting dashboards FOR INVESTORS - Recurring revenue model with strong unit economics - First-mover advantage across regulated markets - Clear expansion path into international markets See www.verif-y.com Ask for financials. DM me if you want more info. Join us on this funding round Will the most trusted data companies of the next decade come from compliance-first innovation?
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