1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Christopher Mirabile, Senior Managing Director at Launchpad Venture Group (Part 1)

Christopher Mirabile is Senior Managing Director at Launchpad Venture Group. We have an awesome conversation about a non-Unicorn chasing investment philosophy.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about your background as well as Launchpad.

Christopher Mirabile: I was actually an English major. I started my career in strategy consulting. I ended up getting a law degree and worked in a very tech-focused corporate firm. I ended up taking one of my clients public. I went in-house and became an executive and ultimately the CFO.

I became a full-time angel when we sold that to another enterprise software company. My background is in and around technology. I have a pretty good knowledge of legal, contractual, and business-related issues.

Sramana Mitra: Launchpad is an angel group?

Christopher Mirabile: It’s a network of about 180 investors with a few affiliated funds. Each of the individuals worked on their own. We put about $10 million to work every year. We’ve been around for 20 years. We’ve backed about 130 companies and had about 70 exits over the years. Our focus is on science and technology companies going to market through B2B. We work with need-to-haves rather than nice-to-haves. We don’t work with gaming or gambling.

Sramana Mitra: B2B is a big focus area for us. Do you do both enterprise and SMB?

Christopher Mirabile: We’re classic venture investors in terms of our psychology. We look at a company focusing on medium-sized enterprises and if the market size is big enough to support venture economics. We’re a little bit different. The typical venture fund has a surplus of capital and a shortage of human capital.

A network of investors is the other way around. We can get interested in investing in a company servicing a $150 million market in way that VC’s wouldn’t. If you’re going for a market smaller than that, it’s hard to make the math work if you’re going to try to fuel the business on risk equity. The time and risk-adjusted returns are not going to be there for risk equity investors. It’s not the best kind of fuel to run that engine on.

Sramana Mitra: You said a lot of things here that I will double-click down on. Let me first set the specifics straight. What is the geographical boundaries of your investment interest?

Christopher Mirabile: Launchpad is based in Boston, Massachusetts. We do take a hands-on approach, so we limit ourselves to the northeast US. Our membership base comes up and down the eastern seaboard. We’ll do the New England and upstate New York, but we tend not to invest that much out of the northeast.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the mechanics of how an entrepreneur would work with you. Let’s say I want to send a deal over to you. How would we work on that? How do you show it to the investors in your group?

Christopher Mirabile: We get a fair amount of deal flow. Having a warm introduction is helpful. It’s not an elitism kind of thing but so much as human nature pragmatism. Our members are all available on LinkedIn. If you search for Launchpad Venture Group on LinkedIn, you’ll probably see someone on your network. That’s one way to find a warm intro. Any entrepreneur can go to our website and hit the entrepreneur button. You’ll just fill-out a short summary profile about the company.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Christopher Mirabile, Senior Managing Director at Launchpad Venture Group
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