1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dan Roselli of CFV Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Dan Roselli was recorded in July 2020.

Dan Roselli is Founder and Managing Partner at CFV Ventures, a North Carolina firm focused on FinTech and InsureTech.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get acquainted. Let’s get you introduced to our audience. Tell us a bit about your background and your firm.

Dan Roselli: I ended up in Charlotte, North Carolina because Bank of America recruited me to be their Brand and Advertising Executive. I ran brand strategy and was the member of the management operating committee of the bank.

I left at the end of 2003 and became an entrepreneur. I helped co-found one of Charlotte’s FinTech unicorns. It’s a company called Red Ventures. Charlotte has produced four FinTech unicorns. I put three different companies on the Inc 500 list, which is a US-based study. You have to have a four-year track record to do it. Not a lot of people have done that.

I have an interesting combination of big company operating experience and entrepreneurial credibility. That takes us to about 10 years ago in the third phase of my career where I focus on community building and helping entrepreneurs.

In the last great recession, we did a crazy thing and bought an empty downtown office building in Charlotte. We turned it into an entrepreneurship center.

It’s called Packard Place. It’s still one of the largest tech and innovation centers in the US. It was one of the first ones outside of New York and San Francisco in the US. It raised over $2 billion in venture capital and created over a thousand jobs. It’s hugely transformative.

Then we started doing acceleration work in FinTech, InsurTech, and HealthTech. We also started a fund specific to the FinTech and InsurTech space, which is CFV. I’ve had a busy decade here at Charlotte.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Congratulations. How big is the fund? What scale are we talking about?

Dan Roselli: It’s a modest fund. It’s just around $7 million for our first fund. We normally participate in seed rounds that are $750,000 to a million. We like to be $200,000 to $300,000 of that round.

We don’t need a huge fund to have the impact that we want. We do have a preference for companies that have come through our accelerator program. That’s the Queen City Fintech Accelerator and the Queen City Insurtech Accelerator.

Charlotte’s nickname is the Queen City because we were named after Queen Charlotte 200 years ago. A lot of our funding goes there partly because we believe we just don’t want to be a check. We believe we’re bringing an ecosystem of resources to the table. Money is just part of that.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dan Roselli of CFV Ventures
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