We recently held our annual investment partners meeting of the York IE core investment syndicate made up of high net worth individuals and family offices. The annual meeting is meant to be in person at our Manchester, NH headquarters followed by beers, appetizers and networking at our neighborhood sports bar Shoppers Pub + Eatery, but this year we held a less enjoyable, yet still productive, Zoom meeting given the current Covid pandemic.
The goal of this annual June meeting is to update the group on progress being made building our hybrid and unique firm while updating everyone to the prior year’s startup investments and most recent six month investment cohort. It is also a solid opportunity for Joe, Adam and I to align with our co-investors and advisors on market dynamics, trends, opportunities and realities. Given that across our 20 or so investment partners we have a cross-section of successful technology entrepreneurs and traditional industry titans (finance, healthcare, etc.) it’s a two way sounding board that delivers great perspective and insights for one another.
Worth sharing, we plan on publicly announcing our latest B2B SaaS deals in the coming weeks as we’ve added a great group of startups to our portfolio ranging from infrastructure businesses to vertical SaaS companies all with modern and innovative plays in their respective domain areas and committed founding teams.
Our agenda covered all of the latest updates on York IE, from market thesis and trends, to York IE company building across investments, advisory and consulting services, and our in-house ‘Fuel’ technology platform, to portfolio evolution and highlights, to team growth and future scaling plans to support startups everywhere, to the aforementioned portfolio details including investments rationales, terms, and performance.
We also highlighted a phenomenal historical angel investment, Fastly, and their recent success in the public market driven by tailwinds of increased internet usage through the Covid pandemic married with strong business fundamentals. CNBC just put out a tremendous article about them titled: Zoom is no longer the best-performing work-from-home stock, which displays much of the enterprise software and infrastructure focus of York IE.
As the public markets have been relatively flat to down for months overall, enterprise software is experiencing an upward motion of ~20% over the same period. These companies may not be the most sexy, but they are the most predictable and sustainable. At one point of time while running Dyn, we even had a hit marketing campaign called ‘DNS IS SEXY’ and it resonated deeply with our audiences! We also recently announced the addition of Dyn Co-founder and SVP Infrastructure from Fastly, Tom Daly, as a new investment partner and advisor. So there are plenty of interconnections to share.
So what’s next as we move into investment year number two (July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021)? Here is what we shared with our growing collective of investment partners and advisors for our core York IE syndicate:
- More investments
- More investment partners
- More helping entrepreneurs
- More innovation on ‘Fuel’ Platform
- More strategic partnerships
- More integrated execution (every day!)
