What a fun week to find out that 6 of our Client Partners/Founders/Friends were recognized as Top Leaders on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list! We love to co-invent with wonderful humans and we’re so excited to see them recognized for their hard work! Here is a ton of love and our hats off to Crystal Evuleocha of Kiira Health, Brian Zatulove and Zachary Wise of Emotive, Stephen Smith of nOCD, and Ravi Shah and Shrenik Jain of Marigold Health for being recognized for their innovative efforts this year.
Beyond co-inventing, we also like to co-invest in these incredible humans tackling problems that we find important and harness tremendous potential. One mental model we use when we’re looking at investing is an image of a compressed spring. That spring starts to take shape when we ask ourselves questions like:
- Do we believe in this founder and team?
- Do we think this problem is a big and real problem?
- Can our network help drive growth?
- Do we think that time and tailwinds can be on their side?
If so, it starts to look like a tightly compressed spring that’s ready to erupt with energy. That’s when we like to double down and invest alongside inventing. We’re excited to say that of the 6 companies above, 4 of them are in our investment portfolio. But even when we miss the mark and don’t invest or don’t get the opportunity to and one of our client partners goes on to achieve incredible things, we still stand by them and celebrate them for the unbelievably difficult work they have done to build something meaningful. It is one of the hardest things in the world to start a company and lead it to success (maybe even more so in 2020 in many cases).
So as we gear for 2021 and we think about where Sidebench is going, as we think about the success of our client partners, as we imagine what we could co-invent and bring to life together, we want to take a step back and celebrate the individuals who give us those opportunities. We’re ultimately in service of helping them achieve their dreams and when we ground our focus and ambition in that fact, we get fueled up and excited to tackle big hairy problems head-on, together. Unlike other shops that do similar things that we do but seek to take credit for their client’s massive successes, we want to champion their wins. Whether we get to take the ultimate ride with them, or not.
Here is to 2021 being massively successful for our client partners, our friends, our co-conspirators of change. When they win, we win.
