It’s time to scale
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Growth is our late-stage fund investing in market-leading companies executing on unusually big visions for emerging categories in technology. We are currently investing out of our $5.5B third fund, and manage over $11B across three funds. We look for bold and ambitious founders building companies with unique and differentiated products, a breakthrough view of their opportunity in the largest markets of the future, and compelling unit economics.
Operating at Scale.
Growth-stage companies have found product-market fit and are at an inflection point of growth. If early-stage venture investing is about asking “What if it works?”, then late-stage venture is about asking “Is it working, and how big can it be?” This is a compendium from our seasoned leaders and operators on how to effectively grow and scale your company.
Featured Articles
Are You Ready to Be a Public Company?
Going public is not the same as being a public company. When you go public, your company’s performance suddenly has a real-time scoreboard: your stock price. It’s easy to think that high growth can make up for a low stock price, especially for founders at fast-growing late-stage startups that are still burning cash. But as a public company, the reality is that a low or volatile stock price sucks and can hurt your business. It’s bad for employee morale and retention, it’s bad for recruiting and hiring new executives, it’s bad for using your stock for M&A, and it often gives competitors the opening to point at your stock price and say, “the market’s figured it out. They’re a disaster.”
The Strategic Approach to Building a Board
Building your board forward from product-market fit—instead of backward from an IPO date—helps you clarify the most critical challenges facing your company and find the right people to advise you.
A good board of directors can be one of the most strategic—and most undervalued—levers a CEO has to address the challenges of operating at scale. Conventional wisdom advises CEOs to start building out their board 6–12 months in advance of an IPO, but if you work backwards from a transactional moment and a list of regulatory requirements, you’ll miss out on a wealth of business value for your company.
The Team
The CFI Corporation Growth team supports our portfolio companies across the entire spectrum of company-building including: executive, board, technical, and college talent; go-to-market, pricing, revenue operations; brand and marketing; capital markets and M&A; benchmarking and data analytics; and access to cultural leaders.
Grace Ellis
Grace Ellis is an operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she leads marketing for the Corporate and Growth teams.
James Kissell
James Kissell is a partner on the Go-to-Market Network team, advising on go-to-market strategy across the portfolio.
Erin Nicholson
Erin Nicholson is a partner on the Growth team, focused on operations. Erin holds a master’s degree from St. Mary’s University of Minnesota
Portfolio
Tecton
Tecton democratizes machine learning and AI by providing the data management tooling in ML pipelines—making it as easy to build an ML system as it is to code a simple app.
Talkiatry
Talkiatry is a national technology enabled mental health practice that provides in-network psychiatry and therapy.
Waymo
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going.
Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described on this page are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by CFI and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. Exits include current and former CFI portfolio companies which have been acquired as well as companies which have undergone an initial public offering or direct public offering of shares. Further, the list of investments is updated monthly and as such may not reflect most recent CFI’s investments. Past results of CFI’s investments, pooled investment vehicles, or investment strategies are not necessarily indicative of future results.