GRP Partners was founded in 1996 with the mission to help entrepreneurs achieve their goals of building big, transformative businesses. The partners of GRP have been involved with many startups over the years, of which 15 stand out companies have achieved exit valuations above $1 billion. We’re proud of this accomplishment and the diversity of teams that we’ve backed – notably that all of our biggest wins have come from outside of Silicon Valley. Our last fund is the single best performing fund in the United States according to the independent industry database, Preqin. (Preqin 2000 Vintage Funds >$100mm)
So what is it that defines GRP Partners?
1. We work in large markets going through disruptive change where we have deep domain experience
As a firm we believe in big ideas over incrementalism. We are looking to work with entrepreneurs who are passionate about bringing changes to their industries. Take Scott Painter, the CEO & founder of TrueCar. He has been an entrepreneur in the auto sector for 20 years. He was frustrated by the obfuscation that exists in consumer purchasing of cars. In the exact same city at the same dealer you can find that one person pays up to 30% more than another person buying the exact same car. The people who get taken advantage of are often those with the least resources and least access to information. Scott believed that the industry should work in a different way. He believed that cars should be purchased as commodities and that dealers ought to compete through upfront pricing and by providing better service and more after-market services. A car is a car. Throughout the 6 years that Scott has been operating TrueCar he has turned this vision into a reality. TrueCar is now the company in the US driving the single largest number of new car purchases. The new & used car market in the US is a $508 billion industry. Scott and his team are playing a leading role in changing this industry for the benefit of all of us as consumers. That’s awe inspiring.
Our traditional markets have been:
- Financial Services & Technologies
- Consumer & Retail Innovation
- Digital Media & Performance-based Marketing
- SaaS & Cloud Infrastructure
- Mobile Applications & Infrastructure
We believe that each of these industries will continue to go through profound disruption in the decades ahead. They represent large slices of the US economy and are industries to which we have dedicated our careers. We choose not to invest in industries where we have neither unique knowledge nor unique relationships that we can bring to bear. If you have a business that operates in our markets, if you have domain knowledge and/or a disruptive idea and if you’re goal is fundamental long-term change – we’d love to debate your concept with you. If your goal is creating a company to see if somebody might acquire it in 2-3 years – we’re probably not the best investor for you.
If you have a burning desire to make a lasting change in some small way in your industry or market – we’d love to talk.
2. We have a hands-on approach to investing, backing teams in good & bad markets
To build 15 companies that exit for north of $1 billion you need to have a long-term investment horizon. The social Internet era has produced some fabulously successful companies who have scaled into 100′s of millions of users in a very short period of time, producing enormously wealthy companies, founders & investors. While we admire this, we think it isn’t the norm. Most companies are built slowly over a 7-10 year time horizon with lots of sweat, daily grind and perseverance. The normal creation time for a billion dollar exit is 10 years, yet the normal economic cycle of expansion & contraction is shorter – somewhere between 4-7 years. That means you need to align entrepreneurs & investors who can manage businesses in good times & bad.
At GRP we’ve always prided ourselves in being hands-on as well as committed to companies – even through tough times. Some of our biggest successes have had dark days. If you’re an entrepreneur we’d be surprised if you hadn’t experienced some of this yourself. In the dot-com implosion of 2001-2005 many companies were washed out – even those with great ideas. We stuck by many of these management teams because we had a working relationships with the teams to know whether or not they had the grit to tough out the trough in the market. We never lost site of the principles that were driving disruptions in our industries. So it is unsurprising that when the market started to turn toward the positive and as these companies themselves matured throughout 2006-2009 we saw a large number of exits.
It’s this formula that created our fund that ranks as the best performing fund in the United States for its vintage year. No hype, no flips, no gloss. It was hard work & commitment from both GRP and the teams we worked with. The rewards were not only economic but huge pride in knowing that the concepts our teams created endured.
If this is how you think about your market and company – we’d love to chat with you.
3. We have a national practice with a Southern California base
Our headquarters are in Los Angeles and that remains a special market for us. As our region has matured we’re seeing 2nd & 3rd-time entrepreneurs who are taking the lessons and capital from their first startups and setting out to change the new world. An example of this is GOGII the company behind textPlus. The three founders – Scott Lahman, Zack Norman & Austin Murray created JAMDAT, the leading mobile games company in “mobile 1.0″ when nobody had a “smart phone.” They sold it to EA for $680 million. When they set out to dominate mobile, social apps for “mobile 2.0″ we knew they wanted to build something bigger and more enduring than even their tremendous first company’s success. Working with this team is a real honor for us.
But we are a truly national practice. Some of our biggest successes have come from Chicago (ULTA, Envestnet), New York (DealerTrack, UGO Networks), Baltimore (BillMeLater), Arizona (PF Chang’s), Las Vegas (HealthDataInsights) and of course Los Angeles (Overture, CitySearch & TrueCar). But we really look hard in all major tech regions in the US including Silicon Valley (CyberSource, Qualys).
Basically, we probably travel as much as you do. We believe that great businesses can emerge in many places. We care more about great teams & great concepts than geography.
4. We are an equal partnership with complementary skills
Lastly, it’s worth noting that since we preach the importance of teams for our entrepreneurs that we should tell you something about ourselves. 3 of our partners have worked together for 20 years and the 4th has been working with the team for 12 (8 as an entrepreneur, 4 as an investor). We are an equal partnership where we value each other’s unique skills, industry experiences and contributions to our portfolio companies. Our aligned incentives mean that we have only one objective: finding, investing in & supporting the highest quality entrepreneurs from idea through to a successful conclusion.
5. What are we looking for in the entrepreneurs we back?
There isn’t one formula to success. We’re happy to back first-time entrepreneurs or more experienced teams with deep domain knowledge. We look more for attributes of success:
- Leadership Skills
- Tenacity
- Detail Orientation
- Market Insight
- Willingness to Work Hard / Knock Down Walls
- Competitiveness
- Perseverance
- A Record of Accomplishments in Whatever Capacity
How should you contact GRP Partners?
Be clever. Show us your skills at networking to gain access. Sure, you could probably guess at our email addresses. But is that how you’d contact an SVP of a large corporation to make a sales or biz dev call? We think you know how to get to us. In an era of social networks and public living it’s simply not that hard to connect the dots. We look forward to speaking to you.
