Gale Wilkinson, Managing Partner at VITALIZE, targets 5% ownership in seed-stage companies through $250K to $750K checks. She looks for post-money valuations below $15 million and focuses on capital efficiency and exit potential to build meaningful equity stakes.
Chapters
What would you say that your philosophy around ownership is when crafting your, your overall portfolio strategy? Yeah, so the, the fund that we're investing in out of right now, we invest $250K to $750K checks and we're targeting 5% plus ownership. We invest at the seed stage, so rounds tend to be $2 to $5 million, which means, you know, the valuations need to be south of $15 million post for us to be able to get our ownership percentage. Now, there are times where we'll go kind of go outside of that if we think it's a really good deal, but we try to be measured in getting that ownership percentage because, you know, when I look at the deals we've done historically, anytime you're a winner, you wish you had more ownership in that company. And we've been really lucky that the ones we've done that are doing well, we, we still own quite, quite a nice piece of it because they were capital efficient. So that's the other thing that we look at upfront. It's, can we get enough ownership today? And then what do we think the exit outcome is?