The purpose behind what we do at iSelect is simple: we help investors and create great companies. When we started this organization, it was in reaction to a market opportunity that we saw — the disconnect between investor access to the venture capital asset class and entrepreneur need for that capital to support their innovations.
We created iSelect to fix that market imperfection.
In my view, what we’re doing here is just the next step in an evolution in the market that has been going on for more than a century. From Sarbanes Oxley, to decimalization, to other market reforms, public markets have become more efficient and constrained over the decades. In 1990, in fact, companies generally went public at $200M in market cap. Today they go public at $4B. As a result, more of the major gains are happening in private companies.
The market impact should be obvious — there is a massive wave of capital moving to private markets. Yet, there are not enough quality private investments available to satisfy this new demand. There are not enough opportunities for the investors who want to get involved.
Venture capital is an effective engine to uncover new innovations, not just in IT, but in food, health, transportation, energy, and more. It is also one of the best things an investor can do to make a real impact on their world with their money.
Because the American entrepreneur is the single most effective wealth producer the world has ever known. American entrepreneurs solve the world’s big problems and generate tremendous profits doing so. Want affordable health care? Pick an entrepreneur. Want to improve education? Pick an entrepreneur. Want to create jobs? Pick an entrepreneur.
The resilience of our global economy comes from customers eager for better answers, entrepreneurs bold enough to think differently, and investors willing to fund new ventures. They create almost all net new jobs, create the industries that drive our economic evolution and provide the answers to the great challenges of our time.
To this end, iSelect is supporting disruptive emerging technologies that can substantially change markets, tapping the enormous potential of the Midwest agtech, food revolution and healthcare innovation and offering access to pre-IPO / pre-exit companies.
When we started iSelect in 2012 we anticipated startups would flourish in every corner of the United States. We anticipated an arbitrage of too much capital and not enough deals. The missing element was an investment mechanism that increased the quality of deal flow and provides a flexible investment structure that meets institutional standards.
Silicon Valley is world-class when it comes to cultivating software, IT, media and entertainment ventures. But what about everything else? How can investors tap into the rest of America’s unique innovation engine?
After all, not every successful company is built in Silicon Valley. iSelect brings accredited and institutional investment to early-stage ventures in Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, St. Louis and many more because that’s where we’re finding the best opportunities. We invest outside Silicon Valley because these locations offer cheaper operating costs, proximity to customers, excellent talent, rational valuations, and strong exit opportunities.
Access to these markets has been missing for investors.
So that is what we built.
