The Headline Growth Investing Team at the Firm's San Francisco Office
Today, Headline announces the launch of its new Global Growth fund and team. The strategy has closed over $865M1 to help companies advance to the next stage of their journey – to become more efficient and to expand their products, teams, and geographies.
The Growth fund’s new team will continue to partner with best-in-class entrepreneurs building companies that are Series B and beyond. And with that, we bring a unique ethos: “Grassroots Growth.”
First, some background. In recent years Growth investors have had a difficult time. The euphoria of 2020-21 appears long gone, and realized returns are now few and far between. Many investment firms are implementing difficult and slow succession plans. Others have shifted their focus to raising ever-larger funds, which has at times created misaligned incentive structures. Some investors have found cynicism and avoidance an easier path than persistence. The Growth community risks moving away from its fundamental mission: generate high returns by helping companies with strong fundamentals scale and succeed.
Headline wants to bring Growth investing back to first principles. We call our strategy “Grassroots Growth.” The term has two main pillars.
The first is the type of entrepreneur that Headline supports. Someone with a chip on their shoulder and something to prove. Someone who pioneered a path for themselves, or who only recently arrived in the country. Someone who was always considered the underdog. Someone who has global aspirations for both the scale of their company and the team they build out. They have an insatiable desire to build something impactful. This founder will have a deep sense of responsibility and unwavering integrity. They understand that optimism is a courageous choice. Implicit to their global mindset, these founders absorb information, traditions, and cultural norms from around the world, in the service of making a commercial impact in all environments. We help them.
The second pillar of Grassroots Growth is about how our team functions. It is non-hierarchical. This blog post comes from all of us. And we behave as a single unit. We have a bias for action and know the value of showing up when we say we will. We are earnest, committed, and nimble. We're energized by doing work that matters. Our incentives are completely aligned with the success of our companies. To that end, investing at Headline means being scrappy – dropping everything at a moment’s notice if an entrepreneur needs help. It means an ethos of “no task is too small.” It means living by our stated values. We invest in our people and develop culture in the same way that best-in-class technology firms develop product: conscientiously, intentionally, proactively.
Our new team has a lot to prove. The team is diverse in the broadest possible sense – not only a mix of genders and nationalities, but also of languages and socio-economic backgrounds. The team has deep experience not just in the Valley, but also on the ground in Europe and internationally, where we continue to see tremendous opportunity. Collectively we have worked at over ten other institutional venture capital and growth equity firms. In this time, we’ve learned a lot about what we want – and what we don’t want – to be a fundamental part of team culture. The team is united on a central idea: we exist to help entrepreneurs succeed, and we aim to reflect the spirit of our founders – fiercely determined to create something remarkable.
To provide this level of support, we will leverage our networks and track records to do anything and everything for founders. The team also draws on the expertise of the broader early-stage Headline community, honed over the 25 years of the firm’s history. This includes Headline’s proprietary Deepdive and Searchlight technology tools, which help founders navigate the complex landscape of startup growth and provide our investors with important data to ask questions and make informed decisions. At the same time, however, the Growth team will be more than just an offshoot of a bigger plant. Think of it as a skunkworks, with the ability to make its own decisions.
We have a clear job to do. We're energized by our mission: invest in great entrepreneurs and support them to the ends of the earth.
We look forward to keeping you updated on our progress.
Headline Growth
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Footnote:
1 All figures that are denominated in EUR (Euros) have been converted to USD (U.S. Dollars) using an exchange rate of 1.1087 as of September 9, 2024. Please note that exchange rates fluctuate, and the conversion rate at the time of actual transactions may differ.