<aside> ✅ Our fund was designed from the ground up to maximize our support capacity and we take a board position in each investment we make.
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With Bleu Capital, you get the backing of a team who has experienced scale from $0 to $200M without external capital - We know how to bridge lean, ultra-efficient cash management with rapid growth. Few people in the startup land have experienced this in the last 10 years due to the broad availability of cheap capital. If you’re a French speaker (or feel like reading subtitles), you’ll find a few snapshot of our method in this podcast.
When you deploy your own capital, you get a few more liberties than a regular VC. At Bleucap, we built a fund that could take full advantage of that. In practice, we save time vs. a traditional fund by (1) not having to fundraise, an activity that can take up to 50% of a fund manager’s bandwidth, and (2) Taking a concentrated approach, making only a very limited number of investments per year (no AUM race) and (3) by investing in other funds that help us source investment opportunities.
We also chose what we believe to be the most aligned investment strategy with the founder's interest: An evergreen fund, focused on a concentrated portfolio of early-stage companies with a high reserve ratio for follow-on rounds. To make that work, we cap the number of investments each year, and invest in other funds to deploy excess capital.
As an internal rule, we reserve 80% of our bandwidth for portfolio support and cap the number of active investments per investor.
We offer a support function to help you make the right decisions for your business. We are not micro-managers, and trust you to run the business in the best way possible. We invested in you to run the business. Founders are very much the central part of our thesis.
Each portfolio company has access to every single team member, as well as the collective intelligence of our portfolio and the support network of founders, market leaders, and partners that we have built across the US, Europe, and China. A good example is investing in a European company to help it get ready for a US market launch (team structure, investor network, best practices).
Each quarter, we define quarterly focus areas with a smaller subset of portfolio companies. The objective is to provide focused attention and extra resources to a particular blocker or opportunity in order to facilitate product innovation, organizational efficiency, and/or growth.
We prefer to communicate on WhatsApp or Slack, connect regularly, meet in person as often as we can. Don’t expect a passive investor checking in once a year.
Our DNA is clear: we are bold and honest and don’t care about popularity contests. Our goal is to present reality the way it is to founders to help them make the right decisions. We are advisors taking a birds eye view and keeping an eye on the horizon to anticipate the next big issue or opportunity.
We support through challenging times. Our fund managers have seen companies rapidly scale up, but also gone through the struggles of difficult times that you will likely experience on your journey from seed to growth. We don’t forget about you when the things don’t go as planned. We’re concentrated, made a high conviction bet, and will do everything to let you win.