Footwork at Year 3

Reflecting on our first three years of investing our first fund.

Welcome to issue #54 of next big thing.

We started Footwork three years ago, and have written annual posts about the journey: at inception, year 1, year 2, and now this one to mark year 3.

What makes Footwork unique?

• We’re a very small equal partnership investment team — just the two of us.

• We make a handful of investments every year — four in the past year (WindBorne, Watershed, Tracksuit, and one to be announced) — so that we can work closely with each portfolio company.

• We focus on early-stage, in leading Seed and Series A rounds.

• We invest at the intersections of categories, and love interdisciplinary companies — many of our investments are both consumer and enterprise, most of our portfolio leverages AI in a substantial way, and we’ve invested in markets ranging from commerce to climate to healthcare.

• We’re founders ourselves, having started this firm, and that gives us unique empathy for the founding journey that the humans we partner with are on.

The Footwork portfolio now stands at 13 companies, 6 of which we first partnered with at Seed, and 6 at Series A (with 1 exception at the growth stage). The past year was an awesome one for most of our portfolio companies. The majority are now millions in net revenue, and will soon be tens of millions. We hope that one day a few end up in the billion dollar revenue club.

One of Mike’s favorite lines is that if you plot his former company Stitch Fix’s revenue in their first six years, it’s a beautiful up-and-to-the-right graph 📈. “But company building feels anything but 📈, even when things are really working.” This feels like the theme of the past year — teams putting in the hard work, riding the startup rollercoaster, having to make tough decisions, but making real progress as a result.

We continue to put more effort into supporting founders on the rollercoaster. While the Footwork investment team is just the two of us, our operations team, consisting of Katherine and Rachel, has worked behind the scenes to develop a set of resources for our founders across several dimensions designed to help support the hard work of company building: community, talent support, managing your board, scaling yourself as a leader, and fundraising. By moving the needle just a smidge in the right direction in these areas, we think our companies’ chance at success increases a smidge too.

A difference between the last year and the prior two is that much of this hard work, for our portfolio companies and for us, has happened in-person, instead of virtually. It’s easy to forget that three years ago we were still wondering what the “reopening” from the pandemic would look like. But the past year has thankfully felt “normal,” with companies realizing the benefits of physically working together. We opened an office in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, where we’ve been getting to spend more time together with each other, with our portfolio company teams, and with the broader startup ecosystem, through regular dinners, offsites, and more.

So, onto year 4 we go. A huge thanks to our founders, the teams at each of our portfolio companies, our limited partners, and our families, for the work and support you give that enables us to do what we absolutely love to do.

Footwork HQ in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. Drop us a note if you’d like to stop by.