Panoramic Ventures is the Blazer winner of the fire starter category in Atlanta Inno's Fire Awards.
Judge, a serial entrepreneur and Buffington, CEO of BIP Capital, teamed up to create this growth-stage investment firm, which focuses on funding innovation from underrepresented regions and founders. The goal for the first fund is $300 million, and the firm has a team of more than 25. It currently hosts monthly startup pitch competitions.
Here's a Q&A with managing partners Mark Buffington and Paul Judge:
Q: How are your company’s innovations changing your industry’s landscape?
A: Buffington: For a long time, the best way to gain an audience with a VC has been through personal introductions. This is still the most direct path, and for years it was mostly open to founders who already had connections within the appropriate networks. There are great founders building great businesses across the country that just haven’t had that same advantage, unfortunately.
We formed Panoramic Ventures to change this reality. We named ourselves “Panoramic” as our mission is to take a wider-view approach to investing, including companies in the Southeast, Midwest and other regions across the country where high-potential companies are often overlooked. Racial and gender diversity of founders and teams is also a focus of Panoramic, with the goal of opening more doors for often underrepresented founders.
This is our plan to help broaden the landscape of venture capital funding so that more good companies get funded that might have been overlooked before.
Q: What’s your advice to future and current entrepreneurs?
A: Judge: While success is always the goal, do not fear failure. It tests our fortitude and as entrepreneurs, it’s one of our greatest teachers. I’ll give an example: Earlier in my career, I co-founded a mobile device security company. Things were going well until the financial markets crashed in 2008. My partner and I soon realized we wouldn’t be able to raise the next round of funding in time, which also meant we weren’t going to be able to make payroll for about 40 employees. We were on the edge of going out of business. But we decided to let that failure point be a turning point instead.
We made the tough decision to use all our personal savings to fund payroll and the company. To our great relief, over the next year our revenue increased, the market got better, and our company was successfully acquired. I can’t guarantee that things will always work out like that, but if you run at the first sign of failure, you’ll never know.
Don’t fear failure because as an entrepreneur, there will be plenty of it. You must persevere in the face of it, do your best to learn from the experience, and make those hard decisions even when there’s risk involved. Every good entrepreneur has flirted with the possibility of failure at one point or another, so you can’t let fear of it stand in your way.
Q: What’s been the biggest roadblock in your growth and how did you overcome it?
A: Buffington: Without question, raising capital from institutions has been the toughest roadblock. Despite consistently driving better than top quartile returns for over 15 years, it’s still a challenge. One institutional investor went so far as to tell me, “If I invest in a name-brand Bay Area fund and lose all my money, then I keep my job. If I invest in an Atlanta-based VC and get a 2.5x return, then I get fired.” Much like the founders we partner with, we feel we have been overlooked, which has caused us to create advantages of our own. We have accessed other pools of capital, mostly with family offices and high-net-worth investors that usually don’t get exposure to the high quality, private market investment opportunities we provide access to. The results of our efforts are clear. In 2014, we were raising about $25 million a year. In 2019 and 2020, we raised over $100 million in each year. In 2021, we raised over $100 million in the first quarter. We plan to continue to talk with institutions investing in venture capital, but we have innovated to the point that they are no longer critical to our success.
Atlanta Inno's Fire Awards 2021
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