When looking at investment, The STRT Investment Committee (IC) stewards the charter and mitigates against potential challenges for biased agenda divergence. The committee is well adept at governance and is in place with a pledge to uphold the following criteria:
- Approaching every decision with a fiduciary mindset.
- Adhering to the mandates and sector focus areas.
- Making strong financial decisions and evaluating equity.
- Showing up with participation, urgency, and action.
- Extending trust to hands-on operational teams.
The ICs role is to assess the target assets for a pre-admittance decision. The IC discusses possible success factors such as scaling a balanced portfolio, investing in durable technologies, and seeking opportunistic plays. Once admitted to the fund, long-term stewardship and guidance takes over.
LPs value this stewardship because even though the fund is a long-term investment, those who invest in startups are looking for opportunistic companies that grow exponentially with diminishing marginal costs — namely utilizing technology where the costs of producing additional units or acquiring additional customers continually shrink.
The STRT Fund invests in technology companies, or companies that utilize technology because they can scale faster with fewer complications than traditional non-tech companies. Leveraging technology allows companies to rapidly grow, bringing on more customers for little to no operational change — while the increased cash flow is invested back into the companies for faster and more growth.
Additionally, the STRT Fund communicates monthly in fund updates so LPs understand what is happening within the fund — the caveat being that the fund is for the long-term investor who is not interested in one-hit overnight returns.
Early-stage companies we invest in:
- Have credible projected returns of at least 35% IRR for the investor within 5 to 8 years.
- Can launch within one year, have projected positive cash flow within two years, do not require capitalization above $8mm, and anticipate invested capital recovery within three and a half years.
- Exhibit authenticity, creativity, and effectiveness not only in their offering but also in their commercial approach, product positioning, monetization strategy, and operational execution.
- Are grounded on novel, innovative, and demonstrated technologies that are durable, distinctive, non-replicable, free of encumbrances, and have multi-generational commercial opportunities.
- Have prototyped the technology, established commercial viability, have no material supply chain risks, and are principally USA based enterprises.
- Have leadership and stakeholders that objectively understand their and the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and are professionally principled and well-grounded in a practical understanding of the market and industry.
- Have leadership that embraces the pre-funding evaluation, optimization, and vetting along with the post-funding stewardship of an independent company builder, respecting and accepting their technology, commercial, business, and structuring expertise.
The success of the STRT Partnership’s investment strategy and trading activities will depend strategically on the IC, advisors and the General Partner’s ability to identify scalable opportunities, manage such opportunities, and otherwise exploit and create value.