Kevin Mosley is a General Partner at Jurassic Capital, a Durham-based growth equity firm focused on growing B2B software companies in the Triangle and broader Southeast. Alongside co-founder Joe Colopy, Jurassic’s deep entrepreneurial and operating experience from Durham-based Bronto and other SaaS companies helps grow and scale capital-efficient companies over $1M in revenue. They recently closed a $25M+ fund and have portfolio companies building software in HR (WorkDove), B2B eCommerce (Corevist), and test automation (Cycle Labs), all of which are located in the Triangle. [Editor’s Note: The links are to earlier GrepBeat stories on those startups.]
Kevin spent his pre-Jurassic career operating at growth-stage software companies, including Sageworks, Lulu, Bronto, and Republic Wireless/Relay. He graduated with a BS in Finance from Clemson and loves spending time with his wife in the Triangle as well as watching and playing all sports, especially golf and tennis.
1. What is in your pockets?
At the moment, nothing. Normally, I’m carrying around my phone, wallet, and keys.
2. What exciting thing has happened recently for you or your organization?
Jurassic Capital is a growth equity firm that Joe Colopy and I created a couple of years ago to help solve what we find to be a gap in the investing market, especially in the Triangle and broader Southeast. Specifically, we found that there are a number of companies that either have been bootstrapped or are relatively capital-efficient, where they find that traditional venture capital is not the right path for them to go down. They are too small to be able to benefit from the traditional growth equity and private equity companies out there that tend to start, at least in the B2B software world, around $5M or $10M in revenue.
What we found is that because of our deep operating and entrepreneurial experience, whether from Bronto or other companies, Joe and I wanted to figure out a way to help those companies make the somewhat difficult transition from that zero-to-one, crazy startup, just-try-to-keep-the-lights-on phase to the $1M-to-$10M growing-and-scaling organization where really you’re trying to get away from individual-founder-led heroics.
We’ve got three companies in our portfolio that fall into the B2B software category. All of them actually are located in the Triangle right now, which is also wonderful, and they’re all growing.
These companies are doing well, and we’re trying to be pretty active investors. We’re helping them from our operational experience, we’re getting a bit more involved and helping them get to the phase where they can make the next leap and get to $5M or $10M of revenue and figure out where they want to go from there.
The exciting piece is that we’ve now raised outside capital for the first time. What that’s allowed us to do is to deploy more money. We raised a little over a $20M fund. That’s allowed us to go out and do this with more companies, which is incredibly exciting, and exactly what we’re passionate about doing. We’re glad that the market validated our thesis in that way. We went out and hired a new associate, Chrissy Whitty, and we’ve also started scaling with the folks in our network as well, to help our portfolio companies.
3. What is your favorite coffee spot?
My most frequented coffee spot is the Oak House in downtown Durham. They recently introduced a reward system, which I think is a terrible idea for their business strategy, because I’m going to crush it. I think Zach Mansfield and other investors and people in the Triangle are going to absolutely destroy that. With that being said, I think my absolute favorite coffee shop is actually a place called the Optimist in Oakwood in Raleigh.
4. What keeps you up at night?
I’m pretty obsessed with efficiency and trying to be balanced in finding well-being in my life. What that ends up meaning is how am I serving our portfolio companies the best, am I doing enough for them? What’s next on the fundraising side? How are we serving our limited partners? Am I doing the most for my team? As well as, how are we helping the ecosystem every day? Then somewhere in there, I’m trying to balance that out with how to find enough time for family, friends, and maybe somewhere deep, deep in there, maybe myself at some point. But all that to say, I’m not sleeping as much or as well as I once was.
5. What is your favorite restaurant or happy hour?
Luna in downtown Durham. I have never had a bad meal there.
6. What is next for you or your organization?
With the fund, we have money to deploy and so we are working on deals constantly. We’re always looking for interesting companies to talk to. One of the things that we always throw out there is that we’ve recognized how many different paths there are on the way to a successful software company. We’re always happy to have a conversation, we’re always happy to help guide them to other investors that we know. Whether or not we’re the right fit isn’t really the important thing for us. Our goal is we want to get to know companies early.
Our last two deals, and likely our next two, will all probably be with folks that we’ve known for over a year and probably closer to two or three years, where we’ve gotten deep into their company and known them and been able to help guide them along the way. Because we know that this is a long-term marriage; it’s a partnership. We want to make sure that there’s a good amount of trust on all sides. With that being said, we’re always interested in talking to everybody and finding more ways to deploy this capital in a local and regional way.
