Why I Joined Serac Ventures Guild

Venture Capital

Founded by General Partner Kevin Moore, Serac Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm backing founders who build transformational companies in fintech, SaaS, AI, tech-enabled services, and future of work sectors.

The name Serac comes from high-altitude ice formations found on some of the world’s tallest mountains. For mountaineers, seracs can be the most difficult obstacle to overcome before reaching the summit.

The old saying, “the last mile is the hardest,” is consistent with my experiences. It is where judgment, execution, and leadership separate the good from the great.

Mission and values alignment is a big part of why I am excited to join the Serac Guild.

The Serac Guild supports portfolio founders as they scale. Entrepreneurship can be a series of seracs, and Guild members are there to help founders navigate those roadblocks more quickly and efficiently as they accelerate their growth.

Portfolio Companies

Serac backs companies building innovative technologies that challenge the status quo in large markets like financial services, enterprise software, and people management. The firm looks for companies with a finished product, revenue, a growing customer base, and a scalable and capital-efficient business model. Checks are written for $250K-$500K with reserve capital for follow-on investments.

Portfolio companies include:

• EMTECH. SoLo. Bump. SocialCrowd. WriteSea. FutureMoney. Sunny Day Fund. SmartWiz. Podonos. Mappa. PlaidCloud. GreenLyne. Shifty. Agentech.

My perspective on the market

I have a point of view that the companies who will dominate the S&P 500 in the AI Economy are being built right now and will be AI-native from day one.

Integrating AI at scale requires objective documentation of how work actually gets done today - the steps, baton handoffs, decisions/approvals, and constraints inside each task. Then it requires re-engineering those workflows with AI capabilities, one-by-one, across the tasks, that make up the roles, that make up the functions, that make up the organization.

And it’s not slowing down. We are now entering the dawn of AI agents - systems that go beyond making predictions or generating new outputs - to doing things. As these agents carry out tasks on our behalf, we will begin to think more critically about how we do work, and this too will require a super-charged rethinking of workflows across the organization.

This is exceptionally difficult for legacy organizations. It requires cannibalizing the bureaucracy which has been built around human labor and non-AI systems for decades. And on top of the implementation complexity, you have protectionism around jobs, institutional process inertia, and other FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

In the meantime, the public markets are telling us where the power is accumulating. The five largest companies by market cap (NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon) play significant roles in the AI Economy today. When combined with Meta and Tesla, these seven companies, remarkably, represent a third of the entire index.

Whether you build/partner/buy for your AI strategy - or likely a combination of the three - deploying AI at scale is complex and capital-intensive. This may be part of why we saw reports last year that 95% of enterprise AI pilots are failing. If you deploy a narrow AI tool into a narrow slice of one workflow of one function, you won’t achieve enterprise scale outcomes immediately. And that assumes you have adoption and the outputs are trusted.

Will some companies make this shift effectively? Yes. Will many fail? I believe so.

This is why I think the future belongs to companies being built today, companies that are designing their foundations in an AI-native way, with AI embedded across the operating model, and building the picks-and-shovels to serve the new markets emerging.

Startups - like the portfolio companies in Serac Ventures - will be well poised to capitalize on these changes.