Four years after founding and bootstrapping Mucker Capital, we are pleased to announce the close of a new $45 million fund, Mucker III. This is our third fund, which might make us seem like grumpy, rich, old VCs. In reality, we are scrappy founders, just like the entrepreneurs we serve. To use a startup fundraising analogy, our first fund was a small friends and family round; our second fund was a seed round that allowed us to validate the core hypotheses of our business; and Mucker III is our Series A.
Just as entrepreneurs should aspire to raise capital from value-added, “smart money” investors, we, too, have focused on partnering with committed, long-term, institutional limited partners (LPs). With a well-capitalized fund, great LPs, and a solid portfolio, we are privileged to continue serving exceptional entrepreneurs.
Thomas Edison said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” We’ve been doing Internet stuff our whole careers, since the graphical web became a mass-market, commercial medium in the 1990s. We’ve ridden the ups and downs of economic cycles. We’ve written code, launched products, acquired users, managed P&Ls, and lost sleep over making payroll. We’ve been on founding teams and worked from entry level through executive management. And we aren’t afraid to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty alongside the founders in our portfolio.
Every week, we speak with entrepreneurs who feel like they have solid metrics and growth, but they see other founders effortlessly raise millions of dollars with nothing more than an impressive PowerPoint deck. We understand. There are plenty of VCs with fancier resumes, more Twitter followers, and famous friends, who raise lots (and lots) of capital in a matter of weeks. For better or worse, we are not those guys.
We keep our heads down and obsess over how we can help entrepreneurs build great businesses. We are consumed with generating great returns for our limited partners. We are the blue collar VCs that keep showing up every morning to get after it. How can we tell founders to stay lean, keep focused on their customers, and keep burn rates low if we cannot walk the talk and eat our own dog food? Knowing the relentless entrepreneurs we meet every day, we would be ashamed to do anything less.
Mucker III is for those quiet but indomitable entrepreneurs. The underdogs. The dogged visionaries. The crazy ones. The ones who spend more time with their customers than on Twitter. The ones who would rather hire a sales guy than spend money on flavored morning lattes. They are not afraid of changing the world one brick at a time. They don’t ask who they want to become, but rather what they want to change. The macroeconomic conditions of 2000, 2008 or even 2016 — none of that matters to them. This is the path they have chosen, and they would be here with or without the VCs, the parties, the conferences, the blog posts, and the unicorns. Mucker is for them.
