Brian O’Malley

You spent time as a partner at Battery.com.

at Excel, at Forerunner.

Today, those firms look very different than they were when you were there.

the game has changed and it's changed for each of those firms as well.

So it's, it's hard for me to even bucket the three of them together.

If you look, they all come from very strong research backgrounds.

Battery was originally founded out of the Yankee group, which is like a Gartner for people who don't, don't know it.

Uh,

Excel started with this Arthur Patterson prepared mind thesis type work.

And then Kirsten, who started Forerunner, had a background as an equity analyst.

And so all three firms, the similarity between them was really that there was this underlying thesis driven investing that evolved over time.

But if you look, if you fast forward to now and look at what's going on at those different entities, Battery, for example, has leaned much more heavily into the tech buyout space and been a very lucrative part of their business.

I think they're one of the few Boston powerhouse firms that didn't ultimately relocate to the West Coast.

And one of the reasons why is that they found this strategy interesting.

which has both been very successful for them as a firm.

It's highly repeatable, and it's also driven great results for LPs.

So Battery, in some ways, a lot of that business is playing a different game than the rest of Silicon Valley is playing.

Accela, on the other hand, is very much leaned into this multi-stage capital approach where they operate internationally.

They do the earliest of early seed deals.

They have a growth fund.