Welcome to the Arena from ICR – Conversations with Today's Innovators & Business Leaders Chad Cardenas, Founder & CEO, The Syndicate Group – Connecting Capital: Scaling startups through strategic networking
Building a thriving business certainly has a lot to do with hard work, but it's just as much about having a strong network and leveraging those relationships. Today's guest has gathered incredible insights and connections in his long career to build a platform that facilitates these critical partnerships.
Today we sit down with Chad Cardenas, Founder and CEO of The Syndicate Group. The Syndicate Group is pioneering a new evolution of venture capital investing, helping startups scale faster by organizing exclusive investment access for strategics who commit capital, and support a company's go-to-market strategy.
With 25 years in the enterprise technology sector, Chad maintains a wealth of experience in sales, leadership, business transformation, innovation, distribution channels, investing and go-to-market strategies. He previously co-founded Trace3 where he served as President and Chief Innovation Officer studying macro trends and their effects in the IT industry. He helped build the tech reseller and integrator to 400 people and over $500 million in revenue before a private equity event in 2017.
The Syndicate Group was born out of these experiences based on the realization that startup founders need more than just capital. They need partners who can deliver economies of scale by selling or buying the startups, products, and services.
The Syndicate Group aggregates those partners, and gives them skin in the game with pre-IPO investment access. The company's investment portfolio includes high flyers such as AppDynamics, CrowdStrike, Nutanix, Abnormal Security, and Cohesity, where Chad played a key role in driving an aggregate market value of over $30 billion.
Highlights:
- How TSG developed their unique business model (3:30)
- How The Syndicate Group's network opportunities are valuable to businesses (5:39)
- Chad describes the relationship between TSG and a startup in their network (7:53)
- Chad explains what came first: building syndicate or attracting deal flow (11:52)
- How TSG attracted initial investors to their business (13:15)
- How The Syndicate Group vets their potential investment companies (14:39)
- More about the specific sectors and business TSG focuses their work on (16:21)
- How TSG manages cap tables with startups that have numerous investors (17:53)
- Why investors are attracted to TSG's deal flow (19:52)
- How TSG maintains scaling and growth despite the complexity of the business (21:08)
- The growth and potential of TSG's business model and unique software platform (23:27)
- Chad describes the state of competition in the field (24:21)
- Chad explains the effects of a choppy economy and social climate on business in the VC sector (25:30)
- Up and coming companies in the Syndicate Group portfolio (27:27)
- Future pursuits and goals (28:42)
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If you have questions about the show, or have a topic in mind you'd like discussed in future episodes, email our producer, marion@lowerstreet.co.