Investing Philosophy

At SAGIAN Equity we prioritize our diligence efforts in the following order:

We look for companies that are participating in markets that have growth rates of 10% or greater or a company that is taking share in markets growing mid-upper single digits.  We expect our portfolio companies to understand their market and when competing for share we expect our companies to know who they are taking share from and why they win.

All early stage companies will encounter unexpected challenges and will likely require one or more changes to the company’s proposed business model (‘pivot’).  We look for leadership teams that have the depth to recognize when these changes are necessary and have the breadth to implement the changes without significant interruption.  We also expect leadership to be willing to learn and readily accept coaching/feedback from customers, advisors, and boards.

The company must have a known and validated value proposition for the product/solution – by market segment if that is applicable.  For companies whose value is based on differentiated technology, there must be IP sufficient to protect the value proposition from competitive solutions.

Team

The SAGIAN Equity team has a long history of entrepreneurship, having founded multiple technology oriented companies with successful exits and a few failures.  In addition, our team has extensive experience operating in larger multi-national organizations. This breadth of experience gives us insight into the challenges faced by early stage companies but also allows us to bring operational expertise when needed.

Scott is an accomplished business executive with extensive experience in all functions of business operations. Early in his career Scott founded multiple businesses and led them to successful exits. More recently he was an executive officer of a public company with responsibility for a portfolio of global businesses representing nearly $2BB in revenue. Throughout his career Scott has had accountability for all aspects of business operations. Scott has helped create and grow businesses through innovation and M&A activity and has extensive experience with integration of companies ranging from $5M to $600M in revenue.  Scott graduated from Butler University with degrees in chemistry & computer science and started his career at Dow Chemical.  Since the earliest days in his career Scott has consistently been part of high performing growth oriented businesses, whether entrepreneurial start-ups or driving intrapreneurship in a larger organization.

Tim is a serial entrepreneur who has also experienced extensive success in large public companies. Tim’s passion is innovation and he has founded numerous high-technology companies in a variety of markets with multiple successful exits. He is also an intrapreneur, having led both a global engineering development organization as well as a global science and engineering research and development organization. In those roles, Tim was responsible for the development and launch of dozens of new products in regulated and research markets leading to > $1B in cumulative revenue and often resulting in market leading positions. In addition, Tim has extensive experience driving value creation through acquisitions, leading technical due-diligence efforts and integrating both acquired product lines and entire businesses into companies he founded and as an executive within a Fortune 500 company. These experiences, plus his experiences creating and managing organizational structures for manufacturing operations, product development and quality systems, provide Tim with an intimate understanding of the impact of corporate structure and culture on innovation. Tim is a Chemical Engineer from the University of California at Berkeley, started his career at Eastman Kodak and has spent 35 years building and optimizing innovative organizations. These experiences make Tim uniquely capable in both intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial environments.