B Capital Group’s Mike Fernandez on What Founders Need To Know as Their Companies Grow

Minnie Ingersoll
Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at TenOneTen and host of the LA Venture podcast. Prior to TenOneTen, Minnie was the COO and co-founder of $100M+ Shift.com, an online marketplace for used cars. Minnie started her career as an early product manager at Google. Minnie studied Computer Science at Stanford and has an MBA from HBS. She recently moved back to L.A. after 20+ years in the Bay Area and is excited to be a part of the growing tech ecosystem of Southern California. In her space time, Minnie surfs baby waves and raises baby people.
B Capital Group’s Mike Fernandez
Courtesy of Mike Fernandez

On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, the B Capital Group’s Mike Fernandez discusses investing in growth-stage companies and the current state of the later stage private markets.

Fernandez joined B Capital the year it started in 2015. It now has 150 employees and $6.5 billion assets under management. B Capital’s growth team primarily focuses on Series B all the way through pre-IPO funding rounds, writing checks of anywhere from $10M to $100M for growth-stage companies.


A native Angeleno, Fernandez said he went to business school with a hunch that L.A. could become the next big region for tech. His hypothesis, he said, was that the region, which had been on par with the Bay Area in the ‘80s and ‘90s, stumbled during and failed to recover from the dot.com era. Still, he felt there was plenty of opportunity.

“When I was looking around Southern California in the early 2000s, I really wasn't satisfied with the number of interesting companies that I was seeing, or the amount of capital that was available,” he said. “There were a number of industries—including aerospace, including transportation logistics—where Los Angeles should be building the best companies in the country—and really the world.”

Now, Fernandez focuses on horizontal enterprise software—such as cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity—and industrial transportation.

As the market began to turn earlier this year, Fernandez said many companies were still bringing in money. Only recently has he seen a noticeable decrease in the velocity of deals. Still, he said the cybersecurity industry has remained mostly unscathed.

“For those sectors that have more of an infrastructure bent to them, and where you're seeing still top-tier growth rates, top-tier net retention, some of those companies are still able to achieve 15 times forward revenue multiples,” he said.

While there’s plenty of advice for founders building their companies early on, he said there are fewer resources for those looking for insight on how to expand their companies. Understanding that raising funds is more metric-driven than story-driven at the growth stage is key for founders to entice more investors.

In addition to having a strong handle on business metrics, as they grow, companies have to become better at managing risk, and building predictability into their growth profiles, he said. Shifting the risk profile of a business can ensure its longevity.

“Something that I think founders need to appreciate is that the early days of, ‘hey, we're gonna go really fast and we'll just figure it out along the way’ needs to eventually turn into, ‘we're gonna grow by X amount, and this is exactly how we're going to do that’ and be able to communicate that to investors,” he said.

Social and Engagement Editor Andria Moore contributed to this post

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The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

The Impact of Authentic Storytelling. LA Latino/a Founders and Funders Tell All
Decerry Donato

As one of the most diverse cities in the world, Los Angeles is home to almost 5 million people who identify as Hispanic or Latinx. Yet, many feel they still lack representation in the city’s tech space.

“I can safely say that last year’s LA tech week hosted all of the events on the west side, and very few were focused on telling Latino and Latina entrepreneurial stories,” said Valeria Martinez, investor at VamosVentures. “We wanted to change that this year.”

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LA Tech Week Day 3: Social Highlights
Evan Xie

L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.

Here's what people are saying about day three of L.A. Tech Week on social:

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LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys

Decerry Donato

Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.

LA Tech Week: Female Founders Provide Insights Into Their Startup Journeys
Decerry Donato

Women remain a minority among startup founders. According to Pitchbook, even though women-led startups in the United States received a record $20.8 billion in funding during the first half of 2022, U.S. companies with one or more female founders received less than 20% of total venture funding in 2022. U.S. companies solely led by female founders received less than 2% of the total funding.

The panel, titled Female Founders: Planning, Pivoting, Profiting, was moderated by NYU law professor Shivani Honwad and featured Anjali Kundra, co-founder of bar inventory software Partender; Montré Moore, co-founder of the Black-owned beauty startup AMP Beauty LA; Mia Pokriefka, co-founder and CEO of the interactive social media tool Huxly; and Sunny Wu, founder and CEO of fashion company LE ORA.

The panelists shared their advice and insights on starting and growing a business as a woman. They all acknowledged feeling pressure to not appear weak among peers, especially as a female founder. But this added weight only causes more stress that may lead to burnout.

“The mental health aspect of being a founder should not be overshadowed,” said Kundra, who realized this during the early stages of building her company with her brother..

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Kundra was surrounded by the startup culture where, “everyone is crushing it!” But she said that no one really opened up about the challenges of starting your own company. .

“Once you grow up as a founder in that environment, it's pretty toxic,” Kundra said. “I felt like I really wanted to be open and be able to go to our investors and tell them about challenges because businesses go up and down, markets go up and down and no company is perfect.”

Honwad, who advocates for women’s rights, emphasized the value of aligning yourself with people with similar values in the tech ecosystem. “[Those people] can make your life better not just from an investment and money standpoint, but also a personal standpoint, because life happens,” she said.

Moore, who unexpectedly lost one of her co-founders at AMP Beauty, said that entrepreneurs “really have to learn how to adapt to [their] circumstances.”

“She was young, healthy, vibrant and we've been sorority sisters and friends over the past decade,” she said about her co-founder Phyllicia Phillips, who passed away in February. “So it was just one of those moments where you have to take a pause.”

Moore said this experience forced her to ask for help, which many founders hesitate to do. She encouraged the audience to try and share their issues out loud with their teams because there are always people who will offer help. When Moore shared her concerns with her investors, they jumped in to support her in ways she didn’t think was possible.

Kundra said that while it is important to have a support group and listen to mentors, it is very important for entrepreneurs to follow their own thinking and pick and choose what they want to implement within their strategy. “At the end of the day, you really have to own your own decisions,” she said.

Kundra also said that while it is easy to turn to your colleagues and competitors and do what they are doing, you shouldn’t always follow them because every business is different.

“When I was in the heat of it, I kind of became [a part of] this echo chamber and that was really challenging for us,” Kundra added, “but we were able to move beyond it and figure out what worked for us [as a company] and we're still on a journey. You're always going to be figuring it out, so just know you're not alone.”

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