Growing our Portfolio through Marketing

Marketing assistance is provided by Morgenthaler Ventures’ Ching Wu and Rip Empson for all IT portfolio companies –  across all active funds. We sometimes spend more time at the offices of our portfolio companies than at our own offices. We are lucky to be regarded as an extension of our startups’ marketing teams. How do we help? We network our portfolio companies. Help them with positioning. Get them press. And build or supplement their events.

Portfolio Company Mixers

We know that venture is a service business. So we’ve been on a mission to help our portfolio companies with PR, recruiting and – perhaps more importantly – community building. Below you’ll find some highlights from a few of the community-oriented “mixers” we’ve held since Fall 2013.

Our “Marketing Mixer” last October was particularly well attended and featured marketing heads from each of our portfolio companies, who could be found networking with a slew of PR, design and social media agencies. Separately, CEOs got a chance to mingle with the press at our “CEO-Press Mixer” in March and attend our private CEO-only dinner, where they could let their hair down and talk candidly amongst fellow CEOs.

Not pictured below is a “Recruiting Mixer” which we organized in October 2013. It attracted roughly 100 people, including recruiting managers across engineering, biz dev, product, and marketing from our portfolio companies– as well as, recruiting agencies and consultants, and star students from Stanford and UC Berkeley who were interested in internships and jobs at startups. You might say it was a fun, low-key job fair.

Helping our Portfolio through Press

We also embed ourselves at portfolio companies to help them with PR – everything from press tours, bylines, new product launches to new funding announcements such as the below:

Doximity Series C Press Coverage

April 29, 2014

Convo’s New Product

December 12, 2013

NuoDB’s Strategic Investment

Feb 23, 2014

Supporting our Companies through Events

We have organized four “DC to VC: Health IT” conferences to drum up support for our health IT companies. Coverage of our events is below.

We have also served as presentation coach for all of Evernote’s DevCup conferences starting in 2011.