This year we hosted 20 events in 12 cities. 1,600+ people showed up!

If you only measured events by checks written this year, they’d look small. Only 3 of our 43 investments came directly from one. But we don’t measure them on a one-year clock. We think the long-term return is exponential.

The person we meet at a happy hour this year might be the founder who calls us first three years from now.

We run multiple types of events; all focused on recruiting exceptional talent

The first is Roots Weekend, which used to be Missouri Startup Weekend. It’s a weekend where people actually build. We put domain experts and business people in a room with engineers and give them what they need to start a company. Some of those teams keep going. The ones that don’t still show us who can build and who can sell in that city.

The second is Roots networking or industry events. These gather people around a shared theme, usually where they're from or an industry. An example is Midwest roots, wherever they live now, or a background in construction. Some are founders. Plenty are engineers, operators, domain experts, and future co-founders who haven't quit their jobs yet.

The third is unannounced but will be along the lines of an innovation summit focused on connecting founders from across the nation to customers in the middle of the country.

It’s a long-tail game. We're building a network of people who will think of Redbud when they're ready to start, long before they have a deck.

The best deal flow starts years before the pitch.

We pick cities based on four things:

• Where there’s an outsized amount of talent compared to the capital being invested there.

• Where we’ve already had success.

• Where we already have entrepreneurs.

• Where we have strong partners on the ground.

Every Roots event is built around a shared root, either geography or industry. 

A Roots event in San Francisco or New York pulls in people who share a hometown, a school, or an industry, wherever they live now. Some may already be building. Others will start a company in a few years, or hire their first engineers out of that room. Showing up in person now is how we’re the first call when they do.

What we get out of it: The obvious return is the occasional investment. The bigger one is everything that flows from being the people who threw the event.

We meet technical talent our portfolio companies end up hiring. We meet domain experts who become the co-founder a solo founder was missing. We meet the investors and enterprise partners who later show up in a portfolio company's round or customer list.

Outbound gets you a meeting, but we want to be the first call when talented people are start tinkering with ideas

The problem is that events are tough to scale with a lean team. There are only so many cities our team can fly to in a year.

So we built our own infrastructure. Roots is the event infrastructure and social network underneath every event we run. It connects founders, talent, investors, and enterprises through the roots they share, online and in person. An AI research engine suggests who to meet and why, so the connections keep going after the event ends.

Owning the infrastructure changes the math. We don’t have to be in every city to have a presence there. If this works, Roots can run events and make introductions wherever our network lives, and we can be everywhere at once.

The investments we make three years from now start at the events we run this year.