Investor and technology executive Heather Redman has a bold plan for Flying Fish Partners, the new venture fund that she has launched with two other industry vets.
“I often joke that the Flying Fish business plan is basically to sit on the steps of one or more Amazon buildings, trip people and hand them checks,” she said. “It’s sort of that simple, in a way.”
Redman may joke, but she takes the business of making Seattle an entrepreneurial haven very seriously. She and the other co-founders of Flying Fish Partners, Geoff Harris and Frank Chang, are trying to change the game for Seattle entrepreneurs by taking on what they see as the biggest bottleneck for companies: home-grown capital.
Flying Fish is talking publicly about its plans for the first time this week. The fund has been operating in stealth mode, although the existence of Flying Fish first surfaced last month. Redman sat down with GeekWire editors Todd Bishop and John Cook to dive into the details of Seattle’s investment scene and the vision for Flying Fish on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast.
Redman said she and her co-founders — Harris, a former Microsoft exec and machine learning researcher; and Chang, a former Microsoft project manager and Amazon exec — have been mulling the idea of starting their own firm for a while.
They are all involved investors who love the Seattle scene but were “continually frustrated with what we saw as a lack of organized, aggressive capital that was accessible to the startup companies in our ecosystem,” Redman said.
She echoed the frustrations of many in the tech community who have seen promising startups going to Silicon Valley for their early funding. To keep talent and funds in Seattle, she said, local VCs need to invest in local companies.
The trio decided to take the plunge and found Flying Fish late last year. Redman said they plan to raise $80 million to put into early-stage Seattle companies, with an eye towards several pain points they have…