A shoeless Paul Martino opened the door to his imposing Doylestown home and led a visitor past the office where he keeps his hippo collection and then down into the basement to the poker table.
Slideshow
Paul who? He’s a Silicon Valley standout who came home to help Philly start-ups
That’s where this once-entrepreneurial whiz kid from Lansdale — now a pioneering investor in start-ups, known for his uncanny ability to see potential where others don’t — prefers to conduct all manner of business, not just games of badugi, a variant of draw poker.
Most remarkable about the next 80 minutes was that Martino, described by others as having seemingly endless energy, sat still. His lips were another story: If power speaking were a sport, Martino would be a medal contender.
A fast talker with a high-pitched voice who launched a business selling computer games while still a student at North Penn High School, Martino said he returned to the East Coast from the start-up heartland, Silicon Valley, in 2010 not just because he missed late-night hoagies from Wawa, but to start a family. He and his wife, Aarati, a senior engineer at Google, had always agreed they would.
But there was a business incentive, too: The move gave an East Coast presence to a unique venture fund that Martino and two others founded in San Francisco that year to address what they considered a serious funding gap for start-ups. Seven years later, Bullpen Capital – the name inspired by former Phillies relief pitcher Chad Durbin — has invested in about 50 companies and is poised to do a lot more after just raising $85 million.
Yet Martino, 42, a father of two, is still adjusting to his new role as investor rather than creator in the world of start-ups — though not because it’s populated with “flaming balls of risk,” as he put it.
“I still to this day get kind of aggravated when I get introduced as the managing partner of a venture fund,” he said. “I’m still a passionate entrepreneur, and I’m just going to happen to innovate on this thing called venture capital.”
And innovate he has, those in a largely uninspired industry say.
“The venture industry itself has never really innovated. This is probably the first innovative venture fund I’ve seen,” said Jim Lim, a managing partner in Greenspring Associates, a fund based in Maryland and Silicon Valley that was one of Bullpen’s first institutional investors. (Lim also grew up in Lansdale and went to North Penn, but did not know Martino, seven years his junior.)
Praise also comes from one of Philadelphia’s most accomplished serial entrepreneurs, a trailblazing venture capitalist in his own right: Josh Kopelman, who cofounded First Round Capital, a seed fund, in 2004 (and who is board chairman of PMN, which publishes the Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com).
Martino “was among the first in understanding the ripple effect to the rise in seed-stage capital,” Kopelman said.
The problem Martino identified?
Seed funding is the first million or two a startup manages to raise, but that amount often is not enough to keep fueling the start-up’s growth to what is the next fund-raising goal: Series A, which usually involves a minimum of $5 million.
Start-ups have to achieve certain progress in product or service development, including some sales, before qualifying for Series A.
So Martino saw opportunity to provide them with the kind of funding to help get them from the post-seed stage to qualifying for Series A. Those are the $1 million to $2 million investments Bullpen Capital makes.
Martino launched Bullpen, partly inspired, he said, by First Round Capital, which he considers “probably the most innovative thing that happened in venture…