Tomorrow’s Innovation, Today’s Work at Safeguard
Posted by | January 10, 2014
Smart money–capital that flows to the greatest and highest purpose–is always predicated on opportunities of the future, tomorrow’s trends that are difficult to decipher in today’s chaos.
Ever since our founding in 1953, Safeguard has had the uncanny ability to seek out opportunity–to find the next big ‘thing’ and then create value through a unique blend of capital and management expertise deployed without arbitrary deadlines.
In a services world, success is primarily determined by the company you keep, and the skills and knowledge those partners bring to the equation. To enhance our success, Safeguard maintains a world-class advisory board comprised of industry experts with real-world operating experience.
Our advisory board members here at Safeguard have mastered the art and science of discerning trends and patterns that will drive future growth–and harnessing that discernment to help Safeguard uncover opportunities and build value.
Over the next few weeks, we will showcase the voices of a number of our advisory board members–putting focus on their perspectives about what we feel are the most compelling opportunities in our economy–areas in which Safeguard has already deployed capital.
Opportunities evolve over time–this we know is true. But one thing that won’t change at Safeguard is the natural advantage we hold over traditional venture capital firms. As a publicly traded holding company, we have a strong balance sheet, financial strength, flexibility and liquidity.
Safeguard places no fuse on the lifecycle of our partnership with a company–unlike typical VCs, which manage investments of a specified duration, limiting their ability to exit at the point of optimal value.
We see this as a cornerstone to our continued ability to attract high-value partner companies that can best benefit from our patient capital and management and operational expertise.
It is this feature of our model that makes an incredible difference to entrepreneurs, many of whom have invested everything in their dream to build and then leverage the most possible value from their life’s work.
We closely align with the true entrepreneurial spirit of great emerging companies and differentiate ourselves from other, simpler, but less constructive sources of capital.
At the end of the day, success is not achieved by solely identifying the right opportunities. Success is taking that one step further–it’s cultivating opportunities by truly providing entrepreneurs with the resources they need.
