View from the Office

Erica Wenger 🏕️and I met for breakfast at Merriweather Coffee + Kitchen in the West Village. She recommends the Big Brekkie, which is an order of soft-scrambled eggs on toasted sourdough with avocado, roasted tomatoes, petit salad and bacon.

Erica is the founder of Park Rangers Capital 🏕️, a new venture firm that invests in pre-seed and seed software startups that focus on leveraging community to build their businesses. An example would be Beehiiv, Tyler Denk’s startup which I use to publish my newsletter.

She’s wrapping up raising money for her first fund. She expects to reach the pre-set limit of 249 investors for funds of less than $10 million.

Erica attributes her success to an enthusiasm for “cold outreach.” She said she tries to connect with people open to consider a new perspective.

She describes her investment philosophy as searching for “elephants, not unicorns.” As she wrote on her blog: “Where a unicorn is fixated on product-market fit, the elephant realizes that’s only part of a bigger endeavor: building a movement, with story at its center.”

Companies she would describe as elephants include: Hugging Face, beehiiv, Bluesky, The Browser Company, Humans Anonymous, GitHub, Public, Replit, Notus, Gumroad, Brex, buildspace, Shopify, Sudowrite, The Juggernaut, Earlybird,

Erica posts actively on social media and hosts a podcast, which is in its fourth season.

You can reach her via LinkedIn or Twitter or DM me if you want a warm intro.

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