Brian Smiga: Hi, this is Brian Smiga, co-founding partner at Alpha Partners. Alpha Partners is the early VCs pro-rata growth fund. We work with over a thousand early-stage VCs to monetize their pro-rata, or their investment rights in their best companies, when they lack capital. With me today is one of our oldest friends, of Steve Broman and myself, David Horowitz—better known as Touchdown Ventures, but now Cerity Venture Partners, a really exciting fund that he’s going to tell you about right now. Welcome, David.
David Horowitz: Hey Brian, thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Brian Smiga: Yeah. David, I think you really are a pioneer, and you’ve been a pioneer several times over. So let’s go back to the beginning now. First of all, you’re a University of Michigan grad. I saw the football on your shelf behind you and I will say this: my career has crossed with many UM grads. Unlike any other major large university—I don’t know if you guys over-index on private equity and venture or on tremendous entrepreneurs—but everyone from you to several hires that I’ve worked with in my life to Ben Sun on the Midas list—there’s a wonderful cohort from the University of Michigan. How do you explain that success?
David Horowitz: It must be the great professors that teach venture capital and private equity there that are training their workforce now. (Self-promotion, because that’s my current role.) I’m actually on faculty there as a lecturer, teaching venture capital—predominantly undergraduate students, although I do a few other things. But no, it’s just a great university, great business school, great focus on venture and private equity. Also, it’s a large school, so we do graduate a lot of people. So the probabilities of having more alumni are higher. But we’re also a good community, and we like to attract and help each other with recruiting, career development opportunities, and things like that as well.
Brian Smiga: But let’s roll back the clock. You were an accounting major. And after a little bit of time on Wall Street, within two or three years of your graduation, you got into venture. Tell us that story. How did you make that transition? And you’ve been an innovator in venture ever since.
David Horowitz: Yeah, so when I was in investment banking—that was during the dot-com era, like the 1998 to 2000 time period. If you added the letters “.com” to the back of your company name, you could go public. So that was when I started. That’s when I started getting interested in venture capital, because I saw all these venture capital investors funding and generating returns.
Also, when I was in investment banking, I did a lot of work with the cable industry. That was actually where I focused. So I had clients like Cablevision, Comcast, Charter—Charter went public during that period of time. So I had this interest in venture capital, I had this expertise in the cable industry. And the third leg of the stool is my wife at the time was doing graduate school in Philadelphia. So every possible sign led to Comcast. Comcast was starting a venture capital division in that time period, and right place at the right time—I was the first person that Comcast hired. So that’s how I got into venture capital—how I really got into corporate venture capital.
And I’ve really been in both industries since 2000. I had the pleasure of working directly for one of the founders of Comcast, Julian Brodsky, and that’s obviously an amazing person. Not only was he the founder, longtime CFO, head of M&A for Comcast, but also really a pioneer in corporate venture. Comcast didn’t really need to have a venture fund at that period of time, but Julian said, “This internet thing is coming, it’s happening. A lot of new opportunities—maybe threats—are going to be coming to Comcast, and let’s go put this group together to go invest and find those opportunities.” So that’s how I got into the venture and corporate venture business.
I owe a lot to the folks at Comcast—both Julian, another gentleman Sam Schwartz who still works at Comcast, Louis Toth is another person I worked closely with, and several others.
Brian Smiga: Wow, what a great training ground. And Comcast became an iconic corporate venture capital firm. Very, very broadly invested. You were there over a decade, and then you pioneered a little bit at Genacast, and then of course, you started Touchdown from scratch. So there’s got to be something in the name. Touchdown Ventures—I know you’re now Cerity—but what was in the name Touchdown? And does it have a connection?
David Horowitz: It does not. When I started iterating on this idea back in late 2013, early 2014—started iterating on this idea of: can we start a firm based on the success of Comcast Ventures that could help corporations get in and help them professionally manage corporate venture capital funds? When you’re going out and you’re going and talking to corporations, you’re going to have more success if pitching it sounds like you’re really doing this. So we needed a temporary name, and Touchdown Ventures was available. I’m a big sports fan. I never really expected it to be the permanent name of the firm. But one thing led to another, people liked it, and what was temporary became permanent.
The only connection—if you go back and look at our old logo—the colors were maize and blue, which are the Michigan colors. But it was a good name. People—we built good credibility. Sometimes people were confused that we were sports investors, which—we did some sports, but we weren’t exclusively sports. We were really about corporate venture, third-party management.
And we did that business for about 10 years. Actually, it’s a pretty interesting story—we incorporated Touchdown Ventures on July 1st, 2014. You can’t make this up. Sometimes life works this way. Exactly 10 years later, on July 1st, 2024, we signed our letter of intent to move forward with the merger with Cerity. More coincidence than anything, but I thought it was a pretty fascinating coincidence.
Brian Smiga: I love that. We’d like to say—we entrepreneurs, and even we pioneer VCs—we make our own luck. I remember sitting down with you shortly after that in 2014 when Alpha was simply me and Steve Broman, and you must have had a very small team. What was it like in the first year?
David Horowitz: It was really tough. I expected it to be easier, because I thought we had great credibility given the background of Comcast. But this was a new model, Brian. No one else had really done this third-party corporate venture model. And what I realized is we really had to evangelize a new model. Before, it was either you start a corporate venture group by hiring your own team or you don’t do it at all. And we were creating a third option, which is: do it with a third-party partner.
About two years into it is really when things changed for us. Back in June of 2016—so we’re about two years into Touchdown—we ended up signing a very meaningful relationship with Kellogg’s, the big food and cereal company that everybody knows from Battle Creek, Michigan. That really put us on the map. We got a great amount of press. TechCrunch wrote a great article—obviously a great publication in the tech ecosystem. That really put us on the map. You could really point to that day as an inflection point. Other corporations saw that news—we were presenting and promoting that we were working with Kellogg’s, since that was public information.
And they said, “Okay, if it’s good enough for Kellogg’s—this brand that’s been around since 1894—it’s probably good enough for me.” That really led us to grow the firm very organically from 2016 through the merger with Cerity, which closed about a year ago now, in September of 2024.
Brian Smiga: Now our theme is driving alpha, or how do we drive outperformance? So let’s take each audience in turn. For a great wealth management firm like Cerity and their clients—family offices, institutions, pension funds, insurance companies, and so forth—what’s in it for them, both with Touchdown and with corporate venture capital writ large, to get outperforming returns?
David Horowitz: It’s a great question. We just have world-class expertise here at Cerity Partners, and that’s not the part of the business that I work in. I’m still—we’ve effectively retired the name Touchdown, now that we’re part of Cerity. So we’re now Cerity Partners Ventures, but it really is the legacy Touchdown business, just under a new name. We’re still doing the corporate venture, third-party advisory and management work that we’ve been doing since 2014.
But what’s been interesting, because I’m relatively new to the wealth management space, is I’ve had the opportunity to meet with several of my partners. These are some of the world-class experts on everything from trust and estate planning to tax strategies. We have a phenomenal team on private markets. We have a team that we call OCIO that manages investments for foundations and endowments. We have a lot of experience working with world-class private equity fund managers, venture capital fund managers, real estate fund managers, etc.
All those are opportunities that Cerity can bring to its clients. One of the other things that I’ve learned about Cerity Partners is—we’re independent. We’re not out there like other groups being commissioned or trying to sell our own mutual fund or other investment products. We really are truly independent, and we’re trying to bring the best of what’s out there in the world. I think clients really appreciate that and want that independent, fiduciary expert. That’s really what Cerity Partners brings to the table—and just excellent client service in terms of how we work with our clients as well.
Brian Smiga: When you think about what Cerity saw in you—I don’t know how the conversation began. Maybe, how did the conversation begin, and then how did they fit corporate venture capital into their mix? Because you’re now a tool in their toolbelt. Just curious how that fit came together.
David Horowitz: Yeah, Cerity is consistently looking for interesting financial services firms that it can merge into the platform. That’s what Cerity has been doing since its inception in the early 2010s. We got to know another group at Cerity—used to be called a legacy firm called Permit Capital—that merged with Cerity a couple of years ago. They’re based in the Philadelphia area. We became very close with the principals there—Adam Landau, Mimi Drake, Matt Taylor, a couple of other folks on the team.
When they completed their merger with Cerity, we got to know Cerity. We eventually met the CEO of Cerity and some of the other leaders. We talked about what we could do together that was better than what we could do on our own. And we discovered a number of different opportunities where we could help each other grow.
We work with a lot of entrepreneurs—and knock on wood, but we hope all of our entrepreneurs are going to generate amazing wealth. They’re going to need experts to be able to come in and manage that wealth. That’s great proprietary client sourcing opportunities for Cerity.
Vice versa, Cerity works with a lot of corporations, and some of those corporations may have a need for the services that we provide on the corporate venture side. So our wealth management advisors and partners may have clients that are CEOs or board members, and they have those relationships.
We’re a year into it, and we’re really starting to see a lot of mutual value creation where these two groups are better together than they are apart. We have a whole list of strategic growth areas that we’re focusing on.
The other thing for us—as Touchdown—we really, I would say in being fair, we overinvested on our team on what you would call the venture capital investment side. We probably underinvested—we had some great people—on the back office and operations side. We knew if we were going to continue to scale—at the time we merged, Touchdown was managing about 20 corporate venture funds. We had about a billion and a half of funds under management, and we had about 50-plus people on the team.
We knew we were going to have to hire and scale on the operations side. We would eventually need to bring legal in-house, HR in-house, finance in-house. I was actually—believe it or not—doing all of the finance of the entire firm from inception to merger, which is crazy. The fact that Cerity can provide all that from a shared services perspective—because we have those world-class experts—that was very attractive to us. It really solved the problem we had as we were thinking about how we were going to scale the Touchdown business if we stayed independent.
Brian Smiga: I think there’s tremendous augmentation of what you already do that lets you focus—your team—on what you do best. Fantastic. I see the synergy on the two sides between customers and wealth. What is it that other venture capitalists need to know—that they don’t know—about corporate venture capital?
David Horowitz: People think about the term “corporate venture capital,” especially that last word—capital. There’s this perspective that corporate venture capital is just another source of investment. And it is—but it’s more than that. And that’s the point.
A corporate venture capital group can be a phenomenal gateway into the corporation. It could be a gateway to a commercial relationship, a partnership, a marketing relationship. It could just be a gateway to getting feedback. As you know, especially for early-stage companies—or even later-stage companies entering a new market—the best gift you can get is feedback on whether the market is interested in your product or not.
How many companies have you seen go out of business because they didn’t do that work around testing the market, understanding if there was a need, whether the price point was right, and whether the market size was big enough? Those are all things that a corporate VC—I’d say it’s almost a fiduciary responsibility—it’s malpractice if a corporate venture capital investor is not working with that startup and giving them that level of feedback and figuring out whether there’s a bigger fit.
Those are all things—even as a third party—that we do. We have counterparts within the corporations we work with that are helping us, taking a lot of the ideas that we’re sourcing or diligencing. That’s a big part of what really differentiates an institutional venture capitalist from a corporate venture capitalist.
Brian Smiga: Great. So when early-stage VCs think about inviting you—which is a basket of corporate venture capital funds—to the table for the next round, or founders think about calling you, what should be top of mind?
David Horowitz: I think it’s some of the same things I just mentioned. We can help with potentially a corporate relationship, a commercial relationship. Our team has really deep domain experience. When we’re working in the food sector—whether it’s with Kellogg’s or another corporation—our team understands all the players, all the trends. We understand how co-packing works, how food is manufactured, food supply chains.
There’s a level of depth that not necessarily other investors have. That’s something entrepreneurs usually want—somebody that understands their business and can help them grow it. And we give them room to operate. We’re not trying to be in their face, like any good capital firm.
Brian Smiga: So now let’s come down to David Horowitz and his team—who you’ve trained. How do you characterize your investment thesis, and what should founders know about your thesis and your edge when they come to you?
David Horowitz: Our edge really is these corporate relationships. It helps us in everything we do—whether it’s attracting startup deal flow, being able to do better diligence, or just getting into deals.
We’ve had entrepreneurs say, “I would prefer to work with you and the corporation you represent, because that’s a better investor to complement my existing institutional investors.” So we see that a lot.
We help in any area we can post-investment. But we’re going to spend the most time on business development and corporate relationship building, because that’s where we have the relationships.
That doesn’t mean we can’t help with recruiting, or analyzing their option pool, or refereeing an employee conflict. We certainly have the skill set to do all that. But we’re ultra-focused on facilitating commercial relationships.
We track how many we do. Across Cerity Partners Ventures—formerly Touchdown—we might do 30 or 40 investments a year. We operate at scale, so we do more investments than a typical VC firm. But we’ll do double or triple that number in facilitated commercial relationships.
Why? Because we can do a commercial relationship even if we don’t invest. That’s part of the value we bring to our corporate partners.
Brian Smiga: Wow, yeah. It’s a two-for or a three-for, talking to you—it could result in a commercial relationship as well as an investment.
David Horowitz: I’ll tell you one other thing, Brian. We don’t push it, but we have had success where multiple corporations invested in the same company. The corporations also did commercial deals with that company. That’s the multiplier effect. When you talk to us, you’re tapping into a broader network.
There’s no guarantee—we don’t promise anything—but if a company is suitable for more than one corporate partner, we push hard to make that happen. That’s a unique edge in the venture ecosystem.
Brian Smiga: Now, let’s talk about risk. At Alpha, we like to say we do “de-risked venture” for family offices and institutions and high-net-worth individuals because we enter at the growth stage. We look at many factors including the capital syndicate, new capital coming into the company, the customer set, customer economics, competition, and so forth. By grading companies in this way, we have a high success rate. I would imagine that working with corporate venture capital, there’s less risk as well. Could you describe how you think about risk?
David Horowitz: Yeah. I think that we will take risk, but it’s usually more execution risk than anything. We’re going to have whoever our corporate partner is in that industry help us evaluate whether the technology is ready for primetime. We’re going to do our own analysis on the size of the market and the competitive landscape, because generally we know those spaces well.
We feel we’re taking less risk than somebody who doesn’t know that area. Like any good venture capital investor, we’re still taking execution risk—there’s no such thing as not doing that. But we try to find those opportunities where we think we have the right team, we’re in the right market, we think this is going to be the winner when we analyze the competitive landscape. We think the technology risk is off the table, and while we believe in the team, we just want to bet on the execution risk. Those are the types of opportunities we look for.
And what’s interesting about our model—some people will say that doesn’t happen in earlier-stage venture—but we think because of the things that we do, we can de-risk earlier-stage venture. We will play at the later stages as well.
Part of our thesis when working with these corporations is to be a little bit more stage-agnostic. That may be where we’re different from Alpha, where I know you guys are more growth-stage investors. We will go earlier stage. We have done some pre-revenue investments. It’s a little bit dependent on each corporate because each of these corporate funds is managed separately—they all have different investment strategies, theses, and focuses.
But generally, on average, we will take some early-stage risk if we can get comfortable just taking the execution risk I mentioned.
Brian Smiga: Scenario: a founder is looking at your website and sees the corporations where you’re running their venture capital arm. They could be pre-revenue, early-stage, growth-stage. They see there’s a match. They know that talking to you, they’re going to get intelligence, product feedback, business feedback—and maybe a commercial relationship as well as an investment. How should they approach you? What do you need to hear from them?
David Horowitz: Like anybody, we get a lot of unsolicited mail—cold emails. It’s hard given the volume to process everything. We do have a process in place to review those, but I’d be lying if I said we catch everything.
We love referrals that come from our network. If Brian sends me a referral, we’re going to take it seriously because we have a longstanding relationship. We know you’ve evaluated it and done some level of diligence, and you believe it’s a good company.
It doesn’t have to be from a VC—we do get a lot from VCs—but we also get referrals from our portfolio companies, from corporate executives, and now from Cerity Partners folks. Cerity might be managing wealth for an entrepreneur, and that’s a warm referral too.
Brian Smiga: Very, very clear. Like Alpha, we source primarily from early-stage VCs, or we work backwards from great companies to the early-stage VCs on the cap table—that’s kind of our go-to. And it sounds like you have a broad set of relationships ranging from Cerity, its corporate partners, your corporate partners, and the venture capital community.
So now that you’ve been freed up a little bit, David—you’ve got some resources to run the back office and HR—what’s next for you and for your firm? Where do you go next?
David Horowitz: We’re really focused on continuing to grow this platform. We still think we’re in the early days of corporate venture. This model that we pioneered about 10 years ago—it’s still pretty new. There’s still a lot of white space in corporate venture.
I think with new technologies like AI, more companies are going to need to adopt technology. They’re going to invest in technology. They may be acquirers of technology—more so than maybe what we’ve seen in the past. So we think there’s a lot of white space for us.
We’ve largely focused on the U.S., although we’ve had some success working with a couple of corporations in Japan, a couple in the Middle East, and Latin America. We think our model is really interesting for companies outside the U.S. as well.
If you think about it, if they don’t have a presence here, that’s a big risk for them. Most of these foreign companies want access to the U.S. startup ecosystem because—certainly no offense to any other markets—but I still think we have the best startup ecosystem here in the U.S. We have a team that has been doing this a long time. We have scale and access to deal flow. We’re a really good model for a corporation outside the U.S. that wants to build a U.S. presence and get up and running almost instantaneously.
So that’s something we’re acutely focused on as we think about the next stage of growth.
Brian Smiga: I think of Japan as a world leader in building teams in the U.S. to cooperate with U.S. venture. Do you want to cite any other exemplar countries, corporations, or sectors that you feel are ready to come into the U.S. and partner with you?
David Horowitz: I think Japan has been one of the most progressive in corporate venture—really led by groups like SoftBank who’ve been doing it for a long time and explored different models. That’s a good one. We’ve seen a lot of interest from companies in Brazil, certainly all over continental Europe. We’re starting to have some conversations in the Australia and New Zealand area.
It’s part of the same things we’re seeing: there are a lot of offline companies that are everywhere—they’re not just in one market, they’re everywhere—and they’re waking up to the fact, led by technologies like artificial intelligence, that they need to be more progressive about investing in these areas.
They’re going to look to the U.S. because that’s the market where a lot of the innovation and startup capital is being funded. I’m very biased, but I think we present a great option for those companies to get to scale and become professionalized almost instantaneously. Those are some of the markets, but I think it’s a relatively universal opportunity for us.
Brian Smiga: Okay, so intelligence has finally entered our conversation—and maybe this is a good note—
David Horowitz: Took a while, but here we go. Here we are.
Brian Smiga: But now we’re going to talk about it. So David, you’ve been at this for 25 years, and I think you have a broader understanding of the challenges that large corporations face with each technology wave. I mean, you’ve lived through it all—Web 1.0, the advent of online, cloud, mobile, data, etc. Clearly, we are in a disruptive phase. So where is corporate venture headed in this world where AI is going to transform and amplify so many businesses?
David Horowitz: If you break AI down very simplistically into two parts—and obviously this is an oversimplification—you’ve got horizontal technologies and vertical applications. The horizontal might be the large language models or other infrastructure plays—things like Google Gemini or OpenAI.
I think the bigger companies—the Amazons, the Googles—I’d put OpenAI in that category now—they’re going to win that space. Maybe there’s a startup or two that comes out of left field like Anthropic or something like that that can be successful. But the larger players are going to win the horizontal infrastructure space.
The opportunities for startup value creation are going to be on the vertical application side. I don’t think Google—no matter how amazing they are—they’re not going to understand the very specific problems of an industry and tune Gemini to solve them. It may be too small for them. Google needs tens of billions of dollars in opportunity—or take Amazon, Meta, etc.
So that’s where I see real startup opportunity—entrepreneurs who understand a specific industry problem, figure out how to apply AI to it, and maybe leverage a Google Gemini or OpenAI backend to build their applications.
And I think it would be very smart for those entrepreneurs to align with corporate investors who can help them get an initial customer, bring capital, and provide domain expertise to help them win.
One of the holy grails of corporate venture that I’ve been trying to find for years is: is there evidence that shows entrepreneurs are better off taking corporate venture capital or not? It’s difficult to get return data.
But I’d have to dig it up—one of my partners, Brian Legler, on our team, several years ago did research. We actually looked at companies that went public, because that data is more available. We looked at companies that had a corporate VC investor versus those that didn’t.
The companies with corporate venture investment actually outperformed post-IPO. It was enough companies—hundreds of them—that it was hard to say it was a coincidence.
We’d love to have more data, and maybe AI will help with that research. But the more research that shows the power of corporate venture, the more corporations will get involved, the more startups will seek them out, and the more the market will grow.
That’s the bet I’ve made with my career. It’s the bet we made at Touchdown, and the one we’re continuing to make at Cerity—that we’re still in the early stages of this relatively emerging asset class: corporate venture capital.
Brian Smiga: In closing: vertical AI. At Alpha, we deployed about 64% of our capital—which matches the venture ecosystem—into vertical AI companies: AI-centric companies focused on a single application or industry. Do you have an exemplar, without playing favorites, from your portfolio that you’d like to cite as a good example?
David Horowitz: We have a lot of great examples. We’ve had some solid exits in AI for healthcare. We had a really interesting company called Casetext that Thomson Reuters acquired—for a lot of money—in the legal tech and legal AI space.
We’ve been investing in AI around insurance. That’s a sector we think could really use innovation—helping insurance agents, improving claims processing.
Our approach has been: what’s the vertical problem? We gain access to and understand those problems by talking to the corporate business leaders at these companies, and then go find world-class startups that can solve those problems.
Industrial is another space—manufacturing, where AI can help keep machinery up and running. That leads to amazing cost savings. We’ve got a really well-performing company in that area as well.
Brian Smiga: Alpha’s definitely going to come back to you for advice, David—and I hope other VCs will follow. I’m sure they already do. You’ve had some exits in vertical AI, so I’m happy to hear that too—we’re still waiting for ours. You must be making some very wise choices.
It’s been great talking to you today. It’s a very pragmatic approach you have. No doubt, there’s a lot of headroom and growth to come. Congratulations on combining with Cerity, and it was great to see you today.
David Horowitz: Thank you so much for having me. And congrats to you. As you mentioned, we started Touchdown Ventures around the same time as Alpha. It’s also nice to see that you guys continue to have success.
You’ve figured out a model that adds value to early-stage seed VCs and entrepreneurs. You guys have built a great venture firm. I’m proud to call you both a friend and a potential venture partner and investor peer. I look forward to continuing to find ways to work together. Congrats on all the success.
Brian Smiga: Yeah, let’s keep exchanging ideas. Oh, and by the way—we’ve just started Alpha Global. Like you, we’re finally moving overseas, with a primary focus initially on Israel. We’ve already made two investments out of that fund, so we should talk.
David Horowitz: Thank you for having me. It was really wonderful seeing you. Thanks.
