Azure's Investment Strategy

Back winning teams and superior technologies
An integral part of our decision to invest in a company is the caliber of its core team. We look for entrepreneurs with high integrity, strong motivation, intelligence and the ability to adjust to change. We also seek entrepreneurs and managers who understand their strengths and weaknesses, and we often use the Azure Network to help our entrepreneurs find complementary talent. In addition, we invest in companies with differentiated products and defensible technologies. These startups are developing products based upon a technology that allows them to compete effectively with much larger incumbents and that enables a time to market advantage. We then work with our entrepreneurs to turn these superior technologies into sustainable businesses.

Engage in primary research to identify large market opportunities created by fundamental industry change
We seek potential markets whose size and dynamics will support a new participant. In our ongoing primary research, we acquire information from a broad set of IT buyers, technologists, entrepreneurs and key public company executives. We use this information to frame and predict market opportunities though rigorous objective analysis, detailed forecasting and continuous cross-referencing of multi-sourced data points. We pay special attention to the market’s size and projected growth and endeavor to invest where there are a small number of direct competitors, rather than spending time on over-funded market spaces.

Identify companies that have powerful business model advantages
Our extensive experience as professional investors has afforded us the opportunity to see a wide range of successful and unsuccessful business models. Four of the most important business model advantages are:

• Ecosystem advantage – the ability to occupy and remain in a unique position in the industry’s value chain, often stemming from strategic partnerships.


• Standards advantage – the ability to define or set industry standards, either through co-operation with standards bodies or by becoming a de facto standard.


• Distribution advantage – the ability to go to market with a product or service in a way that enables scalable and efficient customer acquisition and retention.


• Margin advantage - the ability to maintain lower costs and/or higher prices than the competition as an industry evolves.