In the early days of the New Ventures group at McKinsey & Co. two things became painfully clear. First, investing out of a limited funnel of startups is doomed to failure without diligence. Second, startups need a lot of fertilizer to grow.

Our Managing Partner, Jourdan Urbach, had a front-seat view to this experiment as a product manager in the New Ventures group. These lessons prompted changes. The Firm started paying for week-long concept sprints before investment to enable deep due diligence into prospective portfolio companies. In parallel, they built a robust accelerator to pair product managers, engineers, and designers with our more business-minded founders.

The result was the most prolific and successful venture capital experiment in the history of our sector. That experiment built the groundwork for the future of this 90 year old institution, and bucked every negative stereotype about corporate startup investment.

Brandt & Co. was born to bring these lessons, and the right executional talent, to the world outside of McKinsey. We are an alliance of former consultants, VCs, engineers, and entrepreneurs with a vision for what the next generation of professional services should look like.

We started out with a single service: due diligence for startup investors. We promised the most comprehensive deep-dive in the industry, conducted by specific experts, done in one week at a fixed rate. With our decades of pattern recognition and technical experience, we were able to provide new intelligence for investors that materially changed their ability to invest outside of their comfort zone. That one-week DD is still at the core of what we do, but over time we’ve grown our services for founders as well.

Startup founders don’t need expensive retainers and long engagements. They don’t need generalists and they don’t need to pay to hear what they already know. What founders need is accelerated pattern recognition. Strategic nudges from someone who’s been where they’re standing and who can discern the right moves from costly errors.

You’ll see that we've organized our business into service lines for investors, and for founders. Each service line has defined guide-rails driven by measurable impact. I remember being the CTO at Mass Lab (a Mark Cuban-backed startup), and the endless parade of people trying to sell me promises. At Brandt & Co., if we can’t test it we don’t do it.

Our goal is to prevent startup investors and founders from making costly errors. Whether you are a family office investor wondering if that AI startup really has the technology it claims, or you're a CEO looking to get serious about data science, there's someone at Brandt who can help.