Venture Best started like a lot of scalable businesses start: with an idea for a new business that would provide a high-value solution for a big problem confronting an emerging high-growth market. Venture Best Co-founder Greg Lynch puts it this way:
"After moving to Madison from a large firm in Chicago, I quickly saw that the Madison area had many of the raw materials for a significant high-impact entrepreneurship community, but was missing one key ingredient: lawyers with substantial experience, networks, and a focus on the unique needs of high-impact entrepreneurs. As much as these clients need good technical lawyers, what they need even more is lawyers who understand the unique dynamics of the high-risk environment scalable entrepreneurs live in, and who are willing and able to add business value beyond strictly legal insight."
While Madison’s emergence as a significant center of high-impact entrepreneurship was a bit slower than projected, by 2010 the city and the region was “on the scalable start-up map,” and Venture Best was a leading firm serving those clients across the Badger State. Venture Best Counsel and former Chair Paul Jones recounts the next steps in Venture Best’s growth:
"I began my legal career in Silicon Valley, and subsequently enjoyed a career as a serial venture-backed entrepreneur, and later VC, in North Carolina. On returning to the Badger State, I was well aware of the challenges – and opportunities – for scalable entrepreneurship in places where risk capital was scarce and where entrepreneurs were often less experienced and networked than their coastal counterparts. Initially engaging with the start-up community as a consultant and teacher, I saw members of the Venture Best team in action many times. It wasn’t long until I concluded that a local legal team that had the breadth and depth of relevant legal, business, and financial experience and networks to provide the kind of value added legal services the best Silicon Valley firms offered was a winning business proposition. I joined the Venture Best team in 2010, and over the next half-dozen years we enjoyed a continued level of success."
Today, the Venture Best vision extends well beyond Wisconsin. Leveraging Michael Best’s presence across the country, including entrepreneurial hot spots like Salt Lake City, Austin, Denver, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and D.C., today Venture Best is striving to become the “between the coasts” high-impact entrepreneur’s choice for value added legal counsel. Former Venture Best Co-Chair Melissa Turczyn looks to the future:
"While Silicon Valley and a handful of other venture capital investment centers get most of the headlines, a couple of dozen markets, mostly between the coasts, are coming on strong as homes to a new generation of high-impact entrepreneurs ready to leave their own mark on the world. The Venture Best team – backed by the extraordinary resources of a top 200 corporate law firm and top 100 intellectual property law firm, is poised to be a big part of that. For between the coast entrepreneurs who want the quality and value add the best Silicon Valley firms offer, but don’t like their remote location or their prices, Venture Best has the answer."