What LPs Asked Our Founders

Written by Promise Phelon, GWC's founder and managing partner

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What LPs Asked Our Founders—and What It Reveals About Where Smart Money Is Moving

On October 28th, 2025, I hosted institutional investors at The Landing in New York City for a private breakfast with two of our founders — Andre McGregor from ForceMetrics and Leonard Ivey from Softdrive.

What struck me wasn't just the quality of the questions or the depth of the founders' answers. It was that, for two straight hours, no one checked their phones. No one broke eye contact.

As Rachel Baruch, our partner, said afterward, "The energy in the room was phenomenal. When you bring together high-caliber people who are exceptional in their field, extraordinarily curious and driven by excellence, really great things happen."

The room leaned in as ForceMetric’s founder began to share his “overnight” success story.

ForceMetrics: When customers become your salesforce

Andre's "overnight" success was actually five years of building ForceMetrics, plus a decade spent at the FBI before that. He shared what he called one retailer’s “Sunday” problem — Sunday being a typical day for custody exchanges in parking lots. ForceMetrics' AI alerts the retailer’s security and local police when things are about to go sideways — and, more importantly, advises that children are likely present. That's decades of seeing human behavior under the worst conditions, encoded into a platform that prevents tragedy.

The platform saves officers 1.5 hours per shift — a 23% productivity gain with clear ROI. We helped Andre architect a retail strategy that unlocked a major new market and built a substantial immediate sales pipeline. A single warm introduction to Colorado's Attorney General generated significant net new ARR expansion.

What makes ForceMetrics defensible, though, isn't just its technology. It’s the network effect that's already emerging. The enterprise customer tells local police departments, “This solution saved us money and prevented incidents. You should check it out, too." Customers are selling for Andre. And ForceMetrics is keeping America safe in a way no other company has done.

Softdrive: Scaling without massive headcount

Leonard was equally candid about his company’s challenges. He broke down the specific mechanics that make his goal of nine-figure ARR inevitable: go-to-market strategies, pricing models and the hyperscaler partnership that eventually changed everything.

Today, with minimal marketing spend and one sales pod, Leonard is now landing multi-million-dollar contracts with large enterprise customers – a move up-market from when we initially invested. As Rachel observed, Softdrive can scale without massive headcount because the partnership and brand names create a flywheel that brings in new opportunities.

That’s GWC’s playbook in action.

We restructured Softdrive's entire revenue architecture around channel partnerships and optimized pricing, improving gross margins substantially. The result: expansive revenue growth in 18 months and a completely different trajectory.

One founder in the room said afterward that it had never occurred to him that he could expect his investor to architect hyperscaler partnerships or redesign his revenue model when he's still a small company.

But that's precisely what makes GWC different.

When LPs fact-check your hunting model in real time

It’s rare to see founders sitting in the same space as LPs, who tend to think about funds as “groups.” Here, our founders fielded questions that revealed what sophisticated institutional investors care about right now — and it wasn't just about the companies. They wanted to validate our process. One LP asked Andre directly: "How did Promise find you?"

When Andre explained that I hunted him down and spotted what others missed, it wasn't me making claims about our approach. It was a founder confirming it in real-time to the room.

After the event, Rachel's conversations with LPs became more in-depth. They asked:

• How do we ensure a data advantage is real versus just marketing?
• How do we think about customer expansion strategies?
• What conditions need to exist for companies to reach billion-dollar scale?

These questions are about the defensibility and diligence that separates professional managers who've seen cycles from people chasing trends.

Our hunting process — targeting founders building in sectors Silicon Valley overlooks because they don't understand manufacturing floors or public safety or frontline retail operations — is core to what makes GWC different. Tuesday’s breakfast proved why that difference matters right now.

The inflection point that just accelerated

Amazon just announced it's slashing 30,000 jobs to fund AI infrastructure. Most see "AI displacement." We see AI displacement plus the intensifying labor shortage and knowledge gap. These crises are happening simultaneously.

Every day, 10,400 workers leave the U.S. workforce. That crisis — far larger than the loss of 30,000 jobs — is now compounded by the widespread adoption of corporate AI. It’s the inflection point Fund II is designed to capture.

Fund I proved our precision GTM model works in enterprise AI. Fund II expands that thesis and applies the same approach to an even bigger opportunity in the 4D Economy — sectors with Dirty, Dull, Dangerous and Dated jobs — where the labor shortage bites first and hardest. Companies amplifying what existing workers accomplish become more critical as the deployment window closes.

The private breakfast demonstrated that we're positioned for this inflection point. The companies we're finding and how we're helping them scale are designed for exactly this moment.

The conversations didn't stop at 11:00 a.m. LPs stayed. Founders stayed. People who usually bounce after an hour stayed because something real was happening in that room. The discussion continued around our Fund II thesis and the 4D Economy opportunity.

Download our Fund II thesis — and then share it with your colleagues interested in enterprise and industrial AI.