Swing for the fences. Always.

Apr 10, 2014 • Paul Singh

I started working in early stage venture capital in early 2010 and, since then, have been fortunate enough to have been involved in the financings of hundreds of companies around the world. I’ve been pitched in person, on Hangouts, in bathrooms, on airplanes – literally, tens of thousands of pitches over the past few years and I’ve managed to build an interesting set of heuristics and technology to help filter through the noise.In the first half of 2013, I stepped down as a Partner at 500 Startups, made a case for Disruption Corporation and promptly moved back to the DC area. Somewhere in there, my wife and I discovered that we were expecting our first child in March 2014 (but the baby had other plans).

In August of 2013, I quietly started looking around for a physical location – someplace for Disruption Corporation to call home and I needed something big, really big actually. With a little girl on the way, I wanted to build her a place that might inspire her to be entrepreneurial in whatever profession she might choose. I ultimately chose Crystal City as that place.

Today I’m pulling back the curtain: I’m going to build the most desirable place for post-seed companies to live, work, play and grow. Disruption Corporation will offer our services from our new HQ in Crystal City, VA and guide our investment arm, Crystal Tech Fund, towards high growth technology companies around the world.

To be clear, this isn’t a plan and I’m not just talking. It’s happening.

My team has already moved into the first phase of our new office. Additionally, we’ve quietly made a number of investments in the past 30 days and many of the companies have chosen to co-locate themselves in our new space. There is only one rule for companies that choose to work from Disruption HQ (and the only career advice I hope to give my daughter one day): I’m swinging for the fence, you should too.