MKT Capital - Early-stage b2b fund
Investing capital +
hands-on marketing help
MKT1 Capital is an early-stage fund, led by former marketing leaders Emily Kramer and Kathleen Estreich. We invest $100-$200K in Pre-Seed-Series A B2B startups across industries and help startups build marketing.
select MKT1 Capital & MKT1 Syndicate investments
mkt1 capital overview - For founders
How we invest & help founders
We actually help you build out marketing.
We started MKT1 Capital because the investor plus marketer skillset is sorely missing in the ecosystem, yet highly valuable to startups and highly in demand. We are uniquely suited to fill this gap.
We’re marketing leaders, who have taken startups from 0 to 1 & $1M to $100M. We've also advised and invested in over 75 startups.
Hands-on marketing help
We make sure you have the right marketing strategy, then help you bring on contractors and hire your first marketing leader.
Marketing advantages?
We help you identify & accelerate marketing advantages (think network effects & category creation).
Mentorship for marketing leaders
Once you hire, we serve as mentors to your Head of Marketing and enroll them for free in our course. This is a unique benefit for your marketing hire.
Marketing Community
Our fund has lots of marketing leaders as LPs. They're available for questions, referrals, & recommendations too.
mkt1 capital lps
Our community of investors
Our fund is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Atacama Ventures; GPs including Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), Elizabeth Yin (Hustle Fund) Andy McLoughlin (Uncork Capital), Adam Nelson (FirstMark), Jonathan Heiliger (Vertex Ventures), and Avichal Garg (Electric Capital).
Plus founders, operators, and 75+ marketers with leadership experience at B2B Startups including Airtable, Alloy, AngelList, Asana, Atlassian, Box, Carta, Dropbox, Flexport, Glassdoor, Mode, Oyster, Plaid, Ramp, Slack, Splunk, & Wealthfront.
Watch our "Investing as a Marketer" talk
Emily & Kathleen (Managing Partners @ MKT1) discuss angel & fund investing as a marketing operator.
Experienced marketing leaders
Who we are
We've worked at some of the most successful SaaS companies over the last 15 years, building marketing and operations teams.
Emily Kramer
Asana, Carta, Astro (acq. Slack), Ticketfly
Emily has led marketing teams at Seed to Series E startups with $0 to $100M ARR. She built the marketing teams and function from scratch at Asana, Carta, and Astro (acquired by Slack).
While leading Asana's marketing team for 4 years, she launched their first paid product for teams in 2013 and their rebrand in 2015. At Astro, she launched the company and first product, which won Product Hunt's mobile app of the year in 2017; Astro was acquired by Slack a year later. While at Carta, she developed their gender equity gap data studies and launched the Table Stakes initiative in 2019, which has been covered in 50+ top tier publications.
Emily is also a board member at non-profit Empower Work, a text line for people facing challenges in the workplace.
Kathleen Estreich
Box, Intercom, Scalyr, Facebook
Kathleen has built and led marketing and operations teams at several high-growth startups including Intercom, Box, Facebook and Scalyr. She has experience on both the marketing and business operations side, bringing a holistic view to help founders grow their early business teams.
While at Scalyr, she helped grow the business and team from seed stage to Series A, owning marketing, recruiting, finance, HR and business operations. At Intercom, she helped the company scale from ~100 employees to over 270. At Box, she ran the Platform Business team, where she oversaw platform marketing, programs and partnership, and started and ran the Box Developer Conference. She spent six years in marketing at Facebook, including roles in corporate communications, platform marketing, and engineering marketing, as the company grew from 15 million to more than a billion users.
Kathleen loves helping founders and companies scale in deliberate ways, focusing on building great products and team environments.
testimonials
Here's what a few founders in our portfolio say about us...
Michelle Valentine
Co-Founder & CEO, Anrok
“MKT1 is my go-to-investor when building out our go-to-market motion. From early advice around setting up our demand-gen engine to directly referring our Head of Marketing, I can trust the MKT1 team to open up their unparalleled marketing network to help us at Anrok.”
Alexa Grabell
Co-Founder & CEO, Pocus
"MKT1 has been one of the most value-add investors because of their expertise on all things go-to-market and the ability to jump in and give strategic AND technical advice."
Simon Rorbach
Co-Founder & CEO, Plain
"There are investors who you don't just want on your cap table, but also want to work with all day, every day as part of your core team. The only negative about MKT1 is that's not possible and you'll wish you’d gotten them on your cap table sooner."
Jaleh Rezaei
Co-Founder & CEO, Muitny
“The number one area founders struggle with is marketing—from who to hire, to what channels to invest, to how to position their company. Having Emily & Kathleen as investors has been incredibly valuable. They have given us product feedback, helped with company messaging for major launches, and advice on how to get press. Every founder should bring on CMO investors.”
Lisa Wallace
Co-Founder, Assemble
“Emily and Kathleen have lead Marketing at some of the most varied and iconic venture-backed companies across multiple stages of growth.
My cofounder Enrique and I had been trying to get MKT1 to join our cap table for months. They’ve become one of our most valuable and hands-on partners, approaching our marketing challenges with the zeal and commitment as if it were their own company.
Their advice is consistently candid and actionable, and exceptionally hands-on: brainstorming content with us, drafting job descriptions, and regularly serving as a sounding board for strategy. They are also incredibly helpful with hiring, having built up a powerful community of tech marketers.
We've had multiple VP Marketing candidates tell us that the number one perk of working at Assemble would be working with Emily and Kathleen. I have worked with multiple executive hiring firms and VC firms in my career across a number of executive searches. I have never once had that reaction before from so many candidates so consistently."
If you build it, they won't come.
The best products don’t always win. The best teams don’t always win. And even great founding teams, with great products, in huge markets don’t always win. A great product, team, and market have become table stakes requirements for startups to succeed. Marketing is now the differentiator. But most founders and investors don’t have marketing expertise. That’s where MKT1 Capital comes in.
Read moreHow & when to hire marketing agencies & contractors
Contractors and agencies aren’t bandaids for all of your marketing problems. I often see startups waste more money cycling through contractors and agencies than they’d spend on a solid full-time hire. This newsletter will help you choose the right contractors and agencies and how to set them up for success.
Read moreHow to create a more effective homepage
A step-by-step guide on improving your homepage content & copy to increase conversion. At least once a day, I see a startup’s website and think, “I have no idea what this company does.” Many (most?) websites, especially for early and growth-stage companies are ineffective. They don't tell visitors who the product is for, what the product does, and why the product is better. When your homepage content and copy miss the mark, your conversion rate suffers, and all of your top of funnel efforts are wasteful.
Read more4 ways marketing is different from sales—and why it matters
Marketing gets a bad rap. And that’s partially because it’s incredibly misunderstood. Many founders, sales leaders, product leaders, and even marketers themselves think B2B marketing teams are just a service organization to sales—marketing only exists to generate leads this quarter. This limited view of marketing negatively impacts revenue growth and efficiency—both short and long term.
Read moreThe art of content roadmapping
If you put the effort into generating the right content ideas, adding the right details to your content ideas, and creating a prioritized roadmap—like how a product leader puts effort into a product roadmap—you will save a ton of time producing and distributing content later
Read moreEarly-stage marketing compensation explained
Our perspective on early-stage marketing compensation in an attempt to make this process easier for both marketers and founders. We share salary & equity benchmarks for Seed & Series A marketing roles, plus how to evaluate your equity offer.
Read moreThe fuel & engine
To build a successful marketing function you need to produce great fuel and craft a well-running engine. Your fuel needs to be custom made for your engine and your engine needs to be custom made for your fuel.
Read moreMarketing Goal Setting Crash Course
We’re shocked by how many marketing leaders don’t have clearly defined goals, only have lead and revenue target goals, or set goals that aren’t focused on impact—like “make 10 blog posts...
Read moreGACC Marketing Brief
When you are planning a campaign, writing a blog post, deciding the focus of an event, or creating anything longer than a Tweet, you probably need a GACC. Writing the GACC in advance helps give your future creation focus, sets context for reviewers, and ensures you have a plan for driving results.
Read more
Copyright 2023, MKT1, LLC & MKT1 CAPITAL, LLC.
