“Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both.
I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”
– Michael Scott, The Office
Sean Cantwell is a managing partner and member of the founding team at Volition Capital. He focuses primarily on companies in the Software and Tech-Enabled Services sectors.
Sean’s current board directorships and investments include Assent Compliance, Broker Genius, Creatio, GRAX, JazzHR, and Tracelink.
Sean served on the boards of VisualIQ (acquired by Nielsen), iPipeline (acquired by Thoma Bravo), G5 Search Marketing (PeakEquity Partners), GeoLearning (acquired by SumTotal), Globaltranz (acquired by Jordan & Company), EnterpriseDB (acquired by PeakEquity Partners), and PingID (acquired by Vista Equity).
“I admire the tenacity and guts of the founders we work with. They possess a level of relentlessness that inspires me to push harder for them. I consider it my personal mission to help them reach their goals. I absolutely love investing, but my favorite part of this job, by far, is the people I get to work with. I strive to have a personal relationship with every founder and every management team I meet.”
Sean focuses on investments in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and technology-enabled services businesses. Prior to co-founding Volition Capital in 2010, Sean was an investment professional at Fidelity Ventures. Sean entered the private equity industry in 2001 at Summit Partners, where he focused on growth equity investments in software businesses. Sean began his career at Arthur Andersen.
Sean received a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from Harvard Business School
Fun Facts About Sean:
- He delivered newspapers every morning at 5:30 am starting in 4th grade until the day he left for college
- He firmly believes that his hometown of Allentown, PA is the greatest place on Earth
- His hobbies include CrossFit and Golf
- He is a proud parent of 4 active kids
- He’s a big sports fan – all Philly teams, ND Football, and Liverpool Football Club
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2020 was a heady year for SaaS companies It closes with valuations at astounding heights Snowflake’s IPO saw a final pricing range that gave it a valuation of 36 times forward revenue... more12/22/20
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The Rule of 40 has become an increasingly popular metric to evaluate SaaS companies at scale The basic premise is that companies generally command a premium valuation if their... more11/19/20
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By Sean Cantwell & Pete KeenanIn the classic novel A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens describes the era of pre and post-revolutionary France as both an age of wisdom and foolishness Building... more10/15/20
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Q&A with Sean Cantwell and Tomy Han What is the network effect The network effect is a framework where the more users or more customers a product or platform has, the more value it... more
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Volition Capital Managing Partner, Sean Cantwell, discusses evaluating investors as business... more
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The Next Enabling Platform Historically, there are four key ingredients that all enabling platforms have They've all got a critical mass of users that make it interesting for third... more
