Rick Smith brings an unusual blue-collar background to venture capital, having been adopted by high school dropout parents in Illinois where his father ran a small plumbing business, and working jobs from pipe fitting at nuclear plants to de-tasseling corn before becoming a lawyer and then VC. He built a $750 million corporate venture platform from scratch at SunAmerica despite initially knowing little about tech, then co-founded Crosscut as a $5 million fund during the 2008 financial crisis and grew it into a larger platform that has produced multiple unicorns from that original tiny fund.
About their Fund
Sectors
Space, Energy, Climate, Defense, Enterprise
Rounds
Seed - Series A
Avg Check Size
$100K - $5M
Notable Investments
Founded in 2008 as one of the first seed firms deliberately built outside Silicon Valley, Crosscut has scaled to 170+ companies and $300M+ AUM while remaining LA-centered and formally pledging 1% of their investment into bespoke founder development including coaching, management training, and wellness programs. The firm is repositioning as a frontier-tech specialist focused on space, energy, advanced manufacturing, defense, and underwater exploration by following founders spinning out of SpaceX, Anduril, Northrop, and Boeing, while building a full-stack capital platform that includes growth and project-finance practice to bridge the "valley of death" for capital-intensive hardware and infrastructure companies.
Notable Fund
Investments
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