William Crowder
Managing Partner at Aperture Investor
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Overview
Work Experience
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
2021 - Current
Investing in the evolution of financial services. Supporting founders at the early stage of their journey to build category-defining companies. Current investments include: Anonybit, Azimuth, Freeing Returns, Goodfynd, and GreenLyne. Learn more at www.aperturevc.com and find us on X via @aperturevc
Aperture Venture Capital backs diverse founders leveraging financial innovation to help individual & businesses thrive.
Adjunct Professor
2024
Teach a second-year course for MBA students interested in the venture capital profession. "Special Topics in Finance: VC Lab" is an experiential deep dive into the world of venture capital as a practitioner. Students learn to embracing risk in times of great uncertainty through a hands-on opportunity to evaluate and assess opportunities to invest in early stage companies currently raising capital.
VC In Residence
2017 - 2021
First VC in Residence for Morgan Stanley’s Multicultural Innovation Lab, an accelerator program designed for seed stage companies with multicultural founders including women and people of color.
Morgan Stanley Venture Partners is a private equity firm that invests in high-growth companies in the technology and healthcare industries.
Lead Investor, Catalyst Fund
2012 - 2017
Built the Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund, a $20M venture capital fund focused on investing in early stage tech companies led by diverse entrepreneurs. Invested in 50+ startups with aggregate enterprise value exceeding $5 billion including Squire, Flutterwave, EightSleep, and PartPic (acquired by Amazon).
Comcast Ventures partners with extraordinary entrepreneurs building transformative consumer and enterprise companies.
Managing Director
2011 - 2016
Sourced and advised pre-seed founders building the next wave of game-changing companies. Dreamit-backed companies include SeatGeek, Octane Lending, and LevelUp (acquired by Grubub).
Venture fund focused on real estate tech, proptech & construction tech startups.
Founder and Managing Director
2008 - 2011
Strategic advisory and consulting firm serving the strategic and operational needs of growth-oriented companies. Client engagements included: Managing the planning, development, and launch of an online venture for a $350MM media company with radio, TV, and print holdings. Leading the post-merger integration of multiple media properties (3 companies, 150+ employees) with a publicly traded traditional media company (1,000+ employees).
Director Strategy Business Development
2007 - 2009
Transformed the post-merger operations of 4 online advertising businesses into a fully integrated digital $2B advertising entity. Served as chief of staff to and managed business unit performance and led strategic initiatives to achieve growth objectives.
Senior Manager, Operational Effectiveness Program
2004 - 2007
- Strategically wound down operations of AOL's worldwide customer support and call center operations. - Led cost reduction initiatives to offset subscriber revenue decline
AOL Lifestream is a web-based application that enables users to keep track of all their comments on social networking sites.
Raised $1,000,000,000.00 from Comcast Ventures and Google.
Manager, Global Strategy
2001 - 2002
More strategy and M&A consulting. This time in the legal and regulatory space.
Associate
1999 - 2001
Strategy and M&A consulting. Advised on a wide range of financial services cases including the management buyout of a payments processor, pre-IPO preparation of a life insurance provider, and the creation of a venture-backed eCommerce roll-up.
CAVOK is a technical consulting firm that supports the development of manual systems and processes.
Summer Associate
1998 - 1998
My introduction to the world of management consulting between Y1 and Y2 of business school.