Garrett Levey
Garrett is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Blue Ladder Capital. In addition to over a decade of investing experience, Garrett has been a go-to-market executive for multiple companies that have scaled rapidly into industry leaders.
Garrett began his career at Deutsche Bank, where he worked with large-cap private equity firms and public software companies. That early exposure to how the best investors and operators think about software businesses at scale gave him a strong foundation before moving into growth equity.
While at M33 Growth, Garrett worked closely with Bill investing in growth-stage B2B software companies. There he developed a conviction that the most impactful way to support a portfolio company was to be inside it, which led him to take a leadership role at Titan Cloud Software, a verticalized compliance SaaS business, where he ran go-to-market execution and growth. He helped grow and then exit the business to Charlesbank Capital Partners.
That combination of investing and operating experience is what shaped the Blue Ladder model. Garrett and his co-founder Bill Kloza founded BLC to invest in and actively operate vertical B2B software businesses, bringing hands-on commercial support alongside capital.
After BLC’s acquisition of Nuqleous (now rebranded as Engine), a Bentonville-based provider of automated retail space planning and performance analytics software, Garrett served as Co-CEO alongside Bill. His focus was squarely on the commercial side of the business, leading sales, marketing, and customer success as the company scaled. Together with the founders, the team executed a number of add-on acquisitions and grew the business 4x before taking on a growth investment from Rubicon Technology Partners. The go-to-market playbook Garrett built during that period is something he brings directly to every BLC portfolio company today.
Garrett graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Philosophy. He lives in Miami, FL.
You went from investor to operator and back again. What did that arc teach you?
What kind of companies do you love acquiring?
What's an underrated lever in a vertical SaaS?
Where in the world are you most eager to get back to?
How do you stay active?
Investors who operate, or investors who are 'operationally inclined'?
Nearly every firm below $100M of ARR brands itself "operationally focused" — gray-haired advisors and an ops team a phone call away. It works, but it's imperfect. Everyone on our team has been both an investor and a CEO, which is why we send Functional Operating Executives into every company we back.
Why we built Customer Advisory Boards with our founder
When our founder moved into an innovation role, we built Customer Advisory Boards with him at the center. They became one of the most valuable sources of strategic intelligence we had.
Want to learn more? Start a conversation.
We'd love to meet, trade notes on what we're seeing as the software world goes through a generational evolution, and share more about our philosophy for building great software companies.