Jim Butz has extensive business experience working as part of Bell Labs, AT&T and Lucent Technologies. Currently he is a Venture Partner at California Capital Partners, a merchant banking platform. His decades of experience includes mergers, acquisitions, strategic alliances, organizational development and operational improvement. He brings his vast experience to the local scene along with a fearless perspective of where we are and where we need to go.

Mehit: What is Cal Cap? What are you investing in?

Butz: California Capital Partners is a merchant banking platform. Most of the people who are involved with Cal Cap are pretty seasoned people and have been in equity investing for thirty, thirty-five years. Phil Smith, who is one of the managing directors in New York City actually put together Citibank’s first venture fund together forty years ago.

Martin Mansfield, of Pacific Ridge Capital, shutdown his business and joined Cal Cap. So now, we’re Series 7, FINRA compliant, he’s got Series 24 so he can manage ten other people doing deals. What we’ve mostly been focusing on recently is higher up the food chain with people who are looking for money from private equity sources.

We did sixteen investments since we started in 2006. We’ve done everything from pet pharmaceuticals to a beer company and everything in between.

We’re currently raising some money for some people to drill oil down in Texas. We also looking to put together a fund of funds to investigate intellectual property that’s held by large corporations.

Mehit: What qualities are you’re looking for?

Butz:  A promising return, because you’re really still looking at it the way you look at any venture, which are large returns in a short period of time. Everybody still looks for a 5 – 10x return in three to five years even though the average hold time on a venture backed company was at 9.6 years.

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