POLK CAPITAL
Investing in local companies to encourage middle-skill workforce development.
Our Philosophy
We invest in real businesses that employ real people who make and do real stuff. We believe the work a man or woman does, forms them and that blue collar work adds great value to our economy and dignity to the worker. So, this often overlooked market is where we choose to invest.
We believe Indianapolis embodies this spirit and reflects the kinds of businesses we’d like to both launch and scale.
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.
Matthew Crawford Shopclass as Soulcraft
Methodology and Investment Criteria
POLK Capital is a redemptive venture creation & scaling studio. We incubate new ideas that become new ventures (zero to one) and we scale existing ventures (one to one plus) to solve significant problems worthy of our attention. In deciding which ventures to create and/or scale, we look at three dimensions:
Risk
Every venture idea starts with a hunch but we don’t bet the farm on a hunch. We start with a very small risk and progress over time making more and larger bets, iterating on the hunch with feedback from potential customers. This design process of prototyping is meant to mitigate risk. What we look for then as we are prototyping is whether there is contentment over time - are we getting more and more comfortable with the larger and larger risk a new venture or scaling effort will involve? We seek contentment over time.
Discernment
Discernment is the process by which we choose (or not) from many good pathways to pursue. The awareness of self, knowing your limits and the importance of responding to critical feedback are really important. But just as important as awareness is stillness. There comes a point in every venture’s development that we’ve been involved in, that a kind of still quiet voice emerges from our soul, a nudge to move in a direction that is both long term and pivotal. Stillness - the practice of being quiet enough from the day-to-day noise of the world, to allow oneself to hear that still, small voice is how we discern when and where to move forward with a venture. This can best be described as a process of surrender. We balance awareness with stillness.
Formation
If we cannot form an entrepreneur and/or the idea behind the venture, then we simply will not be involved. We often partner with other entrepreneurs in forming and scaling ventures. The selection of the right partners to a venture is critical. The selection must also be bi-directional. Our partners must also pick us and we must be formed by them as much as we are forming them. In that sense, there is no hierarchy but rather a partnership of peers. The process by which we pursue increasing levels of bi-directional formation is friendship. It is the friendship behind the venture that is paramount, even more so than the venture itself and should outlast the venture in all cases. We choose relationships over opportunity.
We do NOT rush how we assess risk through prototyping, understand discernment through surrender, and undergo formation through friendship. This is an important part of how we form a redemptive thesis for investment.
For more information contact info@polkgroup.org