With a Good Story, A Young Firm Targeting the Midwest and Texas Thrives
Blair Garrou is unassuming, but he’s as ambitious a venture capitalist as you’re likely to meet, as evidenced in part by his co-founding Houston-based DFJ Mercury at just 32 years of age. He was young, but having worked as a principal at the Houston-based private equity firm Genesis Park, and as the CEO of Intermat, a decades-old portfolio company of Genesis that Garrou helped sell to a public company, he decided he was ready anyway. That Garrou helped convinced investors of the same is more impressive. Indeed, the firm, formed in 2005, managed to collect $30 million to invest between $100,000 and $5 million into nascent companies -- particularly those created out of tech transfer programs in Texas, Illinois, Colorado and Michigan. This spring, despite what’s long been an
