About Us

Discerning Unrecognized Earning Power

Silicon Valley-based Strategy Capital is a concentrated, large cap, long-only public equity fund manager that seeks to own competitive winners in opaque emerging industries. Our tools: a unique framework to assess competitive advantage, a specialized team versed in that framework, and unusual access to tech founders.

Our Mission

To advance the study of competitive strategy and use the resulting insight to predict winners in complex, emerging industries – before the market can.

Our Edge

Predicting Competitive Outcomes in Nascent Industries

40 years of applied research into competitive strategy

Founder Hamilton Helmer and his team identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for a company to maintain its competitive edge over current and potential competitors.

Focusing on our edge

To maximize the return from our analytical approach, we seek situations that isolate long-term competitive advantage as the key determinant of potential alpha.

Seeking to invest before public markets understand competitive prospects

We seek a pool of opportunities within complex and evolving business environments, where companies’ future earning power, and therefore intrinsic value, is not yet fully recognized by the market.

Building Silicon Valley relationships

After decades of investing and advising businesses on strategy, we’ve come to interact frequently with tech founders, often at their request. We offer strategic insight; they share insight into industry trends. This further informs our understanding of competitive levers in emerging industries.

Center of milky way

Our Story

Forty Years of Strategy

Strategy Capital was founded in 2013, but its roots go back decades. Founder Hamilton Helmer left Bain & Company in 1984 to launch a business strategy consultancy in Boston. In 1994 Hamilton moved his business to the San Francisco Bay Area where over many years advising Silicon Valley tech firms, he developed a comprehensive framework for assessing the prospects of durable competitive advantage. He taught this approach for a decade at Stanford and then distilled it in 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy, named one of Bloomberg’s Best Business Books of 2017. During this period, he also developed an investment approach that leverages 7 Powers, which forms the basis of Strategy Capital today.

7 Powers represents both an investment approach and a cultural fabric, guiding our business and binding our team together.

1978

1984

1994

2001

2008

2013

2017

2018

2020

2021

Hamilton finishes his PhD at Yale and begins his career at Bain & Company, where he meets John Rutherford – a relationship that would one day evolve into the founding of Strategy Capital

Hamilton launches Deep Strategy (Helmer & Associates) – advising 50+ clients on competitive strategy, including pioneering firms that have transformed today’s tech landscape. Hamilton begins equity investing

Hamilton continues equity investing, utilizing his newly developed 7 Powers to identify undervalued stocks

Hamilton meets Bill Mitchell; they begin a decades-long dialog on tech industry competitive strategy

Hamilton begins teaching at Stanford, Economics Dept., where he teaches Chenyi Shi and William Faulkner, current Principals of Strategy

Hamilton partners with John Rutherford to launch Strategy Capital. The partnership combines John’s expertise in strengthening business operations and Hamilton’s differentiated investing acumen

Hamilton Publishes 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy (selected by Bloomberg for The Best Books of 2017)

Bill Mitchell joins the Firm as its first non-founding partner, bringing over a decade of experience in investment management and software development

Chenyi Shi, a former student of Hamilton’s, joins the Firm, providing vital investing insights from various tech subsectors, including AI

Mike Albert joins the Firm as CFO, bringing valuable finance and operational experience from Taal Capital, Bain Capital and KPMG

William Faulkner joins the Firm, former student of Hamilton’s and infusing crucial investing experience in the internet and software areas

Meet our team

We have a differentiated understanding of long-term competitive outcomes embedded in both our IP and our team. Our team takes a scientific approach to investments by posing a hypothesis and collectively discussing it to see where the evidence leads us.

– Hamilton Helmer, Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer

Meet the Strategy Team