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.
Our Story
Forty Years of Strategy
Strategy Capital was founded in 2013, but its roots go back decades. Founder Hamilton Helmer left Bain Consulting 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.
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