Alyson Watson had already persuaded MGV to invest in Modern Health. Then came another pitch. Recalling the encounter on MGV’s website, she describes Marc Schröder bringing her into a five-hour sales bootcamp. The instruction was wonderfully inconvenient: Now shut your computer and pitch me Modern Health
. Away went the screen. What remained was the founder and her ability to explain why somebody should buy.
- MGV backs enterprise software at the earliest stages.
- Its practical specialty is teaching founders to build sales operations.
- The useful takeaway: make customer knowledge teachable before adding people.
That scene gets closer to MGV’s proposition than a list of sectors could. Software investors can supply introductions, advice and money. MGV makes a particular promise about the work that follows: help the person who understands the product become someone who can build an organization around selling it. Watson credits the exercise with helping establish Modern Health’s sales foundation.
A business learned on the phone
Schröder’s route to venture capital began with staffing work while studying law in Germany. In his account, the ingredients were a telephone, spreadsheets and persistent outreach. He matched people with jobs, trained them and kept clients coming back. Before there was a venture portfolio, there was a service business whose next customer had to be earned.
Through those relationships he met Carsten Maschmeyer, the German entrepreneur who became his mentor and eventual MGV co-founder. Schröder worked on sales at the Maschmeyer Group and invested in European startups before helping establish MGV in San Francisco in 2017. His biography dates the beginning to January; a contemporary partner announcement places the public launch in October.
The distinction helps explain the firm’s expertise. MGV approaches company building through commercial routines: learning what matters to a buyer, preparing the conversation and teaching somebody else to carry it forward. Its founders arrived with experience in selling and investing. The bootcamp puts that experience into a form a technical founder can practice.
Even the name needed a customer test
There is a pleasingly human example of learning from an audience in Schröder’s 2025 OMR podcast interview. An early name was Atlantic Tech. The intended idea connected Europe and America. Americans pointed out the awkward geography: San Francisco was on the Pacific. The team reconsidered and proposed a name reflecting its origins, Maschmeyer Group Ventures, later shortened to MGV.
It is a small naming stumble, with a useful lesson. An explanation can feel obvious inside a company and land quite differently outside it. That gap is precisely where sales practice becomes useful.
The customer is under no obligation to admire the thinking that produced your pitch.
Make the second sale teachable
MGV’s published services reach into the mechanics: assessing sales hires, designing compensation, setting up onboarding, practicing demonstrations and qualifying leads. This is support for building a team, rather than a suggestion that the investor will permanently sell on the founder’s behalf.
Schröder’s 2021 sales essay supplies a portable version of the method. Build detailed buyer profiles. Adapt call scripts to those buyers. Map the funnel. Record what happens in deals. Revisit the material as the product and customer knowledge change. A playbook earns its keep when another person can use it and when new evidence can improve it.
One useful loop, drawn from MGV’s published sales guidance. An explanatory diagram, not a measured performance result.
The scarce input here is founder attention. Someone has to review calls, distinguish a real objection from polite hesitation and change the training. Hiring cannot eliminate that work. The practical question is whether the founder is transferring knowledge or merely transferring responsibility for an unresolved problem.
Follow the buyer, then the money
The portfolio makes the commercial emphasis concrete. Modern Health sells mental-health support to employers. Layr helps insurance agencies and brokerages manage small commercial business. These are different products, but both require explaining value to an organizational buyer. MGV’s portfolio also includes financial software, infrastructure and AI businesses.
There are documented milestones. Modern Health announced a $74 million Series D at a $1.17 billion valuation in February 2021. Layr named MGV among participants in its $10 million Series A in March 2022. Those figures describe the companies’ rounds. They establish neither MGV’s individual check nor the cash its investors received.
Modern Health’s announced valuation at its Series D.
A company valuation, not a disclosed MGV fund return.MGV itself operates as a venture investor. Founders receive capital and operating help; fund investors seek returns from the portfolio. Its Fund II notice, signed March 6, 2026, describes pooled fund interests and an indefinite offering. At that filing, no interests had been sold. The document allows certain fees under the fund’s governing terms. A filing records an offering’s status on a date; it does not establish a completed fundraise.
AI still needs a reason to buy
MGV’s first-quarter 2025 newsletter emphasized AI applications and infrastructure, especially tools integrated into everyday workflows. That emphasis broadens the technology under consideration while preserving a familiar commercial question: whose work gets better? In August 2026, Schröder argued that early founder relationships and practical operating help matter as attractive seed opportunities become expensive quickly.
The positioning is clear within the crowded seed market. A founder choosing investors can weigh sector knowledge, follow-on connections, capital and practical help. MGV puts sales teaching near the center of that choice. Its approach makes particular sense for enterprise founders who want to learn those skills and spend time applying them.
Try the exercise before the fundraise
There are limits to the proposition. As a matter of business logic, better training cannot create a customer need that does not exist. A polished demo cannot repair unsuitable economics. If conversations repeatedly reveal that buyers want something else, the product may need changing. Recording those responses is useful only if somebody acts on them.
A reader can copy the opening exercise today. Close the laptop. Explain the buyer’s problem, the product’s value and the reason to act. Then write down the questions that follow. Repeat with someone who owes you no encouragement. You may leave with a better pitch. More usefully, you may leave with a better understanding of what you are building.