On October 31, 2017, an online building-materials company entered creditor protection in Canada. BuildDirect sold things people could touch: flooring, tile, the heavy ingredients of a renovation. Its ambitions belonged to the internet. The collision makes a useful starting point for understanding Mohr Davidow Ventures, an investor whose work extended well beyond choosing an attractive business plan.
- MDV financed technology companies across software, chips, healthcare and energy.
- Its support included recruiting, pricing and the practical work of finding a market.
- BuildDirect’s reset shows why a large opportunity can require a narrower customer focus.
The customer hiding inside the market
Five months after that creditor-protection filing, BuildDirect announced a $43 million financing led by MDV. Read the arithmetic carefully: $28 million was new funding; $15 million was interim financing converted during the restructuring. Creditors also agreed to exchange $58 million of debt for equity. This was an expensive exercise in getting another chance.
The commercial change was more interesting than the headline number. BuildDirect renewed its focus on contractors, builders and interior designers. Professionals already represented more than a third of revenue, according to its March 2018 announcement. A homeowner might renovate once. A contractor could return for the next job.
“We are very bullish on the shift towards professional contractors.”
Katherine Barr / MDV / March 2018
Years later, BuildDirect’s finance chief described the earlier ambition as becoming the Amazon of building materials. He attributed its failure to timing, execution and insufficient recurring revenue. The surviving assets included manufacturer relationships, logistics and technology. The revised business concentrated on flooring and professionals. In that management account, the useful question becomes precise: which customers make those assets worth keeping?
An engineer who understood selling
MDV dates its roots to 1983. Bill Davidow’s own biography places his founding role in 1985. The distinction is small but revealing: institutions accumulate history in stages. Davidow brought experience at Intel, Hewlett-Packard and General Electric, rather than a career spent exclusively evaluating other people’s companies. His background joined engineering knowledge to the messy business of selling technology.
At Intel, Davidow helped lead Operation Crush, the marketing effort around its microprocessors. His oral history describes a career that moved from scientific work toward marketing. In another recollection, he explains that Art Rock introduced him to Larry Mohr. He had considered established venture firms before accepting Mohr’s invitation to become a partner. The origin involves a personal introduction and a choice about whom to build with.
The check comes with homework
What did founders actually get? The firm’s registered services offer an unusually concrete answer. They include recruiting and retaining managers, developing marketing strategies, packaging technology, determining prices and establishing strategic relationships. Each addresses a familiar startup problem: a working invention leaves plenty of unfinished business.
There are two constituencies here. Entrepreneurs receive financing and help building companies. Fund investors supply the capital and seek investment returns. In Senate testimony in 2011, MDV partner Will Coleman identified endowments, foundations and families among those investors. He said the firm had funded more than 250 companies since 1983. That is a historical measure of activity, rather than a current portfolio count.
The breadth matters. A specialist can develop close knowledge of one market. MDV’s record crosses information technology, life sciences and energy. The potential advantage is experience translating technical progress into a commercial organization. The demand on the investor is correspondingly high: a laboratory milestone, a factory and a software sales pipeline require different judgments.
Different products. The same commercial question.
Consider Verinata Health. Its non-invasive prenatal test became part of Illumina when the acquisition closed in February 2013. The agreed price was $350 million, plus up to $100 million in milestone payments. Illumina gained a test, intellectual property and a place in reproductive health. The buyer wanted a capability with a clinical use.
Coupa addressed a different customer altogether: the business trying to manage spending. Thoma Bravo completed its acquisition for approximately $8 billion in February 2023. Webscale, meanwhile, sold cloud infrastructure services to ecommerce merchants. Its $26 million Series C in 2021 was co-led by MDV, BGV and STCAP Ventures, with plans to expand product adoption and operating teams. These are acquisition and financing figures, respectively; neither tells us MDV’s return.
Even investors change the plan
In June 2016, Reuters reported the launch of Wildcat Venture Partners by MDV’s Bill Ericson, Katherine Barr and Bryan Stolle, alongside InterWest’s Bruce Cleveland. The new firm focused on companies with products ready for market but insufficient revenue to make raising money easy. Reuters also reported that MDV’s last fund at that point was a $670 million vehicle raised in 2007. A respected portfolio did not make fundraising automatic.
That separate venture belongs in any account of MDV. So do later portfolio events: UiPath announced its acquisition of WorkFusion in February 2026. An investor’s history keeps producing company news long after a particular team or fund has changed. For founders researching potential backers, dates and individual partners deserve as much attention as the firm’s name.
Buy the next piece of evidence
There is a practical idea to borrow. In a Stanford talk about Nanosolar, MDV partner Erik Straser described budgeting toward the next milestone, often a technical one. Work backward: what must be demonstrated, which people are needed, and how much time and capital will that require? This turns a broad ambition into a testable operating plan.
It also has conditions. Technical progress needs a buyer, and a capital-intensive business needs financing that lasts long enough to commercialize it. Coleman’s energy testimony emphasized policy uncertainty as another constraint. A founder can copy the discipline without copying the funding model: identify the next uncertainty worth paying to resolve. BuildDirect’s experience adds the uncomfortable follow-up. Sometimes the evidence asks you to choose a smaller market inside the big one.