There is a very specific problem every startup eventually faces: the people who built the company speak in products, missions, and growth loops. The people who fund it speak in LTV/CAC ratios, liquidation preferences, and portfolio construction theory. Peter Blackwood has spent his career living in the gap between those two worlds - first on behalf of Wall Street, and now on behalf of founders.
Blackwood is a Partner on the Capital Network team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Consumer vertical and manages the firm's global investor, corporate strategic, and advisory relationships for consumer and gaming companies. The Capital Network is one of a16z's most powerful and least-discussed operating advantages: a structured layer of relationships with institutional investors, corporate strategics, and financial advisors that portfolio companies can tap when they go to market for their next round.
Before he joined a16z, Blackwood spent nearly two decades as the person portfolio companies eventually call - the investment banker who knows which funds are actively deploying, which strategics are looking for acquisition targets, and how to structure a process that doesn't leave money on the table. He started at SoundView Technology Group in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, handling corporate finance for technology clients. He survived the bust, and spent the next decade and a half getting sharper.
At Janney Montgomery Scott, where he ran the technology and media investment banking group, and then at JMP Securities, where he led the internet and digital media banking franchise, Blackwood built relationships across every tier of the technology capital stack - from growth equity funds to crossover investors to corporate development teams at the large platforms. That network, built over years of doing actual deals, became the thing a16z wanted.
The pivot from banker to venture operator is rarer than it sounds. Most investment bankers who migrate to VC take the traditional route - joining as deal partners or analysts, putting capital to work. Blackwood took a different turn. He joined a16z's Capital Network - a team of operators and relationship specialists whose job is not to source or lead investments, but to make the investments a16z has already made dramatically more valuable. That means knowing who is raising, who is deploying, and who has a board seat open - and connecting those dots for a portfolio of hundreds of companies.