In a significant stride towards decentralizing American innovation, Mike Moradi, co-founder and general partner of Cortado Ventures, is spearheading a movement to unlock the vast entrepreneurial potential of the U.S. Midcontinent. As featured in the NVCA’s "Meet a VC" series, Cortado Ventures, based in Oklahoma City, is a seed-stage firm committed to investing in frontier technology companies, operating on the conviction that the most transformative founders are often those with deep, firsthand experience within critical industries. This approach challenges traditional venture capital paradigms, aiming to cultivate a thriving ecosystem where capital, customers, and networks converge to support groundbreaking ventures far beyond established tech hubs.
The Genesis of a Founder-First VC: Moradi’s Entrepreneurial Odyssey
Mike Moradi’s journey into venture capital is deeply rooted in his extensive and often challenging experience as an entrepreneur. A six-time founder, Moradi navigated the complexities of building and leading companies across technically intricate sectors such as biopharmaceuticals and nanotechnology. His path, however, was not without significant hurdles, beginning with the failure of his first company after leaving dental school. This early setback, rather than deterring him, forged a foundational resilience. "The lesson was to keep pushing past every obstacle, to not be discouraged by hearing the word ‘no,’ and to stay the course," Moradi recalls, emphasizing the invaluable nature of persistence in the face of adversity.
Subsequent ventures brought both rapid success and crucial lessons. One company achieved swift growth and was acquired by a Fortune 100 enterprise, showcasing his capacity for scaling innovation. Another San Francisco Bay Area startup also saw an acquisition, but only after a precarious period that followed an $18 million Series B financing round, nearly pushing the company to the brink. This experience illuminated a different, equally critical lesson: while capital can accelerate growth, speed is only beneficial when a business is moving in the right direction and is genuinely prepared for scale. Moradi keenly observed, "A high valuation and a full bank account will happily let you scale the wrong thing." This insight underscored the importance of strategic capital deployment, ensuring that funding supports the validation of assumptions and risk reduction, rather than premature expansion.
Armed with these hard-won lessons, Moradi’s vision for Cortado Ventures crystallized. In 2020, he co-founded the firm alongside a team of seasoned founders, CEOs, and operators, all united by a common goal: to build the kind of supportive, understanding venture firm they wished had existed during their own entrepreneurial endeavors. This ethos of "Built by Founders, for Founders" ensures that Cortado not only provides crucial investment but also offers profound operational insights and a robust network of support, recognizing the nuanced decisions and challenges faced by early-stage entrepreneurs.
The Midcontinent Advantage: A New Frontier for Innovation
Cortado Ventures’ investment thesis is firmly anchored in the unique competitive advantages offered by the U.S. Midcontinent. This region, often overlooked by traditional venture capital concentrated on the coasts, is a crucible of innovation for industries undergoing immense pressure to evolve. Sectors such as energy, aerospace and defense, healthcare, manufacturing, mobility, and logistics are deeply embedded in complex physical environments, established supply chains, and demanding customer relationships. Transforming these requires more than just compelling software; it demands an intimate, granular understanding of their operational intricacies.
Cortado specifically targets experienced technical founders who possess this invaluable domain knowledge—individuals who have spent years within hospitals, factories, laboratories, energy companies, aerospace programs, or logistics networks before identifying a critical problem and envisioning a disruptive solution. Their firsthand experience grants them unparalleled credibility with customers, deep insight into implementation challenges, and a knowledge base that is exceedingly difficult to cultivate from an external perspective.
Beyond human capital, the geography itself offers tangible investment advantages. The Midcontinent provides unparalleled proximity to these critical industries and their potential customers, a readily available technically skilled workforce, strong research institutions, complementary public funding initiatives, and significantly lower company-building costs compared to coastal tech hubs. This combination fosters an environment ripe for the development of innovative solutions in areas ranging from space communications and industrial safety to critical infrastructure cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, and sustainable energy.
Cortado’s strategy is not predicated on the notion that Midcontinent founders deserve investment simply because they have historically attracted less venture capital. Instead, it is built on the unwavering conviction that proximity to "hard problems" inherently produces differentiated companies and, ultimately, strong returns. As Moradi articulates, "Talent is not concentrated anywhere in particular. Capital and networks have just been slower to distribute than talent has." This perspective highlights a systemic inefficiency in venture capital allocation, which Cortado is actively working to correct, thereby expanding the geographical footprint of American innovation and tapping into previously overlooked sources of insight and ingenuity.
Beyond Capital: Cultivating a Thriving Ecosystem
Initially, Moradi believed that the primary constraint facing emerging venture ecosystems like the Midcontinent was a shortage of capital. Cortado Ventures played a pivotal role in demonstrating that promising companies could indeed be identified and funded within the region. However, as the firm matured and its understanding deepened, Moradi’s view of what founders truly needed expanded significantly. "Five years ago, I would have said the limiting reagent in a young ecosystem was capital. Capital turned out to be necessary, and also nowhere close to sufficient," he reflects.
Founders require a multifaceted support system that extends far beyond mere financial injection. They need experienced operators who can help them anticipate and circumvent preventable mistakes, early-adopting customers willing to trial unproven technologies, patient investors prepared to bridge the gaps between milestones, and a vibrant community where vital relationships can naturally form. Moradi emphasizes, "Money can accelerate a company… It cannot stand in for experience."
This realization profoundly shaped Cortado’s role within the broader Midcontinent ecosystem. The firm actively works to connect founders with funders, universities, corporations, policymakers, and technical experts, consciously eschewing an exclusive approach to these relationships for its own portfolio companies. Cortado’s annual Midcontinent Venture Capital Summit serves as a crucial convening point, bringing together investors, limited partners, founders, and ecosystem leaders from across the nation. Furthermore, the firm collaborates extensively with regional entrepreneurship organizations and The Verge, an Oklahoma City-based incubator and accelerator that provides essential company-building resources, programming, and capital connections. Each of these interactions is designed to facilitate connections—a potential customer, an invaluable advisor, a key employee, a strategic collaborator, or a future investor—collectively building the robust infrastructure necessary for more companies to successfully launch and scale. For Moradi, this is where venture capital’s true impact begins to transcend individual investments, fostering a stronger ecosystem that empowers more entrepreneurs and creates expanded opportunities for capital, talent, and innovation to converge.
The Discipline of Early-Stage Investment: Conviction Without False Certainty
Investing in early-stage ventures inherently involves navigating a landscape of incomplete information. Moradi candidly states, "Incomplete data is my job description." Rather than attempting to eliminate uncertainty, his approach is to strategically dissect assumptions, distinguishing those that can be immediately tested from those that will only be resolved over time. He rigorously identifies the critical conditions that must hold true, actively considers how they might be disproven, and meticulously evaluates the cost associated with achieving the next meaningful milestone.
Moradi’s strongest convictions typically center on the founding team’s capabilities, the authenticity and scale of the customer problem being addressed, and the company’s demonstrable rate of progress. He maintains a more cautious stance regarding predictions about the precise timing of an emerging market or the exact path a company might ultimately take to an exit. This discipline becomes particularly vital when a financing round is moving at a rapid pace, as a compelling founder and a competitive process can generate immense pressure to make a decision before central investment assumptions have been thoroughly vetted. "A hard deadline is exactly when people stop asking uncomfortable questions," Moradi observes, highlighting the psychological pitfalls of accelerated decision-making.
When necessary, Cortado will deliberately slow down the process, bringing in independent scientific or technical experts to bolster the evaluation. This additional diligence can either significantly strengthen the firm’s conviction or, conversely, reveal a compelling reason to step away from an investment. Intriguingly, many of Cortado’s strongest founder relationships have originated from this very scrutiny, as it sharpens strategic thinking and proactively identifies risks while there is still ample time to address them. However, slowing the decision-making process does not equate to slowing the response or support once an investment is made.
Moradi applies a similar discipline to valuation. He believes that "A sensible entry price is a form of protection for the founder, employees, and investors alike." While an aggressive valuation might feel like an immediate triumph, if the company’s subsequent progress fails to meet the elevated expectations tied to that figure, the repercussions can be severe, impacting founder ownership, employee equity, future fundraising options, and the company’s overall adaptability. This is a nuanced balance, as VCs can also inadvertently stifle a company’s potential with overly restrictive valuations. "The right number buys you options for years. In boom times, people forget that financial crises happen," Moradi wisely cautions, emphasizing that discipline is not a lack of belief in a founder’s ambition but rather a strategic mechanism to provide ambitious companies with the crucial flexibility and time required for long-term success.
Active Support and Strategic Intervention: Showing Up with Work Already Done
The Cortado Ventures team distinguishes itself through its profound operating experience, having collectively built, scaled, and exited companies across many of the very industries in which the firm invests. This practical, hands-on background profoundly shapes how Cortado supports founders when strategic plans inevitably shift or difficult decisions emerge. Moradi encapsulates meaningful support in two concise yet powerful words: "Speed and specificity."
He elaborates on this ethos: "Answer in hours rather than days and show up with work already done instead of advice. Better yet, pick up the phone." This proactive, results-oriented approach might involve rebuilding a complex financial model, facilitating a critical customer introduction, assisting in the recruitment of a senior executive, or even taking direct responsibility for navigating a challenging part of a board conversation. It also encompasses the difficult, yet essential, act of delivering candid feedback when a company’s runway is shortening or its strategic direction needs a radical pivot. Moradi, drawing from his own past, empathizes deeply with founders in such moments: "What helped was someone who lowered the temperature, told the truth to me and the board, and followed up after the meeting."
As Cortado and the surrounding ecosystem have matured, the sophistication of its founder support has evolved considerably. Portfolio companies now have access to a comprehensive network encompassing operating executives, industry specialists, expert advisors, prospective customers, dedicated coaches, fellow investors, and other founders within the firm’s extensive sphere. Concurrently, the needs of founders in the region have also progressed. While capital was once a scarce commodity, making Cortado’s investment and its ability to attract additional investors particularly valuable, today’s founders increasingly seek customer access, senior talent, specialized technical expertise, and, crucially, individuals willing to offer honest, unvarnished guidance. The firm’s role is never to usurp control from the entrepreneur; indeed, sometimes the most valuable contribution an investor can make is recognizing precisely when not to intervene. "Other times," Moradi notes, "being helpful means staying out of the way." This nuanced understanding of support underscores Cortado’s founder-centric philosophy.
Building What Outlasts a Fund: A Vision for Enduring Impact
Mike Moradi firmly believes that a venture firm’s responsibility extends far beyond the confines of its own portfolio and the lifecycle of a single fund. "We must build things that outlast a single fund," he asserts, outlining a vision for enduring impact. For Cortado, this translates into a dedicated commitment to strengthening the connective tissue among founders, funders, universities, corporations, and policymakers throughout the Midcontinent. Crucially, it also involves actively fostering the formation and growth of more investment firms within the region.
Moradi emphatically states, "This is not a zero-sum game. We want to enable a dozen other firms in our geography, and bring in outside funds for later rounds. We need to create scalable structures where everyone can win." This collaborative mindset aims to cultivate a larger, more interconnected investment community, thereby providing founders with a greater diversity of potential capital sources and expertise. Such an environment creates expanded opportunities for investors to collaborate and participate in promising companies, ultimately establishing a more durable and robust pathway between regional innovation and national capital markets.
Ecosystem building, however, does not diminish a firm’s fundamental responsibility to its limited partners. Moradi’s prior experience as a trustee and audit committee member for a state retirement system deeply reinforced the paramount importance of being direct and transparent about investment risk, duration, and potential losses. "Ecosystem building matters, and it does not excuse any of us from being disciplined fiduciaries first," he affirms, emphasizing the delicate balance between community development and stringent financial stewardship.
Moradi also views the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) as an indispensable component of the connective infrastructure supporting firms and founders nationwide. He highlights how critical policy issues—such as capital formation, research commercialization, immigration policies, government procurement, tax treatment, and securities regulations—are not abstract concepts. They directly influence an emerging manager’s ability to raise a fund, a startup’s capacity to attract top talent, and a new technology’s potential to reach the customers and institutions that desperately need it. "NVCA helps each of us make policy concrete and stay on top of the issues that matter in D.C. and beyond," Moradi states, underscoring the association’s vital role. Cortado’s active participation in the NVCA also provides a crucial platform to infuse a Midcontinent perspective into national dialogues concerning innovation, capital formation, and the future trajectory of the venture industry.
Expanding the Map of American Innovation
Mike Moradi hopes that Cortado Ventures’ narrative will contribute to a broader understanding of the true breadth and diversity of American venture capital. While the industry’s largest, most prominent firms often capture the lion’s share of public attention, the vast majority of venture capital activity comprises smaller, specialized investors writing early checks into niche markets—be they industrial, geographic, demographic, or otherwise. Moradi astutely points out, "Most of VC looks nothing like the caricature. The bulk of the industry is small firms writing early checks into some niche… And a VC firm is also a startup until fund 3 or 4."
These specialized firms play an absolutely essential role in identifying founders before their markets become obvious, skillfully connecting specialized knowledge with crucial capital, and guiding companies through the notoriously difficult period between a promising initial idea and the establishment of a sustainable business model. "The hardest work happens after the money moves," Moradi stresses, highlighting the intensive, hands-on support required for early-stage success.
The accelerating pace of technological advancement is making this work even more consequential. Innovations in artificial intelligence, automation, advanced manufacturing, energy technologies, biology, and space technology are dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of pursuing ambitious ideas. Consequently, small, agile teams can now tackle opportunities that once demanded the immense resources of large corporations or extensive national programs. Crucially, many of these innovative teams are emerging in locations intimately connected to the very problems they are striving to solve.
This decentralization of innovation is the broader, transformative impact of expanding venture capital across America. When investors consciously look beyond familiar networks and actively seek out founders where critical industries operate, they facilitate the transformation of more ideas into viable companies, enable more groundbreaking technologies to reach the market, and empower more communities to actively participate in and benefit from the country’s innovation economy. For Moradi, the unwavering optimism is fueled by the founders themselves—those courageous individuals who dare to attempt what others deem impossible. "Never forget that we’re here for them. When we do this right, everyone, including humanity, wins," he concludes, encapsulating the profound purpose driving Cortado Ventures’ mission.
The NVCA is proud to count Cortado Ventures among its distinguished members, recognizing its pivotal role in shaping the future of venture capital and American innovation. To delve deeper into the firm’s impactful work, visit cortado.ventures.
