Blair Garrou joined Shiv Narayanan on the Private Equity Value Creation podcast to talk through how we at Mercury Fund build value in early-stage companies outside the coasts and what he’s seeing in the AI market right now. Blair covered:
- The Mercury Method: our post-investment playbook, built on ops hygiene audits, fractional executives, Quicksilver Labs (our in-house AI research lab), and formal liquidity planning that gets companies ready to transact years before an exit.
- AI in go-to-market: why he thinks early-stage companies can run marketing with one person, and why brand voice has to come from a human before agents can scale it.
- How we manage the portfolio: which companies should chase West Coast growth, which should grow efficiently toward an exit, and why moving the middle of a portfolio from 2 to 3x to 3 to 4x matters so much for fund returns.
- The AI valuation gap: why the “SaaS apocalypse” is the market throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and why vertical companies with real data moats and systems of record aren’t going anywhere.
Watch the full conversation: https://www.howtosaas.com/episode-153-blair-garrou-mercury-fund
