Moments of impact from Scott Maxwell's career
I founded OpenView Venture Partners to fill a critical gap in the venture capital landscape. At the time, most VCs focused exclusively on early-stage startups or large growth equity deals, leaving expansion-stage B2B software companies—those generating between $1-50M in revenue—underserved. These companies had proven product-market fit but needed strategic go-to-market support to scale effectively, and no dedicated firm existed to meet their unique needs. To build OpenView from this insight, I raised our first $100M fund and assembled a differentiated team by recruiting three operating partners with deep B2B SaaS expertise. Together, we developed a comprehensive expansion-stage playbook that focused specifically on helping portfolio companies optimize their go-to-market strategies during this critical growth phase. We successfully deployed the fund across 12 companies and achieved a 3.2x return. More significantly, OpenView became the category-defining firm for expansion-stage B2B SaaS investing, validating the market need we identified. The strategy's success influenced the broader venture capital ecosystem, with several other VCs subsequently launching similar expansion-stage investment programs modeled after our approach.
