When you meet Jukka Alanen the word “rebel” doesn’t exactly spring to mind. He dresses in starched dress shirts and blazers. He started his career at McKinsey & Company. And his last job before starting his own venture fund, was an SVP of PagerDuty, a publicly traded tech company.
But after helping build three tech companies that collectively amounted to $3.5 billion in exits and years of AI operations and process automations under his belt, Jukka was being recruited by plenty of the big venture capital firms.
He rebelled to start his own.
And he turned to VC Lab to start Rebellion Ventures.
“I didn’t want to come into an existing framework,” he says. “I was developing a new vision for venture capital and I wanted to build it from the ground up.”
Rebellion Venture is a $12.9 million fund focused on using AI and autonomy to transform operations and processes in massive traditional industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics. Industries where there are often poor outcomes, cost inefficiencies, and a lot of jobs that people don’t want to do.
What’s more rebellious about it is its structure: In addition to financial limited partners, Rebellion has seventy “operating limited partners” who include unicorn founders, operating executives, and industry experts who he regularly taps to help the portfolio accelerate and scale their businesses. Sometimes it's informal coaching, or formally becoming an advisor. Other times, it’s making vital introductions to customers or helping source key employees. Or helping Jukka with due diligence, before an investment.
“Our founders don’t need to repeat the same mistakes we made,” he says. “We can help them scale faster, and they can help me scale my impact.”
It was clearly a structure that resonated with investors: Jukka completed the first close of Rebellion Ventures in a mere two and a half months, the fastest in his VC Lab cohort. The rest of the fund closed in 18 months, as he started investing and building his track record.
He was confident in his ability to find deals and mentor and advise founders. But Decile Group helped him with the fund administration, operations, regulations and all the back office aspects to setting up and running a venture fund. He didn’t expect to find as much value in the community as he did.
“There wound up being a lot of value in being able to connect with others who were going through the same thing,” he says. “I didn’t expect that to be as helpful as it was.”
Strategically Small
Jukka’s speed to first close indicates that he could have raised a larger fund if he’d wanted to. But he sees a lot of advantages in being strategically small.
- Squeezing checks into hot deals. “When you have a large fund you always have to lead the round. It can be a zero sum game. If you can’t get that one slot, you are out,” he says. But that scorching hot deal can likely accommodate several smaller checks, provided you can add value. “We’ve been able to invest in rounds that were already oversubscribed and in some cases already closed rounds, because the entrepreneur saw that we can bring a lot of value and bring great networks,” he says.
- More flexible liquidity. Large investors often have to wait until an IPO or acquisition to get a return. If they have a large position or serve on the board, selling early is either a negative signal or impossible. But smaller, earlier checks have much more flexibility. “If a company gets to a certain point where it makes more sense to return some proceeds back to LPs we can be more agile,” he says. “We don’t have to hold on until the IPO.”
- Putting ethics first. Ethical, responsible autonomy is at the core of Jukka’s investment philosophy. Large funds don’t always have the luxury of focusing on ethics first. “Sometimes when you have these monstrous mega funds, you can’t take ethical stances,” he says. “You have to invest in the asshole, because that’s gonna be the big company and you need the big return. With a smaller fund you can be more thoughtful and selective.”
Jukka may not dress the part of a rebel.
He may not have the resume of a rebel.
But his fund is mounting a quiet rebellion, nonetheless.
“It’s a rebellion against the old way of doing things,” he says. “Against old operations, old processes, the old large mega fund model, against investing that doesn’t focus on being a force for good in the world.”