Rudy Garza
G51 Capital Founding Partner & The Alternatives Fund Founder
Mr. Garza is leveraging his history, expertise and resources to build a global network of Universities, Students, Startups, Industry and Family Offices to speed up the pace of Innovation and Job creation with his work at G51 Amplify. The G51 Venture Scholars Program is currently a national initiative in place at 13 top graduate school programs and growing. From Austin to Raleigh-Durham to Boston and Chicago and west to Palo Alto students are learning and collaborating about promising Startups and helping the Startups find referrals, advice and funding. There are over 200 Venture Scholar alumni working in amazing careers at leading companies across the country and internationally. The intellectual horsepower of the cohorts and academic support in the program coupled with the exposure to raw American startup ingenuity is driving continuous organic growth to national and global locations.
His investment and startup experience comes from being the founder and prior managing director of G51 Capital Management, LLC where he focused on the development of all portfolio companies, syndication partnerships and deal flow. Through investing, mentoring as well as serving on portfolio boards, he assisted portfolio companies in defining and then guiding the implementation of well grounded business and marketing strategies. He applied his knowledge of successful business models; go to market strategies with business growth initiatives, capital formation planning and talent sourcing.
Active in the venture business since 1996, he has been an active leader in the venture community, including longstanding participation in National Venture Capital Association and the Texas Venture Capital Association. His firm and the companies in which he has invested have syndicated over $300 million dollars of investment from leading venture firms such as Bain Capital, Polaris Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Institutional Venture Partners, Foundry Group, Floodgate, Silverton Ventures among others; as well as from corporate venture investors like Intel and HP. He has been involved in multiple acquisitions of his portfolio companies by Fortune 500 companies including Cisco, ADP, Prudential, SAP and others.
He is a past chairman of the board and past president of the University of Texas Exes 100,000 member alumni association and has served as the chairman of the Alumni Endowment Investment Committee. He is a lifetime honorary trustee of the Dell Children’s Medical Center. He received his MBA from The University of Texas and his BBA from St. Edwards University both in Austin.
