Last Updated on December 8, 2017 by Tim
ROCeteer, Inc. is a privately funded company based in the United States. ROCeteer offers coaching, mentoring and training support to entrepreneurial ecosystems. The C-Suite executive team provides decades of experience in operations, strategy, marketing, technology, finance and team dynamics.
With a focus on Return on Capital and a Return on Community (ROC), ROCeteer unleashes the potential of entrepreneurial ecosystems to Transcend Awesome. Working primarily with seed-to-early stage start-ups and small businesses, ROCeteer serves as an added value resource – delivering expertise and oversight to lean teams and the software to help connect them.
Currently supporting the Downtown Project, a $350 million urban revitalization initiative in Downtown Las Vegas, ROCeteer is engaged with over 165 technology companies and small businesses that have been funded by VegasTech, the Small Business Fund and private investments.
The name ROCteer came from the ROC acronym. They use it to mean “Return On Capital” and “Return On Community.” Return On Community is basically about helping all the businesses inside of this ecosystem flourish. And if they can help them to help each other, then effectively, the value of the community will grow. Return On Capital is basically about getting businesses to be cashflow positive. Some tech companies will just get regular funding because they’re not expected to be cashflow positive in the early stages, but the small businesses really do need to start making a profit. When their cash runs out, if they’re not making money, they’re going to close down. And Downtown has already seen that happen.
ROCeteer is an interesting company in that it only works for ecosystems; it doesn’t work for companies. If you made lots of money and decided to create an investment fund and invest in twenty companies, you could hire ROCeteer to help fund your portfolio. Right now they work for Tony Hsieh’s ecosystem, which happens to be around 165 companies. So Tony funds ROCeteer to provide services to all of his investments, and then those investments don’t panic. If you are one of the funded companies and you want to have us come in and help you for a couple of hours and there is no payment as the ecosystem has already paid for it.
ROCeteer works at three levels: the human, the team, and the community. They have distinct programs where they coach, mentor, and train humans; coach, mentor, train teams of people; and also help the teams talk to the teams and help the humans to talk to the humans within the community itself. So they are a bit of the glue that hopefully helps the ecosystem flourish. ROCeteers statement of purpose is, “We unleash the potential of entrepreneurial ecosystems to transcend awesome.”
There are many mentor-matching applications that already exist but many of them are complex and require too much effort on the part of the mentor. By using ROCeteer’s expertise in UI/UX they’ve found a way to match people with peer mentors and decrease mentor fatigue. They’ve also created a way to connect the community of an entire ecosystem to leverage the skills in a new way.
Website: roceteer.com
