Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Driven leader seeking new roads
JEREMY WILSON
Jeremy Wilson is president, CEO and managing partner of NewRoad Ventures, a Bentonville-based venture capital firm. He is also the founder and chairman of Now Diagnostics, a Springdale firm that develops diagnostic tests. Both companies started in 2012. Wilson also spent 16 years working for WalMart Stores Inc. and about four years at Rockfish.
Q. How does a venture fund work?
A. Essentially a venture fund raises capital from outside investors and fund partners into a pool of capital and either creates new businesses or invests into existing businesses.
Q. How do you measure personal success?
A. When I feel most successful, it’s a balance. I have a balance between my faith, my family and my work. If I try to put metrics around the work side I would say when I can look at hard data, like 200 jobs at double the state average salary, I feel successful. I can look at 14 companies that have grown rapidly; a portfolio of investments that is up about four times in valuation over that last two years or so. For me personally it’s about when I feel that balance.
Q. What’s next for you?
A. I don’t know. I think I have several more years of pouring my heart and soul into this business. We want this company to be known as the “Berkshire of the Ozarks.” We want to have a long track record of taking capital and putting it into companies that grow and scale quickly, add to the ecosystem of the area and add to the ecosystem of the country. We can create new jobs and new technologies and businesses that were never dreamed of before.
Q. What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced and how did you overcome it?
A. Changing paths. A lot of people start with one path and they stay on that basic path for most of their careers. It doesn’t mean they’re not growing or evolving or moving up in the company, but it’s the same sort of type of job. One of my mentors at Wal-Mart was a guy named Tom Schoewe, chief financial officer for 10 years, and he would always tell me there are basically two paths within the company: One is the support role and one is an operating role. You can choose either path and both are fine, but they have different characteristics. Support roles tend to be safer, pay less, be a lot more stable and less glamorous. The operating roles tend to be more dangerous; you make a bad decision and you get fired and you have more outward pressure. It took me a while to understand which I wanted to go down. I had a finance degree, so I naturally figured it was on the support side.
Q. What advice do you give as a mentor?
A. Surround yourself with good people who make you better. You don’t know what you don’t know; no one knows everything. One of our core values here is humility. There are two pieces of advice I would give people in their careers: recognize you need good people around you and don’t be afraid to ask them for counsel.
Q. Who has been the most influential person in your life?
A. There are two. One is Lee Scott, and that’s from a leadership perspective. He took the time to teach me lessons, to educate me, to challenge me, to let me
fail. I was in my 20s when I took over investor relations for the largest company in the world. I shouldn’t have been in that role; there was nothing smart about that, but they let me do it. At times I think they let me make bad decisions that turned out OK. They supported me
Q. If you could go back in time and change one thing in your life, what would it be?
A. I would spend more time as a younger person — high school through college — really trying to figure out what I wanted to do in life. I don’t know if it’s my generation or what, but you sort of had this pre-determined path for you. I don’t know that I would end up in a different place; I would like to think I wouldn’t have. But I would have liked to be more thoughtful about what I wanted to do with life.
“Surround yourself with good people who make you better. You don’t know what you don’t know; no one knows everything. One of our core values here is
humility.”
— Jeremy Wilson, president and chief executive officer for NewRoad Ventures