
John Santaguida
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- Full Name
- John Santaguida
- Title
- Managing Partner & Chief Executive Officer, McMorgan & Company (angel investor in a personal capacity)
- Firm
- McMorgan & Company
- Firm Type
- Angel investor / individual (day job: institutional investment management firm)
- Investment Stage
- Seed / early-stage angel rounds
- Sector Focus
- B2B software, productivity/SaaS, food & beverage tech, media & information services
- Geographic Focus
- United States (primarily New York / U.S. startups)
- Location
- New York metropolitan area
Background
John Santaguida is the Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer of McMorgan & Company, a San Francisco–headquartered institutional investment management firm that specializes in tailored solutions for pension funds, Taft-Hartley plans, and retirement plans. He joined McMorgan in 2006 and has led the firm as CEO since 2008, overseeing investment strategy, relationship management, operations, and compliance, and serving on the firm's Investment Committee. He has more than 40 years of experience in institutional investments.
Before McMorgan, Santaguida served as Managing Director of the Taft-Hartley division at New York Life Investments. Earlier in his career he spent roughly a decade at Wachovia Corporation, where he was National Sales Manager for the Retirement Services division, and about a decade in progressively senior roles at Bankers Trust Company. He holds Series 7, 24, and 66 FINRA licenses.
He earned a BBA from The George Washington University and an MBA from New York University. He maintains ties to his alma mater through The GW Investment Institute, where he has participated as a venture-capital panelist alongside investors such as David Asper of the Asper Group.
Separate from his institutional role at McMorgan, Santaguida is active as an individual angel investor, backing early-stage technology startups — a profile that fits the "seed round" stub in the source data. His angel activity is documented through his AngelList/Wellfound investor profile rather than through McMorgan itself, which manages institutional client capital rather than venture investments.
Investment Thesis & Focus
- Invests personally as an angel at the seed / early stage, typically writing individual-sized angel checks rather than institutional fund allocations.
- Leans toward B2B and productivity software (SaaS), food & beverage / restaurant technology, and media & information services — sectors reflected across his disclosed deals.
- Draws on four decades of institutional investment and retirement-plan expertise, suggesting comfort with operationally rigorous, revenue-oriented businesses over pure moonshots.
- No publicly stated first-person thesis or fixed check-size range was found; his selections skew toward founder-led, early-revenue software and consumer-tech companies.
Notable Investments
- Obsess (ObsessVR) — experiential/virtual-store e-commerce and AR/VR retail platform.
- GoParrot — digital ordering and marketing automation platform for restaurants (acquired by ItsaCheckmate).
- SevenFifty (SevenFifty Technologies) — B2B marketplace and data platform connecting the beverage-alcohol trade (distributors, retailers, restaurants); acquired by Provi in 2021.
- CapLinked — enterprise SaaS platform for secure document sharing, virtual data rooms, and deal management.
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