Roland Reynolds

Roland Reynolds is a Senior Managing Director at Industry Ventures, a San Francisco–based venture firm that invests across the venture ecosystem via secondaries, hybrid funds, direct co-investments, and fund-of-funds. He focuses on originating, valuing, and managing primary fund commitments, early secondary limited-partnership investments, and direct company investments for the firm's Direct and Partnership Holdings team. He sits on the investment committee for those funds and is active in fundraising and managing limited-partner relationships.

He was one of the earliest institutional investors in emerging small funds, starting around 2007 as founder of Little Hawk Capital Management LLC, a fund-of-funds backing emerging managers. Little Hawk was acquired by Industry Ventures, and in 2009 Reynolds joined the firm to build out its hybrid/fund-of-funds strategy of backing small early-stage VCs and directly co-investing in their breakout companies. Earlier, he spent roughly five years as a Principal at Columbia Capital, a communications- and IT-focused venture firm (based in Alexandria, VA), and began his career as an investment banker at JP Morgan & Co. in New York.

Reynolds graduated from Princeton University with high honors (where he was a Sprint football player) and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. He is described by his firm bio as an East Coast native with West Coast aspirations who prefers to work with optimists.

In January 2026, Goldman Sachs completed its acquisition of Industry Ventures (closed January 5, 2026). As part of the deal, Reynolds — alongside Industry Ventures founder Hans Swildens and Justin Burden — joined Goldman Sachs as a Partner in its Asset & Wealth Management division.

• Invests across the full venture stack: emerging-manager fund commitments, LP secondaries, hybrid funds, and direct company investments — rather than classic single-company angel checks.
• In the 2024 $900M hybrid fund (Industry Ventures' seventh), capital is split ~40% backing early-stage VC funds (typically $250M or smaller, Seed/Series A), ~40% direct investments in promising (mainly Series B) companies from those partner funds, and ~20% acquiring stakes in emerging firms from exiting LPs.
• Direct checks generally run $2M–$12M per company; he likes backing experienced investors who spin out of established firms to launch their own funds.
• On thesis, Reynolds has said the firm sees "the vast majority of our managers… getting their funds done… most are [raising] larger fund sizes," and he points to digital-transformation tailwinds and surging generative-AI use cases as expanding early-stage opportunity.
• Says "yes" largely on the strength of manager relationships and demonstrated breakout traction within partner portfolios, not cold-sourced single deals.