Joe Musselman
“I bring teams, leaders, and cultures to the other side of the most difficult question: What’s next?”
- Joe Musselman
-
TLC: Teams, Leadership & Culture
Joe Musselman
Joe Musselman is a proud American entrepreneur and investor. He is the Founder and Managing Partner of Bravo Victor Venture Capital or “BVVC.” A U.S.-based early-seed and series A venture capital fund, headquartered in Chicago, IL, with operations across the country. Joe is held accountable for the firm’s strategic vision and day-to-day mission operations. He leads all teams at the firm: capital, investment, portfolio, and fund operations. Joe chairs the Investment Committee at BVVC. He also led the firm’s creation and backing of School.House, a unique VC/PE platform that offers seven experiences dedicated to serving national security founders and broader ecosystems of support.
Since 2019, across his portfolio universe, Joe has early-seed to early-growth investments into companies such as Tive, X-Bow Systems, Firestorm, Epsilon3, Vatn, HavocAI, Tern, and notable early breakouts such as Anduril ($14b), Figure ($2.6b) and Epirus ($1.3b). He also recently led investments into UNION, a new energetics prime, where he is co-founder and Chairman.
Read More
Joe has earned the backing of Forbes Midas Touch investors, top technology founders, prestigious institutions, Fortune 100 executives, family offices, and cross-sector leadership icons. Now, alongside this unique ecosystem, BV and its founders are placed at the intersection of the highest-quality VC/PE and leadership in the world.
Prior to his institutional investing career, Joe was the Founder and CEO of The Honor Foundation (Honor.org). In under five years he had grown the organization into a seven-thousand person support network on behalf of this mission. Now, THF is recognized as the nation’s premier career transition institute for the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) communities. With ten campus locations near the Special Operations commands, in addition to global campuses, this organization has successfully transitioned over five-thousand operators into their next great adventure in life. Joe is now the Founder and chairman of an endowment effort called Honorforlife.com ($100m) that will support Honor.org in perpetuity.
Joe is the twentieth man in his family to have served in uniform, dating back to the American Revolutionary War. He served in the U.S. Navy, with every intention of becoming a Navy SEAL. Serious injury prevented that dream from fully forming. He was honorably medically retired from Naval Special Warfare in 2013.
As a result of his life’s work, Joe has been recognized by multiple global publications. He is a proud graduate of Merit Music Academy (Classical violin) where he now sits on their board of directors, Fenwick High School, and DePaul University. He later received certificates in Non-Profit (Harvard), Design Thinking (Stanford), Science of Well-Being (Yale), and Capital Markets (Pepperdine). Joe lectures often at funds, firms, foundations, and universities on his favorite topic to consider: The Art and Science of Teams, Leadership, and Culture (TLC).
Joe lives in Chicago, IL, with his wife and three beautiful and strong-willed children, Jackson Alexander (4), Sofia Rose (2), and Henry Joseph I. (Newborn)
TLC: Teams, Leadership & Culture
Across industry, we often see misalignment among leadership, poor frameworks for inclusive decision making, resulting in alarming attrition rates and eventually a toxic culture. These issues position companies at a competitive disadvantage that threatens their existence, future funding, and cost later stage companies and founders billions.
Read More
We ignite cultures from the inside out and address the culture challenges facing Founder-CEOs of fast-growing and scaling companies through unique frameworks and artful conversations rooted in human psychology. Listening, analyzing and advising the world’s most elite and high-performing communities, from U.S. Navy SEALs, professional and olympic athletes, Fortune 500 companies, to recent billion-dollar unicorns, we discovered a key and critically underappreciated characteristic of success: There are five driving forces that lead to absolute alignment. These forces attract, retain, and forge extraordinary Teams, Leadership, and Culture (TLC): Vision, Mission, Values, Principles, and Ethos.
Wherever we find success stories, we quickly recognize this absolute alignment across these five forces and all teams, leadership and culture. Just as we can trace all failures back to the misalignment of these forces, and therefore toxic TLC.
Alignment of what you believe, say and do as an organization is critical to your next funding milestone, revenue growth, and most importantly the overall fulfillment of those in your charge as the leader. These concepts are simple to say but extremely complex and rarely executed well. They require a deep, almost surgical, exploration into layers deep beneath the surface of you and your organization, beyond what is just seen and heard.
