Media Buying Briefing: How a VC vet hunts for tech startups with Martin Sorrell’s backing

By Michael Bürgi

Sanja Partalo is no stranger to cutting deals and seeking to outsmart investments for agencies. The former head of strategic development and partnerships at WPP worked with both Sir Martin Sorrell and current CEO Mark Read until last November, before launching her own venture capital firm, S4S Ventures, in January.

Sounds a bit like S4, Sorrell’s no-longer-new agency holding company, right? There’s an indirect connection, acknowledged Partalo, as Sorrell is one of two principal partners working with her to build up the VC’s more than $100 million investment fund, along with Daniel Pinto of Stanhope Capital. Partalo said S4S isn’t an arm of S4, but does work with a number of S4’s executives — just not exclusively, as she’s willing to work with any tech platform or agency holding company.

Specializing in investments in the ad-tech and mar-tech spaces she’s quite familiar with from her time hunting for partnerships at WPP, Partalo hasn’t wasted time seeking out opportunities. Although she declined to name her first investment, Partalo said she has closed one deal and is close to closing two more, in applied artificial intelligence and mar-tech. She said she believes that now that the media world has been optimized to the hilt, the content world is next up, given the ease of access to technology like artificial intelligence.

Digiday’s interview with Partalo has been edited for space and clarity.

How did S4S Ventures come about?

I did a lot of venture investing while at WPP, and it was my favorite part of the job… being in a position to think about the future, and where the disruption was going to come from for our industry. The place where there was the most energy and vibrancy tended to be smaller companies. The fact that sometimes they didn’t come from our world meant they had visions that were very compelling because they weren’t encumbered by legacy thinking.

If you look at the numbers, only 2% of VC funds are led by women. I had no illusions that it would be super easy to put together. So when the opportunity presented itself with Martin and Daniel, it was the perfect setup from an expertise standpoint, from an experience standpoint, and obviously from the alignment with S4 Capital.

How do you work with S4 Capital?

Because Sir Martin sits on the investment committee and has personally invested into the fund — as have a number of directors at S4 Capital — we have operational alignment with the business. At S4S, we know the sectors that we all collectively worked in. What startups want is access to folks who can play with their technology, who can use the technology, or give them insights on whether something is built the right way or priced the right way. How do they [S4 executives] think that product stacks up against the competitive set? There’s a lot of real-world signal [S4S can deliver] that is very useful to early-stage companies as they think about developing their products for the wider …read more

Source:: Digiday