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Jake Colognesi

Background

Jake Colognesi is the founding partner of Mamba Growth, a lower middle market growth equity firm based in New York that invests in high-growth, recurring-revenue B2B SaaS and tech-enabled services businesses. Before launching Mamba, he was a partner at Sageview Capital in Greenwich, Connecticut. He spent over a decade at Volition Capital, which spun out of Fidelity Ventures after the financial crisis. His career began as an investment banking analyst at Cohen & Company (then SG Cowan). A New England native from the Worcester, Massachusetts area, Jake is a lifelong Celtics fan and season ticket holder.

Mamba Growth raised a $104 million first fund and targets a narrow investment lens: $2-10M ARR, 50-100%+ YoY growth, 90%+ gross dollar retention, founder-owned, bootstrapped B2B software companies in the US and Canada. The team is roughly half a dozen people and the firm currently has two portfolio companies.

Appearances

Key Views & Frameworks

  • On Origination and Deal Sourcing: Everyone at the firm sources — no dedicated BD team. Outreach spans email, LinkedIn, cold calls, conferences, and in-person visits. Embraces high volume but insists on personalization.
  • On Value-First Outreach: Always lead with value specific to the founder — competitive intelligence, benchmarking, candidate introductions, embedded payments insights. "Put yourself in the shoes of the person receiving your message."
  • On Sourcing Culture: Hire competitive, genuinely curious people (athletes, people who get fired up by entrepreneur stories). Senior partners must lead from the front — get on planes, join cold calls. Publicly celebrate non-obvious sourcing contributions, including with LPs.
  • On Investment Lens Definition: A tight, concrete buy box is the foundation of effective company identification. Everyone on the team should give the same answer to "what is a Mamba deal?"
  • On LP Diligence on Sourcing: LPs rank sourcing at or near the top of diligence criteria. They want nitty-gritty detail: how many emails before a call, how deals were sourced, conversion metrics. Every LP says their other GPs have proprietary tech — that's not a differentiator.
  • On trust: "Helping people and expecting nothing in return" is how you build trust. Shared a failed experiment where sending unsolicited candidates to founders didn't work because there was no existing trust.

Notable Quotes

"Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's receiving whatever message you're sending." — Ep. 20

"You can't swing a dead cat without hitting another private equity or growth equity firm." — Ep. 20

"Being as human as possible is oddly enough a differentiator." — Ep. 20

"Helping people and expecting nothing in return... that simple act... you are inherently building trust." — Ep. 20