Every year, Utah Business and the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) present annual awards to directors and board members who advise private, public, and nonprofit organizations. The event is designed to celebrate and honor some of Utah’s most engaged and effective board leaders, who exemplify knowledge, leadership, and excellence in corporate governance.

At this year’s event, Mercato Managing Director Ryan Sanders was honored as the 2024 Venture Capital Outstanding Director. Recognized alongside long-time family friend and personal hero Gary Crittenden, theLifetime Achievement award recipient, and Heather Zynczak, the public company award recipient and a 3x Mercato portfolio company board member, Sanders was in excellent company.

 Throughout his career at Mercato, Ryan has sat on eight boards, not including those he’s actively observed. From Stance to Lendio to Lambda, the spectrum of portfolio companies he has a hand in helping govern are broad, however, he brings the same experienced, singular focus on growth-stage strategy to each. His excellence in guiding Mercato’s portfolio companies along a path of sustainable growth is evident in both this recent recognition and his past efforts.
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The best board members bring active engagement. They are prepared and stand at the ready.

The NACD recognition comes just a year after Ryan’s graduation from the Kauffman Fellows program, a two-year, global leadership development program for venture capitalists; the close of Mercato’s largest fundraise, a multi-year effort that was led by Sanders; and Business Insider naming Ryan one of the top 23 VCs in the Rockies. It also comes at a critical time for exceptional board governance within the venture ecosystem. As venture-backed companies prioritize profitability over growth-at-all-costs, executive teams and boards are needing to exercise, encourage, and enable more discipline, grit, and creative thinking than in previous years.

These unyielding demands on executives and founders are top of mind for Sanders. During a recent Utah Business interview, he opined, “The best board members bring active engagement. They are prepared, and stand at the ready to see around the proverbial corners, help the CEO set the strategic direction, and move the business forward.” His embodiment of these beliefs is evident in the dog-eared decks, extensive notes, and open mind that he brings to every board meeting.

Ryan’s preparedness is similarly matched by his unbridled enthusiasm. It is undeniable that he feels fortunate to spend his career earning the opportunity to provide support, advocacy, and partnership to founders. As a result, he strives to be his executives’ biggest cheerleader and advocate both inside and outside of the boardroom, enthusiastically lifting up, amplifying, and championing these entrepreneurs and their mission.

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Between late 2015 and 2016, Mercato made two of its most important decisions since the fund’s investment in Galileo Financial Technology in 2014—hiring the two hungry, talented, and well-connected 30-something investors, Joe Kaiser and Ryan Sanders. Sanders, an Austin-based Mezzanine investor with Escalate Capital, and Kaiser, a Blackstone trained leader of Vivint Solar’s Capital Markets during its $1.6B IPO, joined Mercato at a time when the firm was looking for fresh investor perspectives and future fund leaders. In short order, the decision paid off—both investors were named Managing Directors in late 2021.

In the three years since their ascension to MD, Sanders and Kaiser have already left their mark on the firm and have carefully begun to chart its future course. From leading the fundraise of Mercato’s $400M Traverse Fund IV to leading nearly all of the firm’s growth investments over the past four years, their collective leadership has been instrumental in laying the ground work to help the fund thrive over the next decade and beyond. In part, it was these joint successes that contributed to the pair’s recent recognition by Business Insider for their role in furthering the impact of venture capital in the Mountain West.

Named last year as two of Business Insider’s “23 Most Important VCs in the Rockies,” Kaiser and Sanders don’t only have eyes for Utah, however. Since implementing a firm-wide investment approach in 2022 that focuses more broadly on deploying dollars in undercapitalized and underrepresented geographies across the United States and not just the Mountain West, 80% of the firm’s investments have been outside of the state. From east to west, the duo has led out on this strategic divide-and-conquer investing approach, traveling weekly to meet founders in their own backyards—an approach that is embodied by Mercato’s belief that startups shouldn’t have to start on the coast.

Despite being not even half-way through 2024, the team has already traveled to 46 cities in just 20 weeks—not including a two-week international stint spent visiting limited partners—to meet with founders and connect with fellow funders. Not looking to slow down anytime soon, the second half of the year promises to be just as busy, if not more so than the first half, and will be anchored by the fund’s first annual meeting outside of its home state.

A recent introduction, Mercato’s destination-based approach to its annual meeting is a testament to the duo’s wanting to continually reinvest in and highlight the cities and towns across the country that have been instrumental in the firm’s portfolio construction. Last year, for example, the team traveled to St. George, UT for its annual meeting to highlight the home of portfolio company, Vasion. This year, Kaiser, Sanders, and the rest of the team will welcome limited partners and portfolio executives to Chicago, an important sourcing city that represents a swell of undercapitalized opportunity and is home to three active portfolio companies.

While both Sanders and Kaiser are in the early years of their MD journey, they are already making an important impact on the fund. The recognition by Business Insider is just the first of many accolades that we are confident these two will each receive, and we are eagerly looking forward to the continued and marked progress they will assuredly make at Mercato.

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Interested in keeping tabs on our  travels? You can follow our weekly whereabouts on LinkedIn every Monday in our Mercato on the Move series. You can also find the full 23 Most Important VCs in the Rockies article by Business Insider here.

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🎶 Nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea 🎶

This iconic, cheeky chorus line—a product of Publicis North America for Pepto-Bismol—was introduced by Procter and Gamble in 2002, and has since become permanently embedded into American pop culture. While most assuredly an attempt to grab attention, the jingle was also an attempt to break down American’s proverbial bathroom doors and normalize gastrointestinal (GI) issue relief. It was revolutionary at the time, and helped destigmatize internal dialogues around gut health. Unfortunately, it couldn’t solve for the psychological discomfort associated with seeking access to GI-related healthcare.

Fast forward to today. The GI care options and access available to us far surpass those of the early 2000s thanks, in large part, to a tsunami of digital health adoption. Bolstered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of digital healthcare has experienced an unprecedented surge, revolutionizing the medical services landscape. Telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and virtual consultations have swiftly emerged as cornerstones of patient care. This rapid integration of technology not only helped to address immediate health concerns during a global pandemic, but also set the stage for a more patient-centric and accessible healthcare future. The flexibility and discretion provided by this healthcare revolution was particularly impactful for GI digital health—a $78 billion market.

Today, over 70 million Americans grapple with the challenges of managing GI issues, resulting in 8.3 million annual ER visits, and upwards of $136 billion in spend—a number greater than heart disease, trauma, or mental health. The dollars lost to GI issues, however, are only a fraction of the problem plaguing the patient population. Lost time, productivity, and quality of life are, undoubtedly, the more damaging side effects.

Enter Cylinder Health, a Traverse Fund IV investment, and a leading provider of digital GI care that is working to solve this problem. Led by their marquee virtual digestive health program, Cylinder is reinventing the management of chronic gut conditions through data-driven technology, advanced science, and on-demand human support. Currently, the program is provided to patients free of charge as an employer benefit, and has been wildly successful. Members who work for Cylinder customers—including, Walmart and US Foods—report consistent improvements in their quality of life, and satisfaction rates in excess of 90%.

We have proven that our scalable technology platform paired with our comprehensive care team results in better health, lower costs, and a much better experience for the members we serve.

– Bill Snyder, CEO

Following our lead investment in their $31M Series B, Cylinder is well positioned to be the category leader that solves for the digital consumer delivery blind spots that plague the entire health system. Their team of talented industry veterans, led by healthcare leader and CEO Bill Snyder, have set an ambitious vision for Cylinder's future, and are primed to be key contributors to the next era of U.S. healthcare.

It is our firm belief that by reducing healthcare costs for employers, and increasing employee productivity and quality of life, Cylinder is, undoubtedly, building better.

The year is 2023, and the age of artificial intelligence (AI) is upon us. Much like a Hollywood remake, however, it feels like we’ve seen this movie before. While the technology feels fantastically new, the recent hype cycle feels eerily similar to that which preceded the AI winter of the 1990s. The key difference this time around, however, is that—like Dune—we believe the remake is better than the original.

More than any other technology that preceded it, the recent release of ChatGPT and the public consumption of large language models (LLMs) re-launched AI onto the world stage in an explosive manner. While the technology behind the boom of LLMs—known as machine learning (ML)—is incredibly exciting, it is all but certain that we have barely uncovered the tip of the AI iceberg and the world-changing opportunities that it will inevitably unearth. Deep learning, specifically, holds immeasurable promise.

A subset of ML, deep learning is distinguished by its use of neural networks that—unlike traditional data processing algorithms—learn directly from data without requiring manual feature extraction. This revolutionary technology has (so far) enabled autonomous vehicles, medical imaging for disease detection, real-time language translation, and neural artwork—things that, just a few decades ago, would have been considered science fiction fodder. In the not-too-distant future, however, deep learning will be a fundamental component of nearly every line of software, every piece of press, and every digital interaction. Regardless of the end application, the world will run on AI, and AI will run on Lambda.

Lambda is going to be the #1 GPU cloud in the world.

– Stephen Balaban, CEO

The Deep Learning Company ™, Lambda builds the workstations, datacenter servers, and cloud services that power the engineers and researchers at the forefront of human knowledge. As the only hybrid AI compute company, it provides deep learning engineers with an AI development environment pre-configured with common ML frameworks that simplify and accelerate the training and deployment of deep learning models. From sharing saved models and data sets to letting engineers easily spin up new virtual machines, Lambda is an AI infrastructure power player, and in the realm of vertically integrated deep learning compute power, no one company is building better.