In this age of 10-second TikTok videos, AI-generated blogs and other online ephemera, it can be hard to know what a company really stands for—and how its history has shaped it. At Battery Ventures, we like to think our founding values have endured over time and continue to guide the firm today, despite profound changes in global markets, technology and investment trends.

For us, this is 40. As our entire global team gathered this week to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of the firm’s founding, we had a chance to reflect on those core values: tenets like integrity, humility and teamwork, along with a rigorous, research-focused approach to investing and a truly global mindset. Our business, which now operates across all investment stages, from seed to buyout, has changed quite a bit over the last four decades. But we know change is a constant—and we feel we’re just getting started as we continue to back innovative founders and management teams with the potential to form and grow companies of significant market scale.

Of course, we’re cognizant that our industry, and the companies in which we invest, face plenty of macroeconomic uncertainty and other types of volatility today: Issues ranging from rising interest rates to supply-chain snarls to climate change are impacting investors and technology innovators alike.

But we’ve weathered plenty of market gyrations and global crises before. From the first dot-com meltdown—which led to the creation of our private equity business—to the 2008 financial crisis to the post-Covid 19 market downturn, we’ve stuck to our core strategy. And today we feel the future of technology has never been brighter. We’re excited about innovations in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, industry-specific software, industrial/laboratory technology and e-commerce, among other sectors, that we feel are poised to fundamentally change the way we live and work. We hope these innovations can also generate significant value for those bold enough to develop these game-changing technologies and bring them to market.

It’s a lot to navigate. But at Battery, we feel our history has given us the tools to handle whatever comes next. Since the firm’s founding on Batterymarch Street in Boston by Rick Frisbie, Bob Barrett and Howard Anderson in 1983, we’ve raised 14 families of funds valued at more than $13 billion. We now work out of six offices on three continents (in the U.S., Israel and the U.K). Our team now numbers more than 100 people, including business specialists in areas like talent, marketing and business development, in addition to full-time investors. We’ve launched a new philanthropic program, the Battery Foundation, to offer grants to worthy non-profit groups and are also focusing on diversity and inclusion as we strengthen our distinct, internal company culture.

As we’ve built the firm, industry innovations ranging from the inception of the Internet browser, wireless communications and optical infrastructure, cloud computing and the iPhone have kept us on our toes and continue to generate new investment opportunities for us. We may be entering middle age, but we feel pretty young at heart—and know the best is yet to come.