About

I’m Bill D’Alessandro, and I wear a lot of hats.

I’m a general partner at Skyway Ventures – we invest in e-commerce companies with up to $10M in revenue. Skyway is different than a traditional private equity firm in that we take a hands-on management role in the companies we acquire, looking to grow them via new sales channels, operational efficiencies, and add-on acquisitions.

I’m also the founder of Elements Brands, a portfolio of consumer products sold exclusively via e-commerce. I designed the company to generate maximum cash flow with minimum time investment – so we outsource and automate everything possible, from manufacturing to fulfillment to accounting. This lets us focus exclusively on product development and marketing, and still have time to travel and ski on big powder days.

I took the expertise I developed running Elements Brands and created Matchbox Labs, a consumer-products focused, “Four Hour Work Week”-style incubator for undergrads. We teach students that you don’t need a computer science degree to start a company, and help them design branded, scalable, cash flow positive e-commerce businesses. We graduated our first class of companies from Boulder, Colorado in Summer 2012.

I used to work on Corporate Development and M&A at Hosting.com in Denver, Colorado. I worked with the company’s investors at Pamlico Capital on acquisitions and operational integration of acquired companies. I also did hands on strategic projects between deals, making sure complicated things got done on time and under budget. In a past life I worked at Edgeview Partners, an investment bank in Charlotte, North Carolina where I did M&A, valuation analysis, financial modeling, and technology industry research.

I’m a graduate of Wake Forest University, where I studied Business, Computer Science, and Entrepreneurship. During college, I helped start and eventually sell a company called Groupvine that made running and organizing college groups easy. You can checkout my complete resume/bio page for more.

My interests include (as you’ve probably gathered from the subject of my blog): entrepreneurship, technology, marketing, finance, and lifestyle design. I’ve also recently started playing the guitar.

In addition to Ready Fire Aim, you can also find me around the web at these places: