About Us – TQ Ventures Investment Philosophy

TQ Ventures was founded in 2018 by longtime friends Schuster Tanger and Andrew Marks.

Neither came from venture. Instead, each brought experience from traditional investing and a lifelong obsession with understanding what makes truly exceptional businesses.

Schuster and Andrew approached the VC industry with a clean slate, studied it without fear or favor, and designed a firm rooted in common sense and respect for the craft. With an unusually deep love for investing, they built TQ from first principles around the simple question: how do we identify, partner with, and support the world’s most promising founders?

Today, TQ manages over $1B in assets across three funds and has invested in more than 80 companies globally. Each fund has achieved top-decile or top-quartile performance, and we’ve done it while operating largely under the radar. Our success stems from an intense love for the game, intellectual independence, long-term relationships, and a unique ability to help founders where it counts, especially with strategic and customer introductions to some of the world’s most important enterprises.

We’ve never hired a PR firm. We’ve never had a brand guide or polished social presence. Until now, our website was basically a splash page. Our counterpositioning was intentional. While many firms lean on optics, we’ve focused on substance, letting our work and reputation speak first. With Fund IV, we’re excited to build our brand further and embrace the market position we have earned, humbly noting we have an enormous amount still to achieve.

We’re investing nerds at heart: curious, rigorous, and deeply committed to the art. Our team brings a wide range of career paths and personal perspectives from startups to technical fields to investing to sales, and everything in between. High standards, low ego, and real love for the work unite us.

We’re also voracious readers, strategy game enthusiasts, travelers, and lovers of food, music, and art. Our varied backgrounds and passions provide context and insight that helps us forge authentic connections with the founders we back. We take the work seriously, but not ourselves. We value people who think for themselves, stay curious, and keep their feet on the ground.

At TQ, no one is above any task. We’ll roll up our sleeves and do whatever is needed to help a founder succeed. That’s been true since day one, and it always will be.

We didn’t build TQ to look like a typical VC firm. In fact, we deliberately designed it as a counterpoint because we’ve seen that the traditional playbook doesn’t always serve founders best.

Founders choose us because of:

• Unmatched customer and strategic introductions through an extraordinary network.
• Deep thoughtfulness about business and investing, making us real thought partners as companies scale.
• Real relationships built on trust, integrity, and humility, not transactional behavior.
• Independent thinking and first-principles rigor in every decision.
• High engagement and zero bureaucracy. We’re 24/7, and when we commit, the whole team shows up.

We don’t sit back and wait for investments. We actively pursue the right ones. We don’t default to what the industry says is hot. We study the fundamentals and make our own calls. And, we treat founders as partners, not bets.