Thoughts from
Salih Abdul-Karim
March 28, 2025

Reimagining an Annual General Meeting

Stimulating, multi-sensory, deeply visual – these aren’t the typical descriptors for an Annual General Meeting, a yearly gathering where investment firms share important updates about performance, strategy and progress to stakeholders. But WestCap isn’t a typical investment firm.

These events are usually anchored on numbers and financials, with companies looked at as one of many digits on a spreadsheet. They don’t focus on the stories or the people who help make those things happen.

At WestCap, our operating team consists of former founders, entrepreneurs and business leaders. They roll up their sleeves and join our portfolio companies in their day-to-day work. Our operating model gives startups the tools and talent they need to help them win. Because we work with our companies on a regular basis, we’re able to talk about our investments in a way that goes way beyond the numbers.

The vision

A big part of our vision for our last Investment Partners Summit was to create a full sensory experience to make each session memorable for attendees. This means bringing things to life through video and visual elements, showing the innovative products our portfolio companies are designing, and uncovering people deep within these companies who are dedicated to transforming their industries. It was about bringing a more rounded picture to something that is usually talked about as just numbers on a spreadsheet. At the end of the day, we're partners to the companies we support. Understanding and showing the whole picture of what these companies are trying to do is important to us.

To achieve that full sensory experience, we brought in a musician named Ngawang. Ngawang has done amazing music for movies like Black Panther and Oppenheimer. He crafted an original piece of music that we used throughout the summit – at the beginning of the day, during videos in the middle of the day, and during breaks. Working with him was amazing because he's truly at the top of his game. Even though what we made isn’t as extensive as a 3 hour score for Oppenheimer, the quality and craft was the same.

We then focused on the stories of the people we serve. We highlighted the leaders behind Addepar, Hopper, Peek, and Treasury4. Telling their stories helps investors understand how they got to where they are, what they care about, and the passion that they have in their mission. To us, showcasing these stories is just as important as understanding the bottom line of their business.

To bring these stories to life, we brought in renowned filmmakers who are used to telling raw, unscripted, unpolished stories. Erick Kwecien is an award winning filmmaker who’s worked on films like Sister Hearts, a film about Maryam Henderson-Uloho, who after spending 13 years in prison began a journey to help other ex-offenders, especially women like herself.

We also partnered with Ivan Narez-Hurtado, a prolific creative who works across video and photography. He’s worked on videos for companies like Square but his passion is film. He directed We Are Valo 6, a documentary about the Valo skate brand that represents the culmination of 15 years of Valo, filmed over the course of three years on five continents.

Instead of putting the portfolio companies into overly staged business-like environments; we aspired for photographs that were more intimate. We wanted to be a fly on the wall in a day of their life. Instead of scheduling specific activities, we  shadowed them. Building a company is hard, gritty work. Founders often face setbacks and challenges that require resilience and a determination to overcome adversity, and endure long hours and personal sacrifices in their pursuit of bringing their vision to life. We wanted to see those realities come through in the photography.

Lastly, it was important that we celebrated our entire team at WestCap, who is changing what it means to be an investor through its “Operating Equity” model. WestCap works side-by-side with its portfolio companies (across marketing/branding, product design, cybersecurity, go-to-market, talent and more) to guide them through the most critical stages of growth.

Our goal was to show our investment partners exactly how the team is doing it, for example:

• How is one of our team members helping a company prepare for an IPO?
• How is one of our team members stepping in as an interim CMO?
• How is one of our team members helping another company find their first CRO?
• How is our team helping companies balance their marketing spend?

All of these things are happening due to the people that we have directly on our team and it’s important for us to bring them out of the background and into the spotlight.

Vignettes were spread out throughout the day, with short pieces with information about team members, what they were working on, and how it affected an outcome so investors and portfolio company leadership alike could see the people behind the work.

In the future, we’ll add even more sensory experiences and continue using audio and video as a cornerstone of the day by showing our people and processes. Our focus will stay on people's stories and their journeys to the forefront, from portfolio companies as well as from inside WestCap itself. In the end, our goal with IPS is to always go beyond the numbers to reveal the hard work and journeys that lead to incredible outcomes.

About the author

Salih is a Creative Director / Principal Motion Designer passionate about the blend of entertainment and technology. He enjoys creating a good old fashioned 30 second commercial but he also bridges the two halves of his career by bringing brand thinking into the way digital products move and feel. Even though Salih’s won awards, given talks, written articles, had Fast Company and Communication Arts write articles about him he keeps his process simple. He’s a “what if” kind of guy who loves doing dope work with interesting clients that have challenging problems.

Between 2003 and 2012, he designed and animated commercials at various design shops, agencies and broadcast networks in New York City. After moving to San Francisco, he spent almost three years at Square as a motion graphics designer on its video team, doing short-form animations and compositing for live-action commercials. Next he spent over six years at Airbnb, collaborating with various teams and using motion / animation to solve product challenges on web and native platforms. He’s part of the four-person team responsible for launching Lottie, an Android, iOS, Web and React Native library that helps designers and engineers add high-quality animation to any web or native product. Since 2018 Lottie has been used by hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide and is now the de-facto standard for animation on native platforms.