The twenty-year relationship behind CrowdStrike

In 2005, March Capital put a founder on stage at the annual Montgomery Summit. The company he would eventually build didn’t exist yet. His name was George Kurtz.

"In 2005, March Capital put George Kurtz on stage. He pitched. He kicked off a long-standing relationship with March… That was before George Kurtz ever founded the company we now know as CrowdStrike." — Melissa Montan, VP of Platform & Marketing, March Capital

There wasn’t a deal on the table or a term sheet to chase, and no obvious reason to give him a slot on the stage. There was only a judgment about the person. “We just knew George was great and so we wanted to keep him close,” explains Montan.

The instinct to keep great people close long before there’s anything to transact is the whole story. It took years to pay off, but when it did, it became one of the defining outcomes of March's history. The story is a reminder that the highest-value relationships compound over a decade or more, and you almost never know in advance which one will pay off.

The return runs on a decade's clock, not a quarter's

The hardest part of relationship building is that the payoff is back-loaded. You put in the work now and see the result years later, if you ever see it at all. That mismatch is why most people give up on relationships that haven’t produced.

“What people miss is they expect to see an outcome immediately,” says Montan. “But sometimes it really takes a while. And so the Montgomery Summit is all about relationships… authentic relationships that we build over a long period of time."

The George Kurtz relationship is the clearest proof of that clock. It ran for years before it turned into an investment, and the investment itself took more time still to mature.

"That was a $66 million investment that we made all in. It generated billions in wealth for our LPs." — Melissa Montan

March shares that figure carefully, as its own outcome rather than a promise about what any single relationship or event will return. What matters is the shape of the curve. A modest, patient position, held through a long relationship, eventually returned many times over. Most relationships won’t do that. The discipline is to keep them warm anyway, because the ROI of relationship building is real, and measured in years.

Why in-person still wins, more so in an AI world

As more of our work moves online, being face to face gets rarer, and rarer makes it more valuable.

"There's no substitute for in-life interaction,” says Montan. “People crave that in-person, and especially as we move more and more into an AI world, I think that's just going to increase."

Simply put, the scarcer real human contact becomes, the more it’s worth. Time spent in the same room (at a summit, over a meal, in an unscripted conversation) is where trust actually forms. Technology can help you remember and organize those connections, but it can’t manufacture the moment George Kurtz walked off that stage in 2005.

Treat every relationship as if you can’t predict it… because you can’t

If you can’t know which relationship will pay off, the only rational strategy is to take all of them seriously. As Montan puts it: "You just never know where relationships are gonna go."

"You never know when a chief of staff that just started one of your companies is going to be the CEO of the next company you invest in." — Melissa Montan

That posture is a hedge against your own blind spots. The junior person in the room today may run the company you want to back in ten years. Since you can’t rank relationships by their potential value in advance, the working assumption has to be that they all count.

"When you approach relationships, take them very seriously,” says Montan.” Everyone in your community is important. Really get to know them on an authentic human level."

If you want the practical mechanics of that discipline, we’ve written elsewhere about how to get the most out of your network, six ways to grow your network, and the networking strategies of people who do it well. The Montgomery Summit itself sits in that same tradition of bringing a community together in person.

The platform team's real job: stewarding a seamless web of trust

If the work is to keep hundreds of relationships warm with no transaction in sight, someone has to tend the garden. That’s exactly how March Capital thinks about the platform team's role.

"Spending a lot of time with [March Capital Co-Founder and Managing Partner] Jamie Montgomery, whose own mentor was Charlie Munger… he has reiterated to our team this idea of building a seamless web of trust, and that is really our role as platform." — Madeline Pope, Platform & Marketing Senior Associate, March Capital

The phrase  perfectly captures the ambition of relationship building. A single relationship is a thread. A community of them, tended over decades, becomes a web. Its strength is that you can’t see which thread will bear the load. George Kurtz was one thread in 2005. The web is why March was still holding it when it mattered.