The investment industry loves to sort investors into two camps: You’re either passive owners or activists. You either write a check and step aside, or you buy a large enough stake to force change (and usually create conflict in the process). This framework made sense once upon a time, but it doesn’t capture how many of today’s most effective investors operate.
Instead, there’s a third model, one many people haven’t heard clearly articulated. We call it engaged investing, and it’s a model we believe produces better outcomes over time.
The traditional passive ownership model is straightforward: allocate capital, trust management, and monitor results. It works reasonably well when you own pieces of large, liquid companies where your ownership stake is small and your influence is negligible. You’re a price-taker, and the relationship is essentially transactional.
Activism sits at the far end of the spectrum. An activist investor typically acquires a concentrated position, then applies pressure (usually publicly, sometimes aggressively) to change the direction of a business. When it works, it creates real value. But it also tends to be adversarial by design, and it requires a level of public visibility and scale that only makes sense in specific circumstances.
Neither model maps well with what we do. We invest across public and private markets in companies that are at or approaching a commercial inflection point in sectors undergoing fundamental change. These aren’t the kinds of companies where you stay in your lane and wait. But they’re also not candidates for high-pressure campaigns.
What they need is an investor who shows up, stays engaged, and helps.
Engagement is less than a philosophy and more of a process.
It starts before we ever deploy capital. We take ample time on the front end to do thorough due diligence. We want to understand a company’s value chain in depth before we commit, rather than view the business model in isolation.
We look at the people, technology, market structure, competitive landscape, and the company's position in its own lifecycle. Is it early and unproven, gaining traction, or ready to scale? Those are very different risk profiles, and we underwrite them differently.
We call this process slow diligence. When we identify a company in the early stages, we don’t wait for a deal to present itself. We get to know the founders, learn the technology, and build the relationship long before capital is on the table. When the commercial inflection point arrives, we want to be the call, not a firm scrambling to get into a round. That flywheel compounds over time: early knowledge becomes conviction, conviction enables speed, and speed creates better terms and deeper relationships.
Once we invest, we lean in. We sit on boards as directors or observers. In the public markets, where formal board seats aren’t the norm, we take other measures to maintain close, substantive contact with management teams. The goal is always the same: understand what’s happening inside the business, in real time, based on our own observations and not just from quarterly filings.
What we bring to that engagement is specific: thinking through strategic partnerships, working toward commercial activation, and helping to lower the cost of capital. These aren’t soft contributions. They’re the kinds of inputs that can materially change a company’s trajectory.
One example? We identified a publicly traded company in our sectors that we’d tracked for years and believed was significantly undervalued relative to its backlog. We went long and reached out to management, not with demands, but to say we were excited about the opportunity and wanted to explore how we could be helpful.
That relationship unlocked an additional investment through a private security structure alongside other institutional shareholders, which helped the company reach a significant commercial milestone. The entry point was a valuation call. What made it more than that was the engagement.
This level of engagement serves two purposes:
The big thing with this approach is that you can’t apply it when you manage a portfolio of 50+ companies. It’s the reason we run a concentrated portfolio. We want to spend less time on volume and more time on a well-curated portfolio.
When we talk about engaged investing, people sometimes hear it as “activist” and equate the two models. They’re not the same thing.
The difference is the posture. Activists come with a stick. We don’t. We show up and say: we’re excited about what you’re building, we see the challenges, how can we help? That’s a fundamentally different mentality.
Activism is about using ownership as leverage to force a predetermined outcome; a pressure-based relationship by design.
Engagement is a partnership model. You’re at the table not to force anything, but to help the company get from where it is to where it’s trying to go. You’re contributing access to relationships, knowledge of the sector, pattern recognition from the rest of your portfolio, and additional capital if warranted. The company sees you as a resource, not a threat.
The distinction also matters for outcomes. When a management team trusts its investors, they communicate more openly. You hear about challenges early when you can still help. That doesn’t happen in passive or activist models.
We’re not trying to generate beta in the portfolio. The return objective is alpha-specific, either through information advantages between public and private markets or through the engaged approach itself. Engagement is part of the return thesis.
One thing we’ve become more direct about over time is challenging the false choice between public and private investing. At Clear Creek, we operate across both markets because companies are companies, regardless of where they live on the capital structure spectrum
A company trading on a public exchange and a company that raised its last round from venture firms are, at their core, executing against a market opportunity. The governance structures are different, as are the liquidity dynamics. The due diligence process has some differences. But the fundamental analytical work is the same: Do you understand the business, do you believe in the team, and can you underwrite a reasonable path to value creation?
While the flexibility to move across markets broadens the opportunity set, it’s also how we stay fully engaged across the lifecycle of a company. We can back a company early, when it’s still private and building toward that commercial inflection point. Then we can continue to hold and participate as it scales, whether it stays private or moves into the public markets.
That continuity is valuable for us and the companies we back. It means they’re not constantly re-pitching a new set of investors every time the capital needs change.
As generalists in our sectors, we approach ideas without the blind spots that rigid category constraints create. But generalism doesn’t mean undisciplined. We’re discerning and bottom-up focused. We’re not mitigating uncertainty by predicting macro outcomes, but by doing the work, company by company and value chain by value chain.
The investor relationships we’ve built at Clear Creek reflect the same philosophy. We want limited partners who see themselves as part of the ecosystem. The investors we work with bring relationships, perspective, and often direct business relevance to what we’re building.
When that works, it creates real compounding value beyond the financial returns. A partner with deep sector expertise can help pressure-test a thesis, while one with the right operating relationships can open doors we couldn’t open on our own.
The ecosystem that surrounds our fund is part of the investment strategy. That’s not standard fund language, but it describes how we operate and why we think it matters for long-term outcomes.
Engaged investing requires more work, time per position, and organizational capacity than running a passive or high-volume strategy. Concentration adds risk, even when it’s the right call. And engagement can blur into overreach if you’re not disciplined about the line between being helpful and being in the way.
We believe engaged investing is a structural advantage, particularly in the sectors we focus on: water, food, and energy. In these sectors, outcomes aren’t driven by capital alone. They’re shaped by execution across regulation, infrastructure, partnerships, and timing—areas where active involvement can materially improve the odds of success.
These are businesses where the path from innovation to commercial scale is complicated, and the value chains are deeply interconnected. It’s also where the difference between a company that makes it and one that doesn’t often comes down to details that don’t show up in financial models.
Scarcity accelerates innovation. That’s the macro truth underlying our thesis. The companies doing the most interesting work in these sectors are solving real, durable problems, and they need real, durable partners to get there. That’s what engaged investing means, and that’s the kind of investor we are.
Clear Creek Investments is an innovation-focused, boutique asset management firm investing in enabling technologies across water, energy, and food. The information in this post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a solicitation to invest.
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