Early-stage
consumer venture.

Part cultural anthropologist, part early-stage consumer investor.

Will McClelland is Co-Founder and General Partner of Elizabeth Street Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on category-defining consumer businesses, which he founded in 2018. Across two funds and SPVs totaling more than $34M, ESV has backed exceptional founders at the Seed and Series A.

Will has spent over twenty years as an investor and portfolio manager. As a consumer specialist, he combines a deep interest in human nature with the discipline of a career investor – producing a world-class consumer venture portfolio. He studied Anthropology and Economics at Yale, developing a dual lens for questions that are fundamentally human – how technology shapes consumer behavior, which categories are emerging before they are obvious, and where cultural shifts create the conditions for category-defining businesses to emerge.

Prior to Elizabeth Street, Will was a Partner at Grace Beauty Capital, the venture arm of a family-owned beauty distribution business, where he built and managed a concentrated portfolio of early-stage consumer brands from 2014 to 2017, generating 2.6x DPI.

Earlier in his career, Will served as Managing Director and Head of Research at Ironwood Capital Management, a $3.5B fund-of-funds, bringing institutional analytical discipline to manager selection and portfolio construction. He began his career in investment banking at Lehman Brothers in the Global Technology Group.

Chilean Patagonia

Will co-founded Bambike with his younger brother – a sustainable bamboo bicycle manufacturer and eco-tour operator in the Philippines, ranked #1 on TripAdvisor. The experience of funding and building a business from the ground up – across cultures, with constrained resources and boundless ambition – shaped his approach to backing founders as much as anything in his financial career.

He spent two years traveling through twenty countries, writing longform travel essays and practicing documentary photography – part of a lifetime of travel spanning more than fifty countries. That period of immersion in human culture, daily life, and the textures of how people inhabit the world remains a foundational influence on how he identifies and selects early-stage consumer venture opportunities.