Hammer, co-founder of $10M startup investor, puts roots here and believes in New Mexico

Adam Hammer may have been born in the Southwest — Houston, to be exact — but it was his peripatetic early childhood moving frequently as his family followed his father’s international career in geothermal energy that in many ways has led him to his latest job in New Mexico.

“We spent a lot of time building in new places,” Hammer says. “It feels similar to an entrepreneur’s journey — starting over time and again.”

Hammer, the co-founder of the soon-to-be-launched Roadrunner Venture Studios, a $10 million venture studio in Albuquerque, has spent his life funding, running and now nurturing startup companies. And he thrives on that cycle of creative destruction familiar to any entrepreneur — a spirit he sees inherent in New Mexico and one he’s betting he and his backers will make a lot of money unleashing.

That’s the greater mission of Roadrunner, “turning research and development in national labs, universities, and untapped innovation communities into revenue-generating products that actually solve problems for people in the world,” Hammer says. “That’s one of the unique idiosyncrasies we saw in New Mexico: you have tons of people with research and development experience, but what’s missing is a system to translate that into product, and capital to make it into a business. This is the hole that Roadrunner was created to fill.”

Hammer’s unique background gives him the perfect resume to run such an endeavor. His father was a dairy farm boy from Illinois who dreamed of travel. His job led him to Damascus, where he met Adam’s mother. The two married and had Adam and his sister but were not content to settle in the States. Instead, they toted their kids across the globe.

“It taught me to understand people’s problems from another perspective,” Hammer says. “It also taught me the value of getting out of the country and seeing how other folks live.”

College at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and business school at Yale University led to an investment banking job at Goldman Sachs in New York. There he learned not only “how big companies make executive decisions but also, on a personal level, it taught me how products are pretty central to creating new business,” Hammer says. “The heart of commercialization is in R&D and connecting products to markets and using capital markets to connect to scale.”

From there he had a fateful meeting with Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, who was just leaving his day job to start something new: a fund to foster companies that helped the world. Schmidt hired Hammer to become Schmidt Future’s chief strategy officer. From Schmidt Futures, Hammer wouldn’t just take the experience of funding startups to growth, but also four relationships key to Roadrunner, with Gilman Louie and co-workers Jordan Blashek, Amotz Maimon and Katherine Binney. Louie and Blashek would go on to co-found America’s Frontier Fund, or AFF, a deep-tech funding nonprofit that is funding Roadrunner; and Maimon and Binney would eventually follow Hammer to Roadrunner.

Hammer loved the work with Schmidt Futures but hankered for some hands-on entrepreneurial experience of his own. So, he ended up going to a quantum encryption startup called Qrypt, whose hardware sources were co-developed with Los Alamos and Oak Ridge national laboratories and big universities around the world. The experience gave him hands-on training translating complex science into practical products, and it sparked in him an interest to create a scalable research engine.

After a Schmidt Futures board meeting one day — Hammer remains to this day a close counselor to Schmidt and his fund — Louie button-holed Hammer and told him about the formation of AFF. Louie and Blashek’s ideas were so in line with what Hammer had been dreaming of — a fund and incubator to link deep tech research and markets — that he immediately leapt at the idea, becoming president and co-founder of Roadrunner earlier this year.

New Mexico became the obvious first focus. While $6.10 of every research dollar spent in California goes toward entrepreneurial spinoffs, only 4 cents of every dollar spent in New Mexico goes towards commercialization, according to research from America's Frontier Fund. So, Hammer got an apartment in Albuquerque and now splits his time between the Land of Enchantment and Washington, where his wife Hannah works on international democracy projects. And after nearly a year of building relationships with the state and like-minded funds, an ace team and offices — real world infrastructure replete with labs is an important part of the group’s vision — Roadrunner is on the cusp of launching. They even have their first portfolio company, which will be announced along with much other fanfare on Dec. 5 at the office opening.

Solving this problem for New Mexico — bringing in the experts and support to commercialize products and de-risk endeavors for scale — is also just the first step. Hammer hopes to create a repeatable process that can be scaled nationwide into other corners with deep-tech research but not a lot of commercial partners, such as the Dakotas, Arkansas, parts of New Jersey and Huntsville, Alabama. He also envisions corporate partnership with private-sector, deep-tech labs like Bell, Xerox and Dupont.

“Traditionally, these have been the cradles of U.S. innovation — but they’re increasingly under more pressure,” Hammer says.

But first comes New Mexico, because if they can’t succeed here, they won’t expand elsewhere.

“Our success in New Mexico will turn on whether people believe that we’re real,” Hammer says. “There’s been lots of fads and people wonder: Are they going to stay? What’s really important is people know we’re here for the long haul. And the venture studio game is, by its nature, a long-haul game. That’s a big part of our vision.”

As he has since his childhood, Hammer is building up before moving on — only this time, he intends to leave a big part of himself here: Roots, for thus far a rootless entrepreneur.