Under the 15-year leadership of founding Partner Tom Unterman, Rustic Canyon Partners established itself as one of the most respected venture capital firms in Los Angeles. So it seems counterintuitive that as he winds down his career and Rustic Canyon’s end game grows closer, two longtime partners would choose to cast aside that valuable brand as they prepare for life without him.

But Nate Redmond and Dave Travers don’t care for the conventional wisdom. They wanted to completely step out of Rustic Canyon’s shadow, striking out on their own and launching Basepoint Ventures, a company whose name gives no hint of its origin.

“I’m 70 and retiring,” Unterman said. “It did strike all three of us that the Rustic name was pretty heavily associated with me, and because I’m not going to be part of it, it seems just as well to have a new name and sort of mark a new beginning with a new team and a new direction.”

Redmond, 40, and Travers, 37, enjoyed a fruitful 10-year run at Rustic Canyon. But with the Santa Monica venture capital firm’s last fund approaching the end of its mandated investment period and Unterman moving toward retirement, they had to make a choice.

So they decided to rebrand under a new name and narrower focus: making early stage investments in L.A. entrepreneurs. That’s what they did with Basepoint’s first deal, participating in a $63 million Series A round for Santa Monica human resources software firm ZipRecruiter last month.

“The decision was really, Do we want to do another Rustic Canyon fund or is this the time to plant the flag anew?” Redmond said. “This is an opportunity to clearly draw the lines around what we do and leave behind some of the things that we don’t do.”

The partners would not disclose the size of their first fund, but did say most of Basepoint’s investors are Rustic Canyon investors whom they’ve known for years and that Unterman is among them.

Canyon run

Unterman founded Rustic Canyon in 1999 when the Chandler family, his former bosses at Times Mirror Co. – which then operated the Los Angeles Times – seeded a venture fund after he had some success making small investments as Times Mirror’s chief financial officer.

Unterman believed in investing in high-growth companies, working directly with executives on operations and business development and sourcing opportunities through a deep local network.

Despite opening its doors right as the dot-com bubble burst, Rustic Canyon enjoyed a long, profitable run. Some of the firm’s notable exits include San Francisco real estate listings portal LoopNet, which went public in 2006 and was then acquired by Washington, D.C., real estate portal CoStar Group Inc. for $860 million in 2012, and Santa Monica legal forms company Docstoc, bought by Mountain View software firm Intuit Inc. for $50 million in December.

According to David Hernand, a partner at downtown L.A. law firm Paul Hastings who is active in the local tech finance scene, Unterman’s philosophy was ahead of its time. More of today’s VC funds have come around to Rustic Canyon’s model, trying to identify promising businesses earlier and shape them before they are fully formed.

“The nature of many VC funds has changed,” he said. “The new model is investing less money at an earlier stage, with VCs playing a very active role in helping to grow companies. That plays to the strength of Nate and Dave.”

Unterman agreed.

“One of the things about early stage investing is that it is a very personal thing,” Unterman said. “It is important that the fund be associated with the guys they’re working with.”

Redmond said that when he and Travers joined Rustic Canyon 10 years ago, Unterman was already thinking about his succession plan; the groundwork for what eventually became Basepoint had been laid for years.

“This is very much a continuous process and a slow passing of the baton,” Redmond said.

But for a firm he acknowledged was a direct descendant of Unterman’s shop, Rustic Canyon’s name is conspicuously absent from Basepoint’s online presence.

New leaf

While they are still partners at Rustic Canyon and will remain so through the life of the firm’s current investments, alongside Unterman, neither Redmond nor Travers include their old firm in their personal Twitter bios. That’s not by accident.

“There’s definitely a strong argument to be made that it would have been easier to get started just continuing to use the Rustic Canyon name,” Travers said, “but we wanted to build something new, just like our entrepreneurs do, around a new brand name.”

And Rustic’s name might not mean as much to the current generation of entrepreneurs, many of whom were in junior high when Redmond and Travers started working there.

“It seems like it’s been several years since Rustic’s been making new investments and I don’t think the younger entrepreneurs are familiar with the Rustic brand,” said Paul Hastings’ Hernand. “I think they are familiar with Nate and Dave from seeing them around town and at events.”

Rustic Canyon has always been an L.A. firm, but in its early years most of its investment dollars went up north, where the opportunity was at the time.

While Rustic Canyon stepped up its activity at home over its final years, making investments in local businesses such as Venice online razor company Dollar Shave Club, one of the main reasons Redmond and Travers chose to rebrand was to establish Basepoint as an L.A.-centric VC firm.

“We really believe in L.A. as the market we want to spend our focus on, as opposed to the early days of Rustic, when the Bay Area really got the preponderance of Rustic’s dollars,” Travers said.

While Rustic also did a fair amount of private equity and later-stage deals, that’s another line of business Basepoint won’t pursue. Basepoint’s main strategy is making investments of between $1 million and $5 million in mostly – but not exclusively – L.A. tech companies, with the ability to participate in follow-on rounds as necessary.

Travers said that recent successes such as Walt Disney Co.’s purchase of Culver City online video company Maker Studios in April are signs that the local market has reached a tipping point for entrepreneurs – and the funders who backed them. That deal, valued at $500 million, could hit nearly $1 billion if Maker hits certain benchmarks.

“A few catalyzing events, even within the past year, frankly have been transformative in convincing entrepreneurs to take the leap and convincing investors to invest in startups down here,” Travers said.

Zipped up

ZipRecruiter is just the latest example of this trend. The Santa Monica company allows hiring managers to post job listings to 50 different websites and sorts responses to make them easier to handle. When Redmond and Travers first met ZipRecruiter’s co-founders four years ago, the company held meetings around a kitchen table and the management team still had day jobs.

But they knew immediately it was a company they wanted to bet on.

“We’ve been wanting to invest from the very beginning and the business kept doing so well they didn’t need to raise any money,” Travers said.

When the company was finally ready for a capital infusion, Redmond and Travers decided that was the perfect time to officially launch Basepoint, which had been in the planning stages for the better part of this year.

“We stood it up when it became clear that the opportunity to make this ZipRecruiter investment was now,” Redmond said.

The only reason ZipRecruiter is a Basepoint – not Rustic Canyon – portfolio company is because its co-founders didn’t want to take their money a few years ago. And that underlines the fact that while the whole point of the rebrand was to untie Basepoint from Rustic Canyon’s history, Redmond and Travers are hardly abandoning Unterman’s investment philosophy.

“We pursued different strategies,” Unterman said. “But over the last five years, we’ve found that what we really like to do best is be very early. That is a style of investing that’s a little different than the Rustic Canyon brand.”

The way the Basepoint partners see it, they’re just adapting to changing facts on the ground – mainly, the emergence of a robust L.A. tech scene.

“It’s sort of the culmination of how Rustic’s evolved its strategy over time,” Travers said.