Venture Capital’s Wild Ride in the Guernsey Press
My article, Venture Capital's Wild Ride, is in today's Guernsey Press .
Love the image they've used.
Alma office hours at Sifted
Come meet me at the Alma Angels Female Founder Office Hours during Sifted Summit next week.
🗓️ On Wednesday, 2nd October, from 5 pm, I'll be matched with two founders for 25-minute sessions, joining 49 other Almas in offering advice and support.
Let's do this if:
👉 You're at the pre-seed or seed stage
👉 A woman (co)founded business
👉 Building a tech or IP-rich venture with global ambitions
⚠️ To register, be sure to save the office hours in the Sifted Summit app ⚠️
🎟 If you haven't grabbed your ticket yet, there’s still time. Use code Alma15 for 15% off.
Who’s up for a serendipity meetup
Who's up for a Serendipity Meetup in London next Monday 30th early evening?
No agenda, just get great people together in a room/pub/wherever and see what happens.
Enough people let me know and I will make it happen.
Edit: it's happening.
VC fake differentiation
It's way harder to differentiate as a VC than as a startup.
Most VC funds are pushed by their investors to show how they differentiate when they either don't or they do and it hurts them.
They either:
1. Say they invest in a niche and in doing so rule themselves out of most of the market.
2. Define their areas of interest so widely that it looks like they have them but they actually invest in everything, or
3. Say it's by value add. This is important but, as every founder knows, is usually more words than actions.
In practice, most funds are alike. What really makes a difference is if founders want them in their rounds (= brand + reputation) and if they are good at choosing.
For choosing, it's all about process. And almost every VC process is largely the same.
More on process another time.
Focal W24 final call
🚀 Final call! Just 24 hours left to apply for Focal's W24 Demo Day, backed by HSBC Innovation Banking.
Startups raising in the next 6 months - this is your chance to get in front of over 250 leading VC funds, including unbundled vc.
It only takes 7 minutes to apply. Even if you don’t make it to the Demo Day, you’ll still have the opportunity to connect with top investors - last round over 1,600 introductions were made! This is one of the most efficient ways to supercharge your fundraise.
My biggest learning from investing in startups
What's been my biggest learning investing in startups? Find out at the end of the post.
This was the best question from the podcast I recorded with Prashant Choubey on VC10X. I did not know my answer until we got there. But I trusted the words would just make sense as they came out. This is one of the benefits of doing a lot of improv - and a lesson for the LLM sceptics who like to claim, "We are different".
What's my biggest learning from investing?
Investing has taught me how to be a founder - I've met so many great founders, tried to learn from them all, and continue to learn how to be a great founder for my startup VC, unbundled vc.
Guernsey EIS in the Guernsey Press
My views on the new Guernsey Enterprise Investment Scheme, GEIS, published in today's Guernsey Press .
Buy a clip-on you idiot
Charity event for my kid's school. I have to leave in thirty minutes.
Will I make it?
Click Like for "Yes", Support for "No", or Funny for "Buy a clip-on you idiot".
Guernsey EIS
Guernsey finally has its version of EIS, the imaginatively named GEIS.
It's been a constant challenge for Guernsey startups that it's harder to raise from the UK because they aren't eligible for EIS or SEIS but there's no equivalent to encourage local investors.
Finally there is! At least as a trial. Let's hope it encourages the same level of innovation it has in the UK.
Guernsey startups, you can apply for the Certificate of Advanced Assurance from the 1st of October. Best of luck.
Guernsey Venture Challenge panel
Just setting up for this evening's Guernsey Venture Challenge where I'll be on the panel alongside Paul Wilkes of Osney Capital and Xenia Levina of Blenheim Chalcot to award £70,000 to the best startups.
Best of luck to all the founders presenting this evening - excited to hear your pitches!
Investor insights with SeedLegals
Lots of fun chatting with Mo Saed of SeedLegals for this, including:
- An Xmas Runna fairytale
- What I learned from my first investments
- What I look for in founders and startups
- How doing improv and standup helps me
Blog link. Thanks to Kaylin Sullivan for putting this together!
Tracxn super sketchy cold outreach
Dear Tracxn, here's how to do super sketchy cold outreach:
1. Email me sharing your services. This is fine. Targeted cold outreach is normal.
2. Receive a reply saying, not for me thanks. Reply sent so that I don't get the automated follow up.
3. Cold reply from a second email address saying, I know you said not for me, but here's why you should still use our service.
4. Get blocked and marked as spam. Which is probably why you sent from a different email.
I hope we can keep this highly effective technique between ourselves and that nobody cold replies on my behalf.
Mr Beast onboarding learnings
Mr Beast, a YouTuber, is expected to generate over $700m revenue this year. Last year it was £223m. He's a crazy good businessman.
He built an onboarding document for his 300-person production company. It's full of gold for anyone running or working in a high-intensity, fast-growing business. I learned a lot from it.
Find it here.
Edit: This post led to the opportunity to contribute to a Business Insider article. Link here.
Ctrl Alt in Dubai
Congrats to Matt Ong and the whole Ctrl Alt team on opening their office in Dubai where Robert Farquhar is joining to lead the expansion.
Ctrl Alt has partnerships with Liv Digital Bank / Emirates NBD and more will be announced very soon.
Ctrl Alt helps tokenise alternative assets and already has $150m under management in the UK and Europe. This will accelerate that.
unbundled vc is a proud investor. Link to article in the comments.
Smartest person in the room is fine
It's fine to be the smartest person in the room. Just never be in a room of people you can't learn anything from.
You can learn something from everybody. So if you think you're in a room of people you can't learn from, the problem is you.
I was in an Uber and the driver said to me, "As an employee, you treat your company the way they treat you." Super insightful.
There are learnings everywhere.
Time choices
Monday rant:
We spend half our time bemoaning that increasing wealth doesn't count because people work harder than ever, and the other half criticising the attention economy because people now have so many choices how they spend their time and we don't like their decisions.
What am I missing?
Era of abundance?
Are we approaching an era of abundance?
AI gets ever smarter.
Energy costs are trending to zero. The proportion of energy produced by renewables is growing much faster than demand. The cost of producing it is on a fast downward trend.
In aggregate, these will lead to an era of abundance. Go read the Iain M Banks Culture Series for an optimistic take on this.
What every other professional investor gets wrong - coming soon
To hear what almost every other professional investor gets wrong...
check out my upcoming podcast with David Levine.
I figure these things out by ignoring conventional wisdom and starting from first principles.
No, I won't answer what it is in the comments.
Coming soon.
David Levin podcast questions
I am recording a podcast very shortly with the wonderful David Levine of Manchester Angels.
What topics would you like us to cover?