Are Venture Capitalists and Founders the Same Thing?
Let’s Talk with VC Christian Lindegård Jespen to find out.
Looking for funding but don’t know what the VC’s really want to see? Before our Copenhagen event, Capital On Stage asked Danish VC Christian Lindegård Jespen what his pet-peeve was about the VC-Founder industry and why he chose to attend COSCPH16.
Christian Jespen has had two start-ups, one in Denmark and one in the US. He raised $150million in equity and during this time he worked with a lot of VC’s and saw it as a potential career route, ‘ultimately, being a VC is also like being in a start-up, they’re both forms of entrepreneurs’. On return to his native Denmark he contacted a VC group that was a Danish government fund and worked on a couple of start-ups, a few years later him and some fellow VC’s moved on and started Sunstone.
One of Christian’s areas of interest is start-ups that can produce actionable data, ‘computers are moving and maturing to a point where they should do stuff for us, not enable us to do stuff, take a data set and turn it into real action, don’t tell the marketing guy what to do, DO it for him’.
Why Capital On Stage? It’s nice to be more accessible for a shorter period and see the wide range of start-ups, the industry is always changing so it’s good to be out there, testing the water.
Pet peeve: VC’s see thousands of pitches so we know minutes into the pitch what we want to say at the end, but for the founders, this is maybe their 5th or 6th and it’s part of their training, so we wait, politely, knowing the conclusion already.
Advice to founders: The best team always wins. Founders often don’t spend enough time establishing how to get the best possible team. It’s such a shame when you see a team with 1 or 2 excellent founders and the rest are simply just OK.
Excited by Christian? Watch his pitch from our Copenhagen event,
Feeling ready to get funding? Visit http://www.capitalonstage.com/en/events/ to find out more about our 10 events across 4 continents coming up this year.
