There is no ‘I’ in Team

After finishing his studies in 1995 Jacob began his career as an entrepreneur and joined the first web-design agency in Denmark. A couple of years later he was working in Tel Aviv in the high-tech industry, forging links between Denmark and Israel. In 2000 he helped structure funds for entrepreneurs and this led into his career as a VC, he is now in his 11th year in the industry.

Reflecting on recent developments in the VC industry, Jacob says, ‘even though we are seeing a lot of recent turmoil on the public markets, which means a bit of softening on the valuations also in the private/VC backed market, there is still a lot of VC activity in Europe, and we are seeing a strong appetite for Scandinavia as a region, also from international VCs. This is a healthy development for entire start-up eco-system in the region’.

Why Capital On Stage? It’s a brilliant concept, that once in awhile we are on the founder side, doing what they do every day.

Advice for founders: If you are a seed stage start-up work hard on getting customer proof of your product early on either by onboarding customers or by getting positive feedback of interest from potential customers. Investors want to see concrete interest from the market, as it often from an early point on shows a lot about the scalability of the start-up. If you are a more mature start-up make sure to communicate your basis metrics for the business in a convincing way and e.g. if you are a SaaS business use generally accepted SaaS metric ratios like “LTV to CAC” ratios, “months to recover CAC” etc. In all stages team is the most important factor, so make sure that you have as strong, competent, passionate and as complete a team as possible.

Want to see more VC’s on stage? Check out our Youtube channel and watch the likes of Margus Uudam (Karma), Christian Miele (e.ventures) and Chris Barchak (Conor Ventures) in the hot seat.