50 Months Cubed: 4 Years at Europe’s Largest Equity Crowdfunding Platform
I’ve been in a reflective mood this past week, as I recently had my last day at Crowdcube. It’s been one hell of a journey to help build something that’s had such an impact on how entrepreneurs raise money for their businesses in the UK and abroad. While I’m excited to be moving on to a new challenge, it’s hard not to reflect on the journey, the people and the fun we’ve had along the way.
I was speaking recently with one of our investors about the enormous challenge that even the most reputed startups seem to have (‘unicorns’ included) in the competitive fight for talent. It’s become obvious in the last five to ten years that it’s not just the tech giants that are putting a huge effort into building their ‘candidate value prop’ to try and attract the best and the brightest, viewing their talent functions more and more like a commercial team - venture-backed startups need to compete in this increasingly competitive environment, too.
And it goes way beyond bean bags and free granola. Talent teams are beginning to think about the candidate experience like a carefully crafted customer journey, from the touchpoints within a job application form, all the way through to efficient and useful onboarding. Even small efficiencies in metrics like ‘time to hire’ can translate to big impact in terms of the quality of your team, an employee’s ramp time, their engagement with the role and their sense of belonging with the rest of your team. Some people pawn recruiters off as an admin function when actually, the best ones are becoming trusted advisors and clever marketers of your brand. Your talent team is responsible for managing some of the most critical sales you’ll make in your first years as a company — bringing in the team that will largely define the success of the venture.
This idea reminded me of my first days at Crowdcube. It was the summer of 2015, the company was hot off a large VC round and some groundbreaking £1m+ campaigns on the platform (the first such campaigns in the industry). It was obvious that something was happening, as our small office on Dean Street was becoming a stopping point for some of the best entrepreneurs in London.
One Hundred Thousand Welcomes 🍀 One Hundred Million Pounds 💷
Coming back to the small things. There are times when you meet someone, a company or a team, where you know notice subtle positive differences in the way they treat you during the exchange. There was something very human in the way Crowdcube treated its new hires. Despite the slight chaos of building a VC-funded startup and the speed at which we were operating:
- The day I arrived, James Chalk, my manager at the time, had kitted out my desk with every possible thing you would need to do the job well. I had business cards with my email and Twitter handle on them, a fully-set-up laptop, all my passwords, and a new iPhone.
- I had a full calendar for 3 weeks, meeting with multiple members of every team in the company from product to legal, and compliance to the office manager.
- The moment I opened my email for the first time there was a flurry of messages from people in the Exeter, Barcelona and London offices welcoming me to the team.
- Our co-founders, Darren Westlake and Luke Lang both spent the time to say hello, get to know me and wished me luck in the role.
It’s fair to say that from day one, I felt very welcome and well-equipped to do the job. As I went into my second month, I could reach out to absolutely everyone I needed to with questions or support on a transaction I was working on.
Thanks to this amazing onboarding experience, I funded my first successful campaign within 90 days. Everyone won.

The week I joined the company, Crowdcube had hit £100m in funds successfully invested on the platform and announced a VC funding round led by Balderton Capital. We were also growing the team very quickly. In terms of my time at the company, 2015/16 were the halcyon days of Crowdcube, when equity crowdfunding was beginning to establish itself as one of the bedrocks of the UK funding ecosystem for private companies.
Crowdfunding 1.0 -> Crowdcube 2.0
We’re continuing to see a revolution in how tier one companies and VCs view crowdfunding. Instead of being a lender of last resort for companies willing to take a chance on a quirky new means of fundraising, Crowdcube is now the terminal through which many of the most revered entrepreneurs in the UK ecosystem fund and market their businesses.
Companies like Monzo (formerly Mondo) have led this charge, offering £1m of their £6m Series A round to their customers in 2016, just to get as many ‘Monzoite’ advocates as possible vested in the success of their cool new challenger bank with mammoth ambitions. In doing so, together we’ve created more than 1200 individual investors who have shared in the very strong value uplift since that round, and who, before the advent of crowdfunding, wouldn’t have had a seat at the table, or been able to participate alongside VCs like Eileen Burbidge at Passion Capital (who led the round). What’s more, Monzo recently closed its third crowdfunding round of £20m from 36,000 of its customers in 2 hours and 45 minutes (!!!).

We’ve also seen Irish entrepreneurs like James and Timothy McElroy from HouseMyDog (Now GuDog) lead the way by being the first company from the Republic of Ireland to raise a full seed round on Crowdcube. Their pet services marketplace had received 45,000 bookings before they raised on the platform, with much of the £450,000 they raised coming from their customers and pet sitters.

This meant that their loyal customers could invest alongside experienced angels, institutions and even Enterprise Ireland, the Irish government agency who also participated in the round.
Since working with Crowdcube, the team has gone on to complete a successful merger with the Spanish marketplace, Gudog, making them the single biggest pet services marketplace in Europe.
Growing Pains
As with any company that’s trying to change the way an industry works, it would be easy to talk about how brilliant everything has been, but that wouldn’t make for a balanced story. There has been a fair share of challenges along the way. Scaling a newly regulated form of finance that promotes and accepts equity investments from 120,000+ investors a year is never going to be easy. Internal processes that work at 50 deals a year fall down when you’re trying to do 100 deals a year. Crowdcube is now easily closing 200 deals a year.
The entire team had to change the way we did things, change and embrace new processes, and perhaps most challengingly, change some of the ways we thought about what we did. In fact, we’ve probably done that three times in the last 4 years.
I wholeheartedly believe that if you’re not having some shaky moments like these in an ambitious startup, you’re probably not doing the things that break through the next ceiling of growth. In my humble opinion, the challenge should be about solving these problems quickly rather than trying to avoid every single mini-disaster that could arise because you’re doing something nobody has tried before. We had some pretty public ‘moments’ around that time, that, while they were momentarily embarrassing, were a telling sign that equity crowdfunding meant something to both companies and investors alike.



Some of the changes we had to adopt were quite basic, like implementing DocuSign to execute contracts with clients instead of agreeing on terms via email (I know, crazy right). Others included the ways we reported and quantified our pipeline of companies to forecast demand, capacity, and revenue. The biggest paradigm shifts have been retrofits of how the entire company serves its clients which have, for example, resulted in increases in the number of campaigns we could launch, from 59 to 116, in one quarter!
I’m humbled to be able to say that I was part of a team that has gone from £3m a year in revenue to circa £8m in a fairly short period. The work that the team has done to develop the platform for scale is going to bring Crowdcube and the companies that use it to a whole new level in the coming years. This is down to a concerted effort to deliver well-executed cross-functional projects across product, finance, compliance, sales, completions, legal, marketing and campaign management. It’s a huge part of how Crowdcube has remained the market-leading player. You can see it from the increasing number of major established businesses raising major rounds on the platform.

I’d like to thank Daz, Luke, Matt, Bill, Dan, Chalky and everyone I’ve worked with at the cube for the chance and the coaching over the years; it’s been a huge experience for me.
The Next Step
I’m really excited to be joining the Ventures Team at Founders Factory, a global investor in startups with programmes running in London, Johannesburg, and Paris. I’m seriously looking forward to the challenge as well as working with Kelvin, David, Michelle and the rest of the team!
