Our 1st Felix Portfolio Day, another step in building a stronger Felix community
As many entrepreneurs can attest, being a founder can be very lonely. Being a manager can be quite lonely as well. Both can also often feel overwhelming, albeit very exciting at the same time. At Felix, we are in our fourth year as a firm and are now proudly backing 24 companies across the globe, many of them focusing on similar sectors and going through similar growing pains. We decided that we wanted to leverage this amazing community of entrepreneurs and we just hosted our first ever portfolio day where we gathered our portfolio companies, advisors and friends to mingle and share learnings about starting and scaling a business.
The highlights of the event were small intimate conversations led by key members of community (advisors and founders), as this was a forum to not only learn from others, but also an opportunity to share battle stories.
Pau Sabria, co-founder of Olapic, visual commerce SaaS platform focused on influencer marketing, that we were lucky to back in 2015 and now part of Monotype, led a session on scaling SaaS businesses, growing internationally, and hiring for a SaaS business. And Pau and his team have so much experience with this! During the time that we were investors, the company expanded into Europe from the US, grew the team to over 200 employees, and all of this while scaling sales rapidly and continuing investing in tech and product.
Jon Kamaluddin, Operating Partner at Felix, who is also former CFO and head of International at Asos, current board director at Farfetch and chairman at Klarna, led a session focused on organizational design and strategy, highlighting the importance of clear strategic planning processes and focus on culture and values as the business scales. Jon has significant experience in this area, as he has spent close to 10 years at Asos, starting at the company when it was only a few employees and leaving in 2013 when the business was close to 2,000 employees globally.
Focusing on more functional areas, we were lucky to have Henri Moissinac lead a session on mobile partnerships. Henri is one of our venture advisors at Felix and he comes with significant experience in mobile, including running mobile partnerships at eBay, Facebook, Uber and now Ofo. His session was focused on highlighting specific tactics when it came to forging partnerships, including negotiation tactics, pricing and overall business development tactics.
Finally, our entrepreneur in residence, George Pallis, led a session focused on marketing. George has significant experience in this space, having led marketing at Transferwise and most recently Deliveroo, both high-growth digital businesses. George shared his learnings around scaling marketing organizations, importance of brand marketing, healthy mix between performance, referral and organic marketing, and offline vs. online mix.
The event left us feeling energized and full of new ideas! We feel incredibly lucky being able to work with such inspiring advisors and friends and to back entrepreneurs who are building the new brands and enabling technologies of tomorrow! We can’t wait to host the next event, with an even larger community!
