Swing
TLDR — If at first you don’t succeed join a venture fund, learn a bunch and then try again
In baseball, a .250 hitter is average, a .400 average is excellent. That means that for every 4 appearances at the plate getting one hit is average. To be excellent you need to be able to have a lot more appearances at the plate. </sportstalk>.
In entrepreneurship, most people fail. I failed. Multiple times. But the successful batters are the ones who get back to the plate and make more appearances. In a nutshell that’s why I’m stepping back up to the plate.
After telling the world that my time at Anthemis was coming to an end yesterday, I was floored by all the founders, investors, partners, and former students of mine who all messaged to give their warm wishes and share memories. Thank you. One overwhelming question came many times over, “what’s next?”
Here’s the thing. I loved most of my last year at Anthemis. With my colleague Dario, we met over 350 new fund managers. We connected with people who had refreshing views and strategies regarding venture capital. I was reflecting on this last week when a list of top emerging managers came out and we had met the majority of the funds there.
The crazy thing is that I realised my time at Anthemis was going to come to an end at the same time that Raye was hitting number one on the UK pop charts. Why is that crazy? Well, Raye had been signed to a major album and had felt stuck for years, she was doing great work, writing, making music and releasing some music but was not able to spread her wings. That story resonated with me and my time at Anthemis. And now Raye had broken free and was hitting number one in the charts! Not only that but she was killing it on TikTok too!
<If you want more of my musings on pop music search up mdlskl.>
Here’s the parallel. I enjoyed my time at Anthemis, but I need to give my entrepreneurial itch another scratch, I wanted to swing that bat again. While I felt I was being innovative and was building my understanding of problems and possible solutions, I felt like I wasn’t being my full self and achieving everything I thought possible.
This changes now.
Time to start work on building out LTV Capital.
I felt blessed to meet so many great managers, and talk to so many investors in venture capital, both LPs and GPs, I was convinced this was a part of the industry that was vital but was stuck. LPs wanted to back innovation, but the emerging managers who were close to that innovation weren’t able to unlock capital. Emerging managers didn’t know which LPs they should target so were stuck kissing a lot of frogs and not finding any princes (or princesses). Also, while there were great GPs who were adding tremendous value to the founders in their portfolios, the same wasn’t always the case in the LP space.
On top of all of this, there were too many “underrepresented” (I HATE THAT WORD, but until there's a better one I guess it will suffice) managers who were given the chance to raise and invest capital. If you look at the LP landscape this was doubly true. I promise to myself and you, dear reader, that I will write more on this later.
Don’t get me wrong some great folks and great firms are working with new managers, but when I think about how much innovation and how much value venture investors try to drive with their founders I felt like there was an opportunity for me to take a swing.
So, to all the kind words yesterday, and all the lovely messages on every platform about what I plan to do next, the plan is to spend the next few months figuring it out.
I’m going to make myself available to founders of companies, venture capital GPs and institutional investors and try and learn as much as I can, while trying to add a lifetime of value — get it, LTV. I’m also going to try and blog about the process and share my learnings with the ecosystem because if I succeed and can achieve the vision I have for LTV Capital then like a rising tide, I believe I can help lift a lot of boats.
