Fundraising is tough at the best of times. It’s especially tough at the moment, with a gloomy macroeconomic outlook biting the start-up ecosystem hard. And it’s even more tough if you happen to be building, and raising money for, a B2C start-up. Many sector agnostic funds are steering clear of…

SPOILER ALERT: Napo is an absolutely fantastic business. If you haven’t heard about them yet, you will soon. My one gripe is that the company name does not lend itself to any obvious puns that I can think of. …

Like most things, the internet is a moving feast. In recent years, the evolution of the web has been segmented into three phases by those interested in such things; ‘read’ (Web1), ‘read-write’ (Web2) and ‘read-write-own’ (Web3). The latter phase being premised on decentralisation and powered by blockchain technologies. This framework…

Most of us succumb to using jargon, either through a desire to make ourselves sound more intelligent, to help navigate nuanced topics or through general osmosis, or a bit of all three (👋 guilty!). Jargon is particularly prevalent within in the start-up ecosystem. Indeed, start-up jargon includes Inception-like jargon-within-jargon, such…

Our friends at Sequoia famously profess to invest in ‘legendary’ companies. And, to be fair to them, they’v not done a bad job of doing just that. However, we’ve gone one step further! In Summer 2022, dmg ventures closed an investment into Urban Legend, alongside a number of other leading…

Taking a potential investor from initial outreach to term sheet is a dance. A psychological and emotional dance. Thankfully, it doesn’t involve any actual dancing, else my budding VC career would be over. Soft skills form the bedrock of this dance, particularly at Seed and Series A. …

Fundraising sucks. It takes huge amount of time, effort and (often and ironically) money to raise money from venture capitalists and other start-up investors. And, even then, many fundraising processes end in failure. The problem is particularly acute at Seed and Series A. Although hard to quantify, only a small…

‘Lovely products, lovely brand.’ This is the reaction you get from pretty much everyone when you mention Papier to them. And it’s nigh on impossible to argue with that verdict. Papier is a business that the dmg ventures team has known for a while, both as customers and as potential…

Warning: this blog may contain traces of the word ‘investment’. In October 2021, dmg ventures completed an investment into Plum, the super-app taking Europe by storm. Sourced by Manuel through our comrades at VentureFriends, this marked the first new investment I had worked on end-to-end at dmg ventures. …