Cheers to a new VC adventure
I am thrilled to announce that I joined C4 Ventures as an Investment Partner earlier this month. It’s an inspiring project and I am really excited to join such a great team!
C4 Ventures is a leading VC firm founded in 2014 by Pascal Cagni. Pascal was the former Vice-President and General Manager of Apple EMEIA from 2000 to 2012. Upon leaving Apple, he decided to leverage his experience to invest significantly in startups and tech companies with a European focus. Over the last 5 years, Pascal set up a unique team of 10 professionals, each bringing a strong operational background, and together they built an amazing investment portfolio of 24 companies across Europe, the US and Israel.
We share the same vision about venture capital, in particular, the way to bring performance and support to founders.
I created my first Private Equity fund named Agregator Capital with a team of remarkable entrepreneurs in 2007. I was only 19 years old, so everything seemed straightforward: raise funds and start to invest. Of course, I soon discovered that the path to a successful fund was more tortuous than that — but also much more fascinating.
Agregator Capital was a multi-stage fund investing in VC, expansion capital and LBO. We successfully invested in twelve companies in France and, little by little, we were able to raise multiple new funds. When I left ten years later, we had made close to 230 investments (still on this same multi-stage strategy), were managing more than €500 million and still had about 100 portfolio companies operating across various sectors. What a great adventure!
These ten years focusing on fundraising and investing, notably in the retail and media industries, gave me the opportunity to meet many fascinating entrepreneurs.
I left Apicap to join Exsel, one of my portfolio companies that were looking for a managing director. For one year I worked in the hospitality business, retail and real estate, running a 500-employee group between France and the Indian Ocean, where I literally fell in love with Reunion Island.
Meanwhile, I continued investing, this time as a (small) business angel, in promising startups like Hubstairs, Groupe Cible or Needelp. I realized it was all I enjoyed, and I was clearly missing it.
I met Pascal in March, earlier this year. He wanted to create a new kind of VC firm, and shared his vision with me and the different challenges C4 Ventures faces. I was impressed by his determination and ability to lead multiple crazy lives, between his position as France Ambassador to International Investments, his different board positions and, of course, C4 Ventures. During that dinner he kept referencing that famous Steve Jobs quote: “The journey is the reward” and that probably convinced me to move forward on this project!
I was confident that I could bring something different to the team with my PE background and my knowledge of retail and media industries.
Pascal presented me to the rest of the team, notably Christophe Walewski and Olivier Huez. Olivier has been doing a great job over the last few years, leading the investment team and deploying C4’s strategy across Europe, from his base in London. We spent a long time getting to know each other, talking about the exciting projects ahead for C4 Ventures and how we could build a strong partnership together. It was clear that we shared the same views on the approach, even if we have different and more than all, complementary backgrounds, experience, and way of thinking.
My arrival follows the opening of a new office in Paris where I am based, along with Boris Bakech, who has been working with Pascal, Olivier and Christophe since the beginning, Michel Sassano, a former associate at Kima Ventures who joined in May, and Laura Thivolet, who joined in September.
In the end, it’s all about people. That’s the main reason why I joined them. Even if sometimes they call me Mike Brant because of my haircut!
Complementarity is a key element in C4 Ventures’ team. We all have a strong operational background in different environments or sectors, and that brings us to deep discussions about the opportunities we review among our 3 core investment themes: smart hardware, future of commerce and digital media.
We also closely work with our panel of twelve operating partners who have either a functional or a sectorial expertise. We think that having a deep understanding of the business and the operations is a key to success in VC.
Our objective is to become a leading pan-European venture firm — i.e. one that focuses on partnering with entrepreneurs to navigate the complex European landscape.
I can’t wait to add new stars companies to our portfolio, alongside Graphcore, Formlabs, Clippings and all the others! A lot is going to happen in next few months, so I strongly invite you to keep track of this new adventure on twitter or through our newsletter.
