firstminute capital’s 2022 investor summit was a blast
The 5th edition of our flagship firstminute summit has come to a close, and we could not have been more excited to welcome more than 350 of our amazing investors and portfolio founders for three days of drinks, talks, dinner and debates over some beautifully sunny days in London.
It was a blast. We host the summit every year to bring together our portfolio with our community of investors, made up of a weighty 120 unicorn founders.
This year we did so across several informal settings — a loud and delicious dinner for 175 people, a day and a half of world-class talks and round tables, and even a welcome drink in the communal garden of our General Partner’s mum. We watched with a glow, as everyone shared stories and learnt from each other, with myriad meaningful connections being made (so we were told!).
This year we got to learn from the legendary founders of category-defining businesses such as Slack, Block (formally Square), Supercell, Unity, Mulesoft, MongoDB, Tezos, TomTom and more.
We hosted and connected our portfolio to world-class General Partners at Thrive, Sequoia, Softbank, Accel, Atomico, Tencent, Coatue, Iconiq, General Catalyst, DST Global and Union Square Ventures. And we had side sessions on critical topics such as Hiring, Boards and Storytelling with world-class thought-leaders and operators.
It all started on Sunday in the garden of Harriet Crawley, the mother of our General Partner Spencer Crawley, who hosted drinks for our founders who had flown in from all over the world. The food came from one of our great portfolio companies Foodhak and we raised more than £12,000 to buy an ambulance for Ukraine. For some of our friends, it was their first time in London. We had to tell them: London is not always as nice as Harriet’s garden!
The next day, we had an afternoon of sessions on specific themes that our portfolio companies ask us about all the time.
- The first was narrative and storytelling, brought to you by Steve Jobs’ number two James Vincent and our in-house storyteller-and-chief Michael Stothard. We covered why a compelling narrative is a competitive advantage and gave a framework for shaping the best one.
- The second was on hiring with Ross Mason, Co-founder & former CEO of Mulesoft, and Raphael Ouzan the founder of A.Team who talked about hiring for the mission, not the role, and hiring for cultural rather than just the hard skills.
- The third was on How to get the most of your board” with an amazing group: Linda Fayne Levinson, an inspiration to us all with 20 years of board experience; Philippe Costeletos, with 30 years’ of board governance experience and formerly Head of TPG in Europe; and Elizabeth Rossiello, the founder of global fintech AZA Finance.
Also, we had some curated round table sessions with top investors with Matt Miller from Sequoia, Lydia Jett from Softbank, Sonali de Rycker from Accel and Chris Bischoff from General Catalyst. The last time we did these round tables, a good number of people in the room ended up raising from the funds they met, so we will see how it goes this year!
After the ancillary sessions, it was party time. We all walked over from The Londoner Hotel in Leicester Square where the talks were to Wild by Tart, where there were 175 of us for dinner. We hear that deals were struck, friends were made and some people even went out dancing after!
After the Monday dinner, Tuesday was a full day of amazing content. There were too many amazing speakers to mention them all, but some of the highlights were:
- The co-founder of Block (formally Square) and general polymath Jim McKelvey talked to us about true innovation, building companies and flying planes. (Strange note: His plane clipped a building on the way to London so planes were on his mind!)
- Cal Henderson, the co-founder and CTO of Slack, talked to us about the joys and perils of remote working. Plot twist: it’s not the best for every company!
- Two amazing founders Ilkka Paananen from Supercell and Jochen Engert from Flix told us about making the leap to investing.
- Shaun Maguire from Sequoia, surely the most interesting crypto VC out there, told us why he was still bullish on Web3 and is doubling down on climate. Side note: he walked from London to Heathrow to catch his flight back to the US!
- Kevin Ryan talked about taking risks in a crisis, explaining to Spencer how this time of challenging markets was potentially a great moment for innovation.
- David Helgason, climate investor with Foobar, founder Taylor Francis from Watershed and Corinne Sawers from KKR talking about climate investing. Conclusion: there is not nearly enough money going into this space!
- We had superstar investors Lydia Jett (Softbank) and Adam Valkin (General Catalyst) on seven lean years for venture alongside the brilliant unicorn founder Michele Romanow (Clearco, CEO)
- On top of all that we had Itamar Lesuisse from Argent, Isabelle Henriques from Klang, Isaac Bentata from Fair.xyz and Robby Yung from Animoca Brands on the metaverse.
- The best-titled panel was “How governments and spies text each other”, a conversation between our General Partner Arek Wylegalski and one of our portfolio founders Amandine Le Pape from Element.
- We also had Pete Flint from NFX, Juliet de Baubigny from Bond Capital and Raphael Ouzan from A. Team on cultivating culture in a crisis.
- On top of all of that, we had presentations from some of our amazing portfolio companies. Thanks to: Coen & Sam van Hees at Instant Commerce; Nate Anderson at Teero; Toni Nijm at RightHub; Maik Taro Wehmeyer at Taktile; Husayn Kassai at Quench; Sakshi Chhabra at Foodhak; Raffi Salama at PassionFruit; Koda Wang at Block; Lucrezia Bisignani at Kukua; Stefán Heinrich at Maky.it; Riya Grover at Sequence; Farrukh Jaddon & Umar Sikander at Garnet; Egil Osthus and Ivar Osthus at Unleash; Antti Karjalainen at Robocorp; Helen Altshuler at Engflow; Peter Fedchenkov & Andrew Zhulin at Soveren; Simone Martinelli at Volume; Andreas Wallendahl at Tenet; Junaid Dadan at Stitch; Dan Hobbs at Protex; Ingvar Helgason at Vitro Labs; Meri Beckwith at Lindus Health.
That was the end of the investor summit, but on the start of a super busy week for the firstminute team and many of our investors, who were then off to Founders Forum — the flagship event of our sister company run by our General Partner Brent Hoberman.
Here the team played chess and shook about 500 people’s hands. More on how amazing the whole event was here, but some of the highlights for the firstminute team were:
- Eric Schmidt’s wide-ranging fireside conversation with Joshua Kushner (Thrive Capital)
- Tony Fadell (Apple, Build) spoke with Thomas Heatherwick on mission, purpose & creativity within the Founders Story.
- Demis Hassabis, speaking to Brent Hoberman, reminded us that when he founded DeepMind, 12 years ago, the ability of AI to even achieve one point in a game of Pong was impossible.
- President Zelensky being beamed into the event by hologram!
- Introducing some of our founders to amazing investors!
After that, we spread out. Brent and Spencer went to Paris to host a dinner with Vivatech, with the likes of CZ (Binance founder), Oli Pomel (Datadog), Fred Mazzella (BlaBlaCar), Pascal Gauthier (Ledger) and Antoine Arnault (LVMH). In the meantime, Min, Rose and Lorcan headed to SuperVentures in Berlin. Michael took his wife to Venice for his five-year wedding anniversary. And Anais, our head of community, finally slept.
And after that, we were done. Thanks to everyone who was there this huge week. Thank you Anais and Abby in particular on the firstminute team for organising it so heroically, brilliantly and immaculately.
Thank you too to everyone who was there for making it so special. See you all next year!
