Female Founder Office Hours Edition IV: Meet the Investors Part III (ft. Entrepreneur First, HearstLab, Optum Ventures & Longwall Venture Partners)
Applications are now closed for Edition IV of Female Founder Office Hours with over 200 founders having applied to (virtually) meet investors from all over the UK.
Through two events on the 5th and 12th November, founders will have the opportunity to meet Seed and Series A investors to ask for advice, feedback, funding and/or introductions.
However, we recognise that more is needed to change the current situation of female founders raising less than 1% of all VC funding. And so, each investor has pledged to mentor at least one founder from the event on an ongoing basis.
In preparation for the event, we have created:
- A public Notion page where founders can access useful information about the investors they will be meeting. Time is of the essence in these short, sharp 15-minute meetings; coming in prepared will keep the conversation on track and help founders and investors alike get the most out of their day.
- Our team’s tips and advice.
- Weekly ‘Meet the Investors’ series where we interview investors and summarise what they look for during founder calls. This week, it’s our third blog in the series with a group of investors attending in November, from Entrepreneur First, HearstLab, Optum Ventures & Longwall Venture Partners.
Read on for insights into their investment strategy, what they enjoy discussing with founders and their top tips for office hours below:
1. What is unique about your fund?
Caroline McGrath, Entrepreneur First
The stage at which we invest: EF is a pre-seed fund that invests in individuals, rather than companies, pre-team and pre-idea.
Jocelyn Lee, HearstLab
HearstLab invests cash and provides services to seed-stage, women-led startups. We are 100% focused on women-led, defining women-led as having a woman CEO or female founder with at least 50% founder equity. Our parent company is Hearst, a diversified media and information services company with businesses in financial services, healthcare, transportation and media. Having access to the resources of these 360+ businesses means that we are incredibly hands-on in how we support our portfolio companies. We’re proud of the legal expertise we provide, as well as our Scout network — women leaders across the company who provide subject matter expertise and open up their networks for valuable introductions. Since HearstLab was founded in 2016, we’ve invested in 28 portfolio companies and our footprint extends across the US and Europe.
Heather Roxborough, Optum Ventures
We’re a VC fund partnering with extraordinary entrepreneurs, who want to fundamentally change healthcare. We focus exclusively on investments in digital health startups with aspiration to scale in the US and strive to be an active player in each portfolio company’s success.
We can leverage our unique connections to Optum and UnitedHealth Group (we’re the independent venture fund of Optum) to provide our portfolio companies with a proving ground to test and innovate and so help catalyse our companies’ US growth.
Kate Ronayne, Longwall Venture Partners
We specialise in investing in B2B science, engineering and healthcare businesses at a very early stage, often with a hardware element. We work closely with our portfolio companies over a long period (8–12 years) to build towards an exit. Each of the investment managers has been working in or with startup businesses for more than 20 years so we bring a lot of lived experience to our investees.
2. What investments do you enjoy looking at?
Caroline McGrath, Entrepreneur First
I love companies that have a positive impact on the world and where there is clear founder-idea fit. Starting a company is hard and I have to believe that you are willing to put yourself through a tumultuous few years in order to be convinced of your company’s mission.
Jocelyn Lee, HearstLab
We’re particularly interested in enterprise software, data analytics, and startups in sectors that have some connectivity to our businesses: fintech, digital health, transportation and the future of media.
Heather Roxborough, Optum Ventures
We love to partner with smart, driven, humble people — and most importantly people we like! We are flexible in our investment timing but typically invest in revenue generating businesses seeking capital to accelerate their growth.
We target early stage healthcare companies across the globe with a focus on digital health startups that use data and insights to help improve consumers’ access to healthcare services, improve how care is delivered and paid for, enhance patient outcomes, and make the healthcare system more reliable and easier to navigate.
Kate Ronayne, Longwall Venture Partners
I am personally very excited by businesses who are applying innovation in physical science or engineering to a clearly identified unmet market need. Or even better, several unmet market needs! I like to get under the skin of the technology and really understand what advantage it will offer to customers.
3. Which part of a business do you most enjoy discussing with a founder?
Caroline McGrath, Entrepreneur First
Having supported over 100 founders through the seed fundraising process at EF, I love anything to do with fundraising strategy, how best to frame your narrative with investors, and doing deep dives on fundraising materials like investor decks and financial models. I’m also happy to talk through common pitfalls I see founders make during this process.
Jocelyn Lee, HearstLab
I enjoy hearing about why a founder started a company and if she has a co-founder, how they met and why they decided to team up. What pain point is the founder addressing and did it come out of a personal experience?
I also enjoy learning about a founder’s sales strategy: what the sales cycle is like, milestones, and how she is validating product market fit.
Heather Roxborough, Optum Ventures
Tough question as every business is different but I particularly like to understand the value proposition and growth strategy. I think it’s also important to understand a founder’s personal motivation and what they want to achieve with the business — it’s really important that everyone is aligned from day one.
Kate Ronayne, Longwall Venture Partners
I love hearing about the founder’s ambitions for their startup, understanding where they see opportunities for their technology and products and then taking the time to develop the strategy to achieve this. I like to talk through the different scenarios and options facing the business and keep challenging any assumptions we might be making.
4. What are your top 3 tips on how to make the most of office hours?
Caroline McGrath, Entrepreneur First
(1) Research the investor you’re meeting ahead of time and come with an “ask” so they can be as useful as possible to you.
(2) Send materials ahead — if possible. This will help the investor to prepare and means they can follow-up with you easily afterwards.
(3) Get the basics right: don’t be late for your meeting and test your connection and A/V set-up in advance.
Jocelyn Lee, HearstLab
- Research the investor and her firm’s areas of specialty.
- Be succinct and crisp in your storytelling: you only have a few minutes to explain the pain point and illustrate how you plan to solve it. Do a product demo if possible.
- If the investor doesn’t have expertise in your sector, come prepared with broad questions.
Heather Roxborough, Optum Ventures
- Have a concise elevator pitch that clearly conveys your business vision, plan and stage.
- Do your research beforehand. Know who you’re talking to and what each investor is offering. This will help you refine your elevator pitch to hook the investor and also anticipate questions.
- Go into the meeting knowing what you want to get out of it.
Kate Ronayne, Longwall Venture Partners
- Pick investors who you think will be interested in your business and have some interesting experience to offer.
- Treat it as a chat not a pitch.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.
5. What advice are you giving to startups on how to navigate Covid-19? Are you giving the same advice to scale-ups (post-series B)?
Caroline McGrath, Entrepreneur First
Every crisis is an opportunity. EF’s last cohort, who started seed fundraising in the middle of lockdown, raised more money and much faster on average than our cohorts six and twelve months prior. There is money out there and investors are willing to write cheques. That being said, every startup, of any stage, needs to crisis-proof their narrative: in short, how does what you are doing fit in with the “new normal” for businesses and consumers?
Jocelyn Lee, HearstLab
We advise seed-stage companies to think about several different financial scenarios (worst case, base case, best case) based on COVID impact — how it will impact their business and what recovery will look like. At least 18 months of runway is advisable. We urge startups to be clear-eyed and decisive on cutting costs where possible, but it’s also important to balance that with supporting commercial demands. During this time of uncertainty, it will be more difficult to land enterprise partnerships, so we’ve emphasised the value of doing more nimble pilots to validate product market fit.
Heather Roxborough, Optum Ventures
The pandemic has caused a massive acceleration in the adoption of digital health technologies and many of the companies in our space are working hard to address the expanded market need. In addition to the solid advice that many investors are giving around financial planning, we’re telling health-tech startups to think creatively about how they can accelerate to meet these new opportunities and also to think carefully about how they will position themselves in the post-COVID era.
Kate Ronayne, Longwall Venture Partners
Assume that everything will take longer than you’ve planned and try to start early — whether that is engaging with investors for future rounds, talking to customers, securing supply of key components. Spend time thinking about how communication will be impacted by increased remote working and discussing what processes and behaviours are needed to keep this effective. And look for the opportunities which the changing world might offer your sector.
