Female Founder Office Hours Edition IV: Meet the Investors Part IV (ft. Insurtech Gateway, Speedinvest and Playfair Capital)
2 days until Edition IV of our Female Founder Office Hours event kicks off.
We’ll be bringing together 61 investors and 156 founders, with four key pillars in mind:
- Access. No warm intros needed.
- Remote. Geography is not a barrier.
- Collaboration. All investors, groups and initiatives working together.
- Founder-driven. Ask for advice, feedback, funding, or introductions.
In total, there will be 624 remote 1:1 meetings facilitated throughout the events on 5th and 12th of November. But it doesn’t just stop there. Each participating investor has committed to mentor at least one founder on an ongoing basis therefore, maximising the impact of the event and introductions made.
We have been releasing weekly ‘Meet the Investors’ blog posts — where founders can get tips and tricks on getting the most out of the event, straight from the investors —and this week, it’s the fourth blog in the series with investors attending from Insurtech Gateway and Speedinvest, as well as our own Playfair Capital team.
As always, our public Notion page and our team’s tips and advice are a further bank of resource for those approaching their fundraising journey overall.
Read on for insights into our investors’ investment strategy, what they enjoy discussing with founders and their top tips for office hours:
1. What is unique about your fund?
Maria Čoko, Insurtech Gateway
We built Insurtech Gateway, the only FCA authorised independent incubator and fund, so that founders from any background could embrace insurtech-enabled business models. Our specialist incubator supports early-stage tech founders with underwriting capacity, regulation, expert guidance and pre-seed stage funding.
The Gateway Fund supports the portfolio from Seed stage to Series A and beyond, as they enter a phase of rapid growth and scale-up.
Magda Posluszny, Speedinvest
Speedinvest has a very unique Pan-European platform approach. We are one company but are split into 5 vertically focused teams: deeptech, fintech, consumer & healthcare, network effects and industry tech. Additionally, we have a team of over 20 operational experts —in fields like marketing, HR and business development — that support our portfolio companies. We have a broad European coverage with offices in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Paris, London, and San Francisco. Our US-based office is dedicated purely to portfolio support.
Chris Smith, Playfair Capital
Playfair invests in pre-seed and seed-stage tech companies that aim to rethink the way we live and work. We are driven not just by delivering strong financial returns, but by being a force for good and living our values. Everything we do is intended to maximise our positive impact in the ecosystem, especially with first time and underrepresented founders.
We are defined by our ‘angel DNA’, being founder-focussed, and seeking and orchestrating collaboration. Each team member has specific domain expertise that they bring to our founders spanning sales & marketing, hiring, and commercial and financial strategy. We invest because we share each founder’s passion for their business — we love getting hands-on and our fund size is optimised to allow us to spend quality time with each founder.
2. What investments do you enjoy looking at?
Maria Čoko, Insurtech Gateway
I am always excited to meet founders who are building highly scalable businesses in emerging markets. I particularly enjoy speaking with founders who are collecting unique data that could give us insights into risk or founders that operate in a business space that could need financial protection.
Magda Posluszny, Speedinvest
I’m part of the team focusing on network effects at Speedinvest. I am quite excited about B2B marketplaces and the opportunity to disrupt outdated industries, such as construction or procurement. Recently, I have also spent increasingly more time on the intersection of marketplaces and fintech, and have been closely following trends, such as embedded finance.
Chris Smith, Playfair Capital
I enjoy looking at any investments where you have genuinely passionate and mission driven entrepreneurs. It is the joy of being an investor that we get to speak to such a diverse range of people building their dreams whilst learning about new markets, pain points and solutions.
More specifically, I tend to favour B2B business models (although my team are doing a great job of showing me that not all B2C is bad!). I guess this comes from having built a B2C telecoms business at university and then being an operator at a B2B telecoms business immediately before joining Playfair. I learned to love many elements of B2B models, not least the security of contracted revenue, generally higher contract values and lower customer service overhead.
I also really love businesses in overlooked and unsexy sectors. We have invested in founders in the shipping, construction, and waste management sectors. All old-fashioned industries with huge potential to use tech to save money or time, open new business lines, or improve safety.
Joe Thornton, Playfair Capital
More than anything, I love speaking to founders who are solving problems that I didn’t even know existed or operating in markets that I didn’t realise are painfully underserved by incumbents. This means that when I’m speaking to them, I’m learning, which is what life’s all about.
I also love ideas that, on the face of it, seem totally crazy, where the founder has to take me on an intellectual journey to realise that it’s actually totally feasible. When I used to interview candidates for a role at Playfair, in trying to illustrate the fun of being a generalist investor, I would make up a joke about how “one minute you’re taking a pitch from a founder who wants to lease chickens over the internet and later that day, you might meet a founder who wants to sell subscription ice cream through the post.” Well, it turns out both of those things exist (see here and here)!
Simon Blakey, Playfair Capital
After 20 years of investing, what I still enjoy is seeing those rare investment opportunities where the founding team have a real passion for the problem they are attempting to solve, coupled with deep domain expertise and compelling market dynamics. These companies give me a real buzz after a first meeting.
3. Which part of a business do you most enjoy discussing with a founder?
Maria Čoko, Insurtech Gateway
The key to any startup success during the early-stage is product market fit, so I like to talk to founders about their target customer, distribution and route to market. I then take a deep dive into their business model and understand how they plan to scale at speed.
Magda Posluszny, Speedinvest
I really enjoy learning about the personal motivation for starting a business in a specific sector. These stories can be quite interesting, and tell a lot about what drives the founder.
Chris Smith, Playfair Capital
I love hearing a founder’s personal story, understanding how they met their co-founder(s) and what led them to setup the company. It is here that mission driven founders really shine — their story is authentic, and you can see their eyes light up with excitement as they talk about their journey so far. It’s infectious.
In terms of a functional business area — sales. I assumed earlier in my career that sales was easy. After two years building and running the sales team at plan.com, I realised how incorrect that assumption was, as I wrote in this blog post (initial disaster -> found my feet -> did OK in the end). Building a robust go to market plan and baking sales into a company’s DNA is a critical ingredient in creating a successful business. Often it gets overlooked as something that can be added on later or is considered of secondary importance to the technology/product.
Joe Thornton, Playfair Capital
In my five years as Playfair’s Head of Talent, I’ve seen over and over again how hiring is such a big blindspot for founders. Most people think hiring is easy and that assessing candidates is an intuitive endeavour. The reality is the exact opposite. When speaking to founders, I really like to dig into their talent strategy and figure out if they really understand the challenges involved in building high performing startup teams.
Simon Blakey, Playfair Capital
It’s actually working together with founders on the problems that they come across, be it in sales, finance or talent. VCs should be the catalyst to help founders achieve their vision and therefore, our true ‘value add’ has to be more than just how to prepare for the next funding round.
4. What are your top 3 tips on how to make the most of office hours?
Maria Čoko, Insurtech Gateway
- Consider the value your business might have in the insurance space. Reframing your business as an insurtech could unlock new investment, new markets and game-changing products.
- Know your market. We are most interested in underserved markets with high growth potential.
- Make your pitch short and sweet to leave time for discussion.
Magda Posluszny, Speedinvest
Make sure you request 1:1 time with an investor in the relevant sector. Secondly, don’t pitch to the investor. Use the safe space and friendly atmosphere to learn: ask questions, ask for their feedback, and try to learn what an investor would like to see in the business. This will help you in your fundraising journey going forward.
Chris Smith, Playfair Capital
- Research the investor you are meeting to figure out an appropriate plan for each one.
- Ensure you keep a close eye on the time and pace the session.
- This is cheating a bit, but ensure you don’t make any of the relevant mistakes here.
Joe Thornton, Playfair Capital
- Have a goal heading into each meeting and be determined to achieve it, whether it’s to have a particular question answered, to secure a follow-up meeting, or anything else.
- Preparation, preparation, preparation! If your goal is to secure follow up meetings, you’ll need to make a strong impression in the 15 mins you have with each investor. Expect and prepare for lots of direct questions on your business plan (competitive landscape, sales cycles, margins, Series A metrics, churn prevention, hiring, etc. etc. etc.).
- Have fun!
Simon Blakey, Playfair Capital
- We can’t cover everything in a short pitch so don’t come with a huge presentation.
- Be able to talk at high level about what problem you’re solving, what your solution is, why you’re the right team, and the progress/speed of progress to date.
- Follow up after office hours with those investors you click with.
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)?
Maria Čoko, Insurtech Gateway
During times of uncertainty, focusing on the core priorities and operating in a lean way is key to any business. Start-ups are also best positioned in the market to quickly respond to major changes like Covid-19. It is key to pause and think what potential opportunities these changes are bringing — did it unlock a new target audience, distribution channel or a new customer need?
Magda Posluszny, Speedinvest
This depends on the sector, as some industries massively benefited from the increased online adoption, and in such cases, the advice is quite different from those who are negatively affected. From our observations, the impact on valuations differed based on the stage — while early-stage valuations are staying at a similar level to pre-pandemic conditions, later-stage valuations have been more impacted. It’s a consideration for companies at Series B and beyond to have in mind.
Chris Smith, Playfair Capital
There has been some fantastic advice on this in previous interviews, so I am just going to focus on one. And that is for start-ups and scale-ups to carefully balance cutting costs to extend runway with maintaining momentum. The objective here is not just to extend runway until the funding environment improves; it is to make sure that you continue delivering on the milestones that get the business to the next level. Get this balance wrong and there is a risk that you become a zombie.
Joe Thornton, Playfair Capital
If you’re raising a seed round, try to raise enough to give you at least an 18 months no-revenue runway. Be creative with being lean. If you’re not a hardware startup, ask yourself if you really must pay for expensive co-working space, or if you can build an all-remote team in the early loss-making stages of your business. My colleague Chris has recently written on this subject.
Simon Blakey, Playfair Capital
Cash is king. Extend your runway.
Disruption of the status quo can be good. Some of the best entrepreneurs I’ve seen have adjusted to turn a potentially disastrous situation to their advantage. The best deals will still get funded, but valuations, round metrics and the availability of finance is different now to pre-COVID .
You can follow the Playfair team on LinkedIn, Twitter, Forbes, Vimeo and here on Medium. If you’re a male founder and would still like to pitch us, please submit your application on our open-to-anyone pitch page.
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