Female Founder Office Hours Event 2: Meet the Investors Part III (ft. GMG Ventures, KEEN Venture Partners, Sure Valley Ventures & YFM Equity Partners)

On June 4th, we held the third edition of Female Founder Office Hours.

We saw 100 founders and 34 VCs from the UK’s leading funds come together for 400 one-on-one office hours meetings.

Due to the high number of applications we received for the event, we’ve decided to continue the support of this Female Founder Office Hours initiative by extending to a second event on June 24th, to provide access to as many founders as possible.

In total, this will see ~800 meetings being held for up to 200 female founders with 60 VCs, and 200 total hours of one-on-one mentorship.

In the lead-up to the event, we have been sharing material to ensure all founders attending (& those not attending!) have a chance to get to know the funds and individual investors before their meetings.

We have created a public Notion page collating all resources we thought were useful for this event and approaching the fundraising journey overall.

When we launched, we published our team’s tips and advice on getting what you want from each meeting, followed by the launch of our ‘Meet the Investors’ series, where we have been interviewing the VCs attending Female Founder Office Hours over the past seven weeks.

Across Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V we have heard from most VCs participating on June 4th, and have had some fantastic advice on approaching investors, office hours and tackling COVID-19.

Over the past two weeks, we started speaking with the investors attending Event 2 on June 24th, across Part I and Part II of the three-part series.

This week, we’re joined by our third and final group of investors attending Female Founder Office Hours on June 24th, at GMG Ventures, KEEN Venture Partners, Sure Valley Ventures and YFM Equity 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?

Ginny Watsham & Denise Xifara, GMG Ventures

We are a sector specialist, investing in early stage companies at the intersection of media and technology. For us, this means deep tech businesses that are solving a problem for the media industry, from creation of content for new formats, to improved distribution and use of data by enterprises, to more effective methods of consuming and interacting with information, to new routes to monetisation for media businesses. Our investor in our first fund is the Scott Trust, the owner of Guardian Media Group, publisher of The Guardian and The Observer.

Briehan Burke, KEEN Venture Partners

Keen takes a ‘radically human’ approach to VC. We’re thesis-driven in how we find tech companies and start out by building relationships with founders through investing time first, money later.

Isabelle O’Keeffe, Sure Valley Ventures

Sure Valley Ventures is an entrepreneur-led venture capital fund. We invest at an early stage, into businesses using technologies to create impact across traditional industries or those that are creating new markets. We believe that companies leveraging frontier technologies have the ability to solve huge problems, in a scalable manner with a global impact.

Helen Villiers, YFM Equity Partners

YFM is a UK focused SME investor specialising in both Growth Capital and Management Buyout transactions. I think what makes us different is our collaborative partnership approach with management teams, to ensure we’re all aligned towards the same goals and can work together, particularly when things don’t go to plan (just like at the moment!). We are deliberately sector agnostic and are focused on finding good management teams in good businesses — that way the sector shouldn’t matter.

2. What investments do you enjoy looking at?

Ginny Watsham & Denise Xifara, GMG Ventures

Ginny Watsham, Associate & Denise Xifara, Co-founder and Investor at GMG Ventures

As mentioned, we invest exclusively in media tech businesses. Typically we invest in B2B or B2B2C businesses with a data and deep tech proposition, and prefer businesses with SaaS or subscription business models. We focus on seed and series A by stage. Businesses must have proven product market fit already — we don’t invest in businesses with limited traction or that are pre-launch. For us, a couple of areas we are most excited about at the moment are those looking at solving problems for content moderation, businesses exploring the metaverse and consumers’ willingness to exist in virtual worlds, and tools enhancing the mass adoption and professionalisation of e-sports.

Briehan Burke, KEEN Venture Partners

Briehan Burke, Associate at KEEN Venture Partners

Companies that target underserved markets and are looking to transform an industry and how it’s served vs. just making marginal improvements. That only goes so far though; it’s not just what a business does, it’s who they are. So having a team that rocks is really what makes the difference.

Isabelle O’Keeffe, Sure Valley Ventures

Isabelle O’Keeffe, Principal at Sure Valley Ventures

We invest at seed stage across multiple sectors — AI, Fintech, AV/VR, IoT, Cybersecurity and Gaming to name a few. We are particularly interested in companies using technologies such as AI/ML and IoT to revolutionise traditional industries or create efficiencies in mundane but necessary processes that are time consuming and costly. We also love companies that are creating ground breaking technologies/products where the true market opportunity is yet unknown, an example of this is our portfolio company VividQ.

Helen Villiers, YFM Equity Partners

Helen Villiers, Investment Manager at YFM Equity Partners

We have two separate funds with differing investment criteria. The first focuses on investing in businesses with £1m+ EBITDA and usually going through some sort of change of ownership, such as an MBO. The second fund is out VCTs which focus on smaller, earlier stage businesses with £1m+ revenues and looking for growth funding to accelerate a proven concept or product. In either of these cases, I most enjoy meeting ambitious management teams hoping to grow their business.

3. Which part of a business do you most enjoy discussing with a founder?

Ginny Watsham & Denise Xifara, GMG Ventures

So many parts! But if I had to pick one I’d probably say talking about the founder’s vision and growth strategy for the business. Understanding the ultimate problem the business is trying to solve is what I really enjoy and realising the steps the business needs to take to get there. I find looking at how trends from one sector impact other sectors fascinating and chatting to founders about how they see their technology impacting other sectors is really inspiring. Discussing the culture founders are hoping to build and the type of company they wish to lead is very interesting and a great insight into what motivates the founder and how it will be working with them on our investment journey (Ginny).

Briehan Burke, KEEN Venture Partners

Getting to understand what they’re struggling with. I think it’s the best way to really get to know someone, understand how their business works and what their vision is, and figure out how you can work together.

Isabelle O’Keeffe, Sure Valley Ventures

I enjoy learning about the product, underlying technology and how it has been built and the problem it is solving. I’m also very keen on really understanding your go-to-market strategy and hearing your assumptions around key stakeholders, sales processes and pricing.

Helen Villiers, YFM Equity Partners

The growth opportunities — which can be anything! I find that the most exciting element of being an investor, as we are able to support Founders to take a big step forward and achieve growth in the business, whether that be new products, new territories or increasing sales and marketing spend. Founders’ creative ideas are always great to hear — and remind me why I’m an investor and not the entrepreneur!

4. What are your top 3 tips on how to make the most of office hours?

Ginny Watsham & Denise Xifara, GMG Ventures

1. Firstly, prepare a quick 2 minute pitch to convey an overview of your business, the problem you’re solving and what you’ve achieved to date
2. Secondly, do some research on the investors you are pitching to and know exactly what you’d like their advice on and how you think they can help you, otherwise you might end up not getting as much out of the session as you’d like
3. Thirdly, if you are meeting multiple investors perhaps to pick a topic you want to dive deep on with each. That probably contradicts the second point! But if you know you want to do a deep dive on one specific part of your business and you’ve identified that this is something the investor enjoys or specialises in (say, for example product roadmap or pricing strategy) then you will likely get a lot out of just going into detail on that one topic and not worrying about covering a little bit of everything

Briehan Burke, KEEN Venture Partners

The best outcome is a follow-up meeting.

1. Be clear and quick in delivery
2. In getting to the heart of the business, and
3. Most importantly in figuring out what advice or investor is going to be most helpful for you (the fit needs to go both ways!)

Isabelle O’Keeffe, Sure Valley Ventures

1. Remember investors are only people and they DON’T know half as much about your product, market, go-to-market strategy as you. Your pitch doesn’t have to be perfect but has to be able to convey your key messages about what you are doing to the investor
2. Know what you want to get out of the office hours and save enough time for questions
3. Follow up with the investor either afterwards, even if they are not the right fit they will have other investors in their network that they can introduce you to

Helen Villiers, YFM Equity Partners

1. Be concise in what you’re asking and looking for
2. Be open to new suggestions you may not have previously considered
3. Ask anything! However big or small

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)?

Ginny Watsham & Denise Xifara, GMG Ventures

Our main advice has been to focus on getting the business well capitalised, preferably for at least 18 months, and diving deeply into cash flows to plan exactly how you can keep the business running over the next year or so, given poorer economic conditions. We are also encouraging our companies to look at any possible opportunities, new products or adaptations to core strategy that might present themselves in the current market dislocation. We also think it’s really important to remember the human aspects of this crisis, and keep team motivation and culture a priority in this challenging time. And yep we are giving our companies that have reached the later stages a similar message.

Briehan Burke, KEEN Venture Partners

I think Playfair already said it well: collaboration is Queen… but so is cash. Be agile, but don’t make strategy and contingency plans in a vacuum, and leave yourself more room for error than you think you’ll need.

Isabelle O’Keeffe, Sure Valley Ventures

For startups, the business plans they had before are virtually null and void or at least the timelines have been pushed by months. They need to build new assumptions and forecasts or at least conservative versions of their current plans. If you intend on fundraising know that the process might take longer as investors have slowed down the pace of their investing to a certain degree. So be prepared for this. If you can manage your cash today you can ready yourself for a potential upturn again. Reduce costs by thinking carefully about implementing growth plans and be sure to generate enough cash in a number of scenarios

Helen Villiers, YFM Equity Partners

I’d give the same advice to all Founders and management teams — and that is to hold your nerve. Good businesses led by good management teams will find a way to adapt, survive and prosper. I continue to be amazed by how many management teams are pivoting their business models to navigate the current environment.

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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