Female Founder Office Hours: Meet the Investors Part III (ft. BGV, Downing, Mercia and Playfair)

Collaboration is hugely important in working towards improving the stats on funding going to female founders. At the same time, we think that as important as getting in the room is making the most of the opportunity while you’re there.

In the lead up to the fully remote edition of Female Founder Office Hours on June 4th, 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 published our team’s tips and advice on getting what you want from each meeting a few weeks ago. This was followed by the launch of our ‘Meet the Investors’ series, where we will be interviewing the 30 VCs attending Female Founder Office Hours over five weeks. Over Part I and Part II, we spoke to 11 of the investors taking part in the event.

This week, we’re joined by our third group of investors at Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV), Downing Ventures, Mercia and Playfair. 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?

Bethany Greer, Bethnal Green Ventures (BGV):

We invest exclusively in ambitious founders using tech to tackle big social and environmental challenges that aim to radically improve millions of lives and protect the planet whilst delivering top-quartile returns to investors. We are usually the first investor into companies, and we provide lifelong support as they scale.

Kathy Gromotka, Downing Ventures:

We invest from Seed all the way through to Series B from an evergreen EIS fund as well as two Venture Capital Trusts, which means we’re patient capital and long-term partners to our portfolio companies as we can support them through multiple funding rounds. While having dry powder and follow-on capacity is helpful, what makes us truly unique is our team: the Downing Ventures dream team represents 11 nationalities, has as many PhDs as MBAs, and is generally as diverse as the founders we love to back.

Charlotte (Clarke) Barttelot, Mercia:

Our fund is a collection of funds backing strong UK, regional businesses with a focus on venture. We are a generalist fund with expertise in digital, technology and life sciences with a long term patient capital strategy (i.e. can back businesses for the long term). We invest from seed stage to Series A-B.

Joe Thornton, 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?

Bethany Greer, BGV:

Bethany Greer, Associate at Bethnal Green Ventures

At the start of this year, we set out the 20 themes we’re looking for in 2020. We are particularly keen to back diverse founders deploying innovative uses of technology that directly link financial success with direct positive impact for people and planet. Going forward, we are excited to see tech for good startups that will help create a more equal and just post-COVID economy.

Kathy Gromotka, Downing Ventures:

Kathy Gromotka, Principal at Downing Ventures

I get excited when I can tell from the 1st meeting that there is deep ‘founder-market-fit’ and that the team just have this sense of urgency about solving the problem(s) their customers are experiencing. Teams that are authentically passionate about their work will out-compete incumbents or better-funded competitors, and they’re incredibly energizing to be around.

Charlotte (Clarke) Barttelot, Mercia:

Charlotte (Clarke) Barttelot, Associate at Mercia

The fund is generalist so we look at a number of sectors. I enjoy looking at health tech / med tech businesses because of the science geek in me (I promise I was interested in this sector pre COVID!!). I also enjoy looking at strong consumer businesses for obvious reasons!

Joe Thornton, Playfair Capital:

Joe Thornton, Partner at 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 realising 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)!

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

Bethany Greer, BGV:

I get to speak to a lot of mission-driven founders so I always like to hear their personal journey of how they came to start their business. Team is often one of the only things we have to go off of at the stage we invest so vision around company culture is always an interesting topic.

Kathy Gromotka, Downing Ventures:

I love hearing founders explain why there has never been a better time in history to launch/scale than right now, as well as asking them about the precise moment(s) when they decided to launch their company and why they felt they couldn’t wait.

Most successful founders will attribute a decent amount of their success to luck and good timing, so I enjoy talking to teams about the macro-conditions as well as personal circumstances that they feel are blowing wind under their wings.

Charlotte (Clarke) Barttelot, Mercia:

I enjoy discussing the people leading the business and what really motivates them. We are backing people at the end of the day! If you are working together for a number of years, this really needs to be top of the agenda! I also enjoy discussing what makes the product strong and defensible!

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.

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

Bethany Greer, BGV:

1. Research the investors ahead of time — know which elements will be most important for which investors and highlight those
2. Come with a specific ask — time is limited so ‘pitching’ is not always the best use of time, instead pick an area on which you’d like specific feedback
3. Not every investor you meet is going to be right for you (and that’s okay!) so plan your questions accordingly

Kathy Gromotka, Downing Ventures:

1. Ask every VC you speak to the same question that is most top of mind for you right now. You’ll get slightly different answers each time, and that experience will hopefully give you the confidence not to feel knocked-down in future just because of one VCs opinion.
2. Know what you want to get out of each session and clearly state your objective at the start of the meeting. If you’re looking for advice, be specific. If you’re currently fundraising and would like to pitch the investor, then state that your objective is to get to a second meeting with them. By stating your objective clearly, you help the other person get in the right frame of mind to be helpful to you.
3. Follow-up.

Charlotte (Clarke) Barttelot, Mercia:

1. Be very clear what you want from the session.
2. Have a clear, concise way of describing your value proposition
3. Do some research on the funds you may be talking to (not all VC funds are the same!)

Joe Thornton, Playfair Capital:

1. 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.
2. 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.)
3. Have fun!

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)?

Bethany Greer, BGV:

There’s no easy answer but our advice has generally been a combination of the following:

a) Adapt: make necessary pivots to capitalise on changing demand

b) Make your digital sales/onboarding processes the absolute best they can be, customer experience is more important than ever

c) Try to raise 12 months of runway where possible or find a way to extend what you have

d) When pitching to investors, don’t shy away from addressing the changes you’ve made to your business in order to adapt, this is an opportunity to demonstrate creativity, scrappiness and determination

(We don’t invest in scale-ups so can’t comment there.)

Kathy Gromotka, Downing Ventures:

There are two things you need to actively manage right now: cash & morale. Same advice for Seed vs Series B start-ups. Actively managing is different from getting passive reports or looking at lagging indicators. You need to be all over the leading indicators for both (cash burn / drop in morale) and identify the levers you can pull to course-correct.

Charlotte (Clarke) Barttelot, Mercia:

I think this advice is true outside of COVID but critical in the current environment. React quickly to effect change within your business (these are often difficult decisions) and do not underestimate uncertainty — businesses that do this well will adapt and excel in difficult macro-environments.

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 coworking 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.

If you would like to meet any of the 30 VCs participating in this remote edition of Female Founder Office Hours, please visit our events page to register until Sunday 24th May.

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.

You can follow Tech Nation on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re a founder, you can register for the free Founders’ Network programme.