Why I Joined Playfair Capital
I am extremely excited to share that I have officially joined Playfair Capital as an Associate in London. This is a hugely important and exciting moment in my life and I am incredibly grateful to the Playfair team for their generous welcome and their confidence in me as we launch our Fund II.
Why have I decided to join Playfair? Because I believe that ultimately everything revolves around people, and Playfair is a family that brings together the smartest, hardest working and most modest people I have worked with to date. Here at Playfair, I am lucky enough to be able to learn from a founder and chairman in Fede who has played a key role in establishing the seed funding landscape in London since 2011; a Partner Chris who has been a successful angel investor for the past 10 years and was part of the early team that grew plan.com to be the fastest growing company in the UK last year; and Joe who has helped build dozens of startup teams with the Playfair portfolio alongside his current core investor responsibilities.
I was looking for a close-knit team that I respected and wanted to learn from. The Playfair team have given me the chance to join their mission to find and help the smartest, savviest founders building tech companies that rethink the way we live and work. The opportunity to step up and make a real impact with Playfair was one that I could not refuse. This is why:
Back to the beginning: outliers
At Playfair, we often look for the unusual and unexpected in both ideas and founders. Finding the next people that can radically change the status quo often involves playing the outlier. This is something that has always resonated with me personally: from my Swedish-Venezuelan-English family; to studying French, Spanish and Portuguese at Cambridge. This melting pot of languages and cultures growing up taught me to appreciate the power of diverse ideas and people as well as the surprising similarities you can find between what first appears so different. This is what I am doing every day here at Playfair: meeting unique people with unique stories and visions, and trying to help the best build world-changing businesses.
Being an entrepreneur in VC
In venture capital, you meet entrepreneurs day in, day out. In order to really understand what makes them tick and how to compare vision with practicality, I think it is important to be able to associate with that entrepreneurial spirit in some way.
I do not pretend to have ever experienced the true toil of building a business from scratch, but I have had an entrepreneurial mindset since I was quite young: from selling seashells on the beach and setting up a school sweet shop, to building an access-driven tutoring website and launching a meet-up and discovery app while at university. How exciting is it to create a new, better way of doing something, improving someone’s life in no matter how small a way?
Believing in the positive possibilities of newness is hugely powerful: newness of approach, method, and idea. This, for me, is the foundation of Venture Capital, and why it plays such an important part of today and tomorrow. Personally, nothing excites me more than being at the forefront of what and who will shape the future, however great or small. Venture Capital has the ability and even the responsibility to support the future through fast-growing startups, and for me that inspiration is the ultimate motivation.
This vision has been part of Playfair’s DNA since Fede founded the fund in 2013 and I could not have wished to find more like-minded people in this team. Of course, we invest for excellent fund returns; but first and foremost we invest in people who can and enjoy rethinking the way we live and work, building successful businesses as they do so, not just seeking mythical status.
Why seed stage investing?
Here at Playfair, we invest at the pre-seed and seed stage. While the ecosystem has recently seen a number of funds move up the value chain, we prefer to back founders as close to the start of their journey as we can. That way we can truly be value-additive partners in their mission and help founders overcome what are often the most treacherous early hurdles.
Personally, I was attracted by this approach at Playfair from the four years I have spent equity crowdfunding on Crowdcube’s and Seedrs’s platforms. Even as a student, these platforms enabled me to explore much of the role of a VC investor: judging a pitch deck; assessing the founder(s), team, product, market, business model; analysing and scenario-testing the financials; even engaging with and questioning founders through the anonymous discussion boards. Other than an incredible learning experience, I found it especially rewarding seeing how the network and financial backing of investors could transform a business. This is taken even further at Playfair, where we can truly own that influence, using it to drive startups to the next level.
From Everywhere to Venture Capital
One of the many fantastic attributes of Venture Capital is that everyone has a different background and story, none of which are better or worse than another. Much of what motivates VC investors to do the job they do is a passion for the people they meet, the ideas they discover, and positive possibilities. I have already talked about this qualitative side to my motivation for joining Playfair and the VC ecosystem, but there are some key quantitative skills already helping keep the infamous “impostor syndrome” from being too real for comfort.
My couple of years of experience in finance — in Investment Banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and in Private Equity at Ardian — taught me fundamental skills in financial modelling, market and competitor analysis, as well as the practical experience of presenting to and taking responsibility with senior management at FTSE 100 clients. People often say two years of banking is like four years of accelerated learning elsewhere; for me, it undoubtedly grounded aspirational motivation in tangible knowledge and training that has made this opportunity at Playfair possible.
What I do at Playfair
As the junior member of a small team, I am fundamentally supporting Chris and Joe in their more experienced investor roles. I am also helping to further Playfair’s brand, reach and network so we continue to find the best founders. Below are the key roles I will be helping the team with:
- Pitching: filtering the 300+ decks we see a month, follow-ups over the phone or in person
- Investment memos: researching and writing everything from market mapping to competitive analysis and financial modelling
- Due diligence: supporting technical, legal, financial DD
- Portfolio support: working with founders to refine their financial models, help with market sizing and, occasionally, fiddling with a cap table
- Network building: less “networking”, more meeting and engaging with smart and interesting people who we can help in some way and vice versa
- Research: we are thinkers, and our thesis is always evolving through our ongoing in-depth research projects
- Social media: making sure we know what the world is up to and letting the world know what we are up to, tweet by tweet, blog by blog
I could not be more excited about the years that lie ahead here at Playfair.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re a founder, fellow investor, looking to learn more about the opaque VC industry, or just generally curious. I am always happy to help if I can.
You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn and here on Medium — just reach out!
And if you would like to learn more about Playfair and our history, check out Joe Thorton’s blog post here, and Chris Smith on why we made our first Fund II investment into Sightec here.
