427th Roundtable Recording on January 10, 2019: With Daniel Keiper-Knorr, SpeedInvest

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Spencer Crawley of Firstminute Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In a nutshell, you are still looking at unicorn exits as the preferred investment thesis.

Spencer Crawley: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: It is the conventional wisdom of venture capital.

Spencer Crawley: We debated it at length. It’s not something that we took as gospel from day one. It’s a more organic process of building a business and scaling. In a way, it’s a very VC question in terms of when you’re meeting a seed-stage company to have a meaningful internal debate if this is a billion dollar exit or not. It’s a little bit academic. The amount of unknowns are so significant. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Spencer Crawley of Firstminute Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the highlights of your portfolio? Tell us about what stage and what condition you encountered when you chose to invest in them. What is it about them that caused you to place the bet?

Spencer Crawley: I have to think through my head about which ones are public and which are not. I mentioned the gaming business in Berlin. It’s a business called Klang. We invested in the A round at the beginning of this year. Elliot, a colleague of mine, sourced that business by trailing through a list of 2,000 names that flushed the conference in Helsinki. He met them there and started to open a dialogue with them. They’re building an MMO.

The business was founded a couple of years ago but its timing had become really interesting. When we met them, they had success with their initial >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Spencer Crawley of Firstminute Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We just announced a partnership with EIT Health. They are going to be accelerating 115 companies with us. The first 15 have been named.

Spencer Crawley: How did that come about? That seems really impressive and exciting.

Sramana Mitra: We have very deep connections in Europe. I am married to a European. My husband, Dominique Trempont, was Steve Jobs’ right hand at Next. He’s on the Board of one of your British media conglomerates DMGT.

Spencer Crawley: I’m on the fourth floor of Northcliffe House. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Spencer Crawley of Firstminute Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your definition of seed. What do you like to invest in stage-wise? I’ll pre-qualify that question by giving you some context. At least in Silicon Valley, seed has fragmented into pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-Series A, small Series A, and then the traditional Series A. How does it look like from your point of view and the European landscape?

Spencer Crawley: This week, I’ve heard seed two, mango seed, seed extensions. The semantics have gotten imaginative. I think for us, we set up the fund to be deliberately opportunistic. By that I mean we invest in the best founders anywhere, whilst having and holding deep thesis across a number of areas. We really wanted to be able to be agile and back founders wherever we see them. >>>

414th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With George Spencer, Seyen Capital

^{George Spencer, Senior Managing Director at Seyen Capital, invests in SaaS companies, mostly in the Midwest, from a small fund out of Chicago. The interview contains an excellent discussion on ideal levels of capitalization for good exit prices.}

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Spencer Crawley of Firstminute Capital (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Spencer Crawley was recorded in November 2018.

Spencer Crawley is Co-Founder of Firstminute Capital, based in London and focused on European startups.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your firm and yourself. 

Spencer Crawley: We’re a new seed fund. Obviously, that’s what the world needs – more seed funds. We’re based in London. We launched the fund in the summer of 2017. We’re a $100 million fund. We’re backed, predominantly, by tech entrepreneurs. We have about 50 founders of technology businesses invested in the fund. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nihal Mehta of ENIAC Ventures (Part 5)

Nihal Mehta: We like un-sexy industries. I’m looking at a construction company that’s storing construction history on the Blockchain. When people say they’re using Blockchain, more often than not, you can say, “You probably don’t need to use Blockchain for this.” There are some really interesting native use cases of Blockchain that we’re excited to learn about and invest in.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. It’s something that has come up in some of the talks that I’ve given recently about this whole automation thing. India’s development, to a very large extent, depended on this massive BPO industry. I think that’s going to go away in the next decade or two. >>>