The Invested Investor: Recent Episodes
The Invested Investor
The Invested Investor - becoming, and working with, an angel or angels who add value to the startup journey with help such as mentoring, governance, connecting, future funding and even friendship.
We're on a mission to improve the journeys of startups by educating angels and entrepreneurs to make fewer mistakes, work better together and produce more successful exits. We want to make angels more comfortable to invest their time and emotion into start-ups, and help entrepreneurs with how they should start to talk to investors and then build an honest relationship with them.
Rajat Malhotra is a seasoned Invested Investor, which was recongised by the UK Business Angels Association in 2013 as he won their prestigious Angel of the Year award. In this podcast with The Invested Investor, Rajat expressed to Peter Cowley about the thrill of learning from the bottom up, the phenomenal people he meets and the marvellous ideas that stem from start-ups. His experience has taught him so many lessons including predicting positives not negatives and investing in where your expertise is.
Rajat Malhotra founded Wren Capital as full-time angel investor in 2011 together with university friend Richard Cameron. He was previously a competition lawyer in London and Brussels. Rajat acts as Wren's managing partner, responsible for deal sourcing, negotiation and ongoing support and monitoring of investments. Wren has invested in 48 companies over more funding rounds than he can count with 4 exits to date and 1 more coming very soon! Rajat was the UK Business Angels Association Angel of the Year in 2013.
In our latest podcast Peter talks to successful entrepreneur-turned-academic Martin Kleppmann. The two explore the companies that Martin has founded, and exited, including a move from the UK to the USA and back again. Alongside this, Martin discusses how he and his co-founders raised funds on both sides of the Atlantic, and the differences between Angel Investors in each country.
Martin grew up in Germany, before moving to the UK to study at Cambridge University. Once he had completed his degree he decided that the entrepreneurial life looked interesting and exciting, so he set up Go Test It. He ran the company for less than three years before software provider Red Gate bought the company.
Having worked in a startup co-working space within Red Gate prior to its purchase, Martin met a number of like-minded entrepreneurs. From here his story takes an even more exciting turn as he co-founded Rapportive and took the big decision to relocate to Silicon Valley in the USA, benefiting from the Y Combinator accelerator program. Again, it took him and his co-founders less than three years to find a buyer, this time LinkedIn.
Having founded two companies and worked for LinkedIn in a relatively short space of time, Martin then turned to another passion, data systems and applications. He has subsequently released the book “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” for O'Reilly, created an illustrated guide to distributed data systems, and is now back at Cambridge University, this time working as a research associate.
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Simon King is a Principal at Octopus Ventures, a London and New York based venture capital firm. Simon’s responsibility at Octopus are split between looking for new investment opportunities and sitting on the board of six of Octopus’ portfolio companies.
In this podcast Simon King talks to Peter about his journey to working in Venture Capital from a background in physical sciences and academia, via Africa. He talks about the challenges in transitioning from an academic background to the commercial world and how investments are considered at Octopus Ventures.
Simon also talks to Peter about the interactions between VCs and Angel investors, what the differences are, where the challenges occur and where it works well.
Octopus Ventures is a London and New York based venture capital firm, focused on backing unusually talented entrepreneurs. They have been fortunate enough to work with the founding teams of over 60 companies, including Conversocial, graze.com, LoveFiLM, Property Partner, Secret Escapes, Sofar Sounds, SwiftKey, Swoon Editions, Uniplaces, tails.com, Zoopla Property Group and Zynstra.
They can invest from £250,000 to £25 million in a first round of funding and will look to follow in subsequent rounds. They are proud to be known as one of the most entrepreneur friendly investors in Europe. A significant part of our portfolio consists of referrals from teams they have already invested in or serial entrepreneurs who they have previously backed. Octopus Ventures is part of the Octopus group, one of the UK’s fastest growing investment management companies with more than £6 billion of assets under management.
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In our latest podcast, Richard Lucas describes how he has been an entrepreneur since 1991 and angel investing since the early 1990's. This episode focuses on Richard's advice and tips to entrepreneurs and angel investors, whilst endorsing the three T's to his businesses (Team, Traction and Technology). Within the podcast, Richard recounts his most memorable bad business experience, which involved a potential investor opening a briefcase filled with $30,000 in cash and a gun. Be sure to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as subscribing to our regular podcasts..
Richard Lucas is a business and social entrepreneur based in Kraków, Poland. He supports the existing businesses he has invested in and/or led - which in all have over 500 employees in Europe, the USA and Asia and invests in new companies from time to time.
The companies are listed on his Linkedin profile. He founded Cambentrepreneurs to support entrepreneurship among the students and alumni of Cambridge University worldwide, and actively supports the pro- enterprise eco-system, mainly in the UK and Poland, with initiatives like Krakow Enterprise Mondays, Open Coffee Krakow, the Project Kazimierz podcast and the richardlucas.com blog.
He is active in the TED and TEDx Community, holding the Licence for TEDxKazimierz. He is responsible for the global Wojtek the Soldier Bear initiative about which he gave a TEDxKrakow talk, and led the project to put a statue in Park Jordana in Krakow.
He is one of the co- founders of Krakow Standup Comedy, and was part of Free Festival at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017. He is a speaker and MC/host at events with a primary focus on entrepreneurship and leadership. He was granted Polish citizenship in 2017 and received a Pro Memoria medal from "Urząd do Spraw Kombatantów i Osób Represjonowanych" for his "Wojtek the Soldier Bear" project from Krzysztof Strzałka, Polish Consul General in Milan.
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On her meandering entrepreneurial journey Katy has set up an automatic on-line fitness instructor; an innovative technology solution to infertility; a boutique global consultancy in sport... and many other ventures and community movements. Along the way she has built high-profile Advisory Boards, comprising senior medical figures, business leaders and functional experts, and she has raised both money and support for her ventures in creative and innovative ways. Her results range from global profitability, to meaningful community impact, to down-right failure.
In this podcast she talks authentically with Peter about her proudest failure, a start-up called Ready Steady Mums. She talks about the lessons she learned and how she brings them into her work today coaching entrepreneurs and other business leaders.
Katy Tuncer is the APECS accredited Executive Coach and former McKinsey consultant who founded Horizon37. Her services include: (1) Individual and Team Coaching, (2) Strategy-led Facilitation, (3) Leadership Training Courses, Workshops and Seminars.
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Alex Schey co-founded Vantage Power. Peter and Alex chat about how Vantage Power took shape, the importance of a business plan and much more.
Vantage Power designs and manufactures technology used in hybrid powertrains for new buses, as well as a retrofit solution for buses already on the road. Vantage Power's most recent award came in the form of the 'Most Distruptive Tech' at the UK British Angels Assocation awards 2017.
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Simon Thorpe was UKBAA Angel Investor of the Year 2016/17. He has an investment portfolio of close to 30 early stage tech companies and has achieved 5 exits including Swiftkey, CMOS Sensors, VocalIQ and CentraStage.
Simon has had some hugely rewarding business journeys, both financially and personally and continues to be an advisor and mentor to entrepreneurs. He has made a career out of his passion for backing aspiring entrepreneurs creating innovative disruptive technologies. Angel Investing is an endurance race not a Grand Prix!
www.investedinvestor.com
Peter Cowley introduces The Invested Investor podcast series, with the help of Chris Smith from The Naked Scientists. The two entrepreneurs will talk about why Peter decided to start the podcast series, what his background is and why he feels it will be a success.
Peter Cowley describes why we are embarking on this project, why he is the perfect person to propel it forward and what people can expect from the content. scover more fascinating content from my channel!
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