FounderTech Decoded: Recent Episodes

Propelia

FOUNDERTECH DEC{}DED is an original podcast from early stage accelerator Propelia, that examines whether a new category of platforms, investors and founders trying to fundamental recalibrate and reimagine the founder investor relationship, represents a new venture category - FounderTech.

In the same vein as FinTech, PropTech, EdTech, HealthTech etc are all distinct verticals within the venture landscape, over the course of the podcast we will examine the people, market dynamics and conditions that are helping inform and drive this new category of FounderTech.

We believe this new category of FounderTech is integral to the evolution and recalibrating of the early stage founder investor conversation.

This podcast intends to test, illustrate and inform that assumption.

Welcome to the Flightpath podcast. Each episode of Flightpath acts as a dedicated Briefing with a leading industry voice currently navigating their unique path into a new Deal Diligence™, that affects the way forward looking deal flow and funnels might now identify, generate and evaluate new and untapped venture value.

In this Briefing episode we talk to Sami Abou Saab founder and CEO of zigzag - the global innovation platform that empowers entrepreneurs to rapidly evaluate and validate ideas and then to build and launch quickly.

We explore how the anatomy of a great founder aligns with those founders that can sustain and survive the difficult and emerging early stages of their startup journey when it becomes psychologically hard.

We discuss how a great founder has that rare ability to listen and cut through the noise of hustle culture and startup hype to be able to focus and hone in on their key ‘element’ of their fundamental insight and core strategic competencies. Navigating this whilst also having the ability to agilely pivot and shift whilst continually delivering and executing at a very high level of operational competency.

Given this invaluable founder make up and profile, this increasingly means that we are moving away from typical due diligence to be able to consistently identify and assess such a founder. Towards a more consistent psychological and data driven assessment, that can better track, map and evaluate this unique startup founder anatomy.

Connect with Sami further:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabousaab/

https://zigzag.vc/

Welcome to the Flightpath podcast. Each episode of Flightpath acts as a dedicated Briefing with a leading industry voice currently navigating their unique path into a new Deal Diligence™, that affects the way forward looking deal flow and funnels might now identify, generate and evaluate new and untapped venture value. In this Briefing we talk with Karan Madan, who has a unique perspective and story as he works in deal origination at both ends of the venture ecosystem - for both private equity with Clifden Consulting and also with startup assessment at FundIQ. The conversation is a deep and detailed exploration into the ongoing importance and intrinsic value of alignment in venture deal flow. We discuss how whilst there may be different lenses and metrics, the principals and dynamics of this alignment apply equally to the early stage founder who is currently looking to now initially frame, market and distribute their pitch deck to investors as to an experienced founder. Who might be now running a mature business and managing a substantial operational infrastructure and is currently moving out of the Series B or C in their venture capital stage into the private equity phase. In order to rapidly scale, generate new value and possibly drive towards exit for themselves and their shareholders and stakeholders. Uniquely this episode Briefing is also infused with and evaluated via the principles of Stoicism. The guiding philosophy that Karan continually returns to in order to guide his own journey and enable him to continually maintain and calibrate his own ongoing personal and professional alignment! Connect further:* https://www.linkedin.com/in/karanmadankmrt/ * https://www.fundiq.report/ * https://www.clifdenconsulting.co.uk/

Welcome to the Flightpath podcast. Each episode of Flightpath acts as a dedicated Briefing with a leading industry voice currently navigating their unique path into a new Deal Diligence™, that affects the way forward looking deal flow and funnels might now identify, generate and evaluate new and untapped venture value.

In this Briefing we with talk with Stacy Kehren Idema about her new venture Equati. An intelligent legacy technology for Family Offices which bridges generations through data and technology.

Creating a single source of truth for Family Office investors, we help them align their direct / impact / alternative investment opportunities to their values; while reducing emotional bias, enhancing family communication, and fostering co-investment opportunities.

We explore how a Family offices often struggle with balancing their portfolio thesis with effective investment governance with the need to uphold their legacy - particularly when historical data shows 90% of family offices face wealth erosion by the third generation.

We discuss how her Deal Diligence™ journey - mirroring many others working and pioneering this new paths into this evolving space - is being driven by a cross section of emerging technologies with an increasing appetite in venture for data colliding with the behavioural shifts in appetite amongst forward thinking investors around the psychology of leveraging the competitive advantages offered by these shifts first and early.

Connect with Stacy:

LinkedIn here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacykehrenidema/

https://equati.ai/

Contact and sign up for newsletter here: https://equati.ai/contact/

Welcome to the Flightpath podcast. Each episode of Flightpath acts as a dedicated Briefing with a leading industry voice currently navigating their unique path into a new Deal Diligence™, that affects the way early stage deal flow and funnels might now generate and evaluate new and untapped market value. In this Briefing episode we talk to Naish Yadav about how in scaling his startup Ventur he is setting up and creating a data driven foundation for early stage founders to now access and be able to leverage. A foundation that enables them from the outset better frame, understand and therefore match with the portfolio thesis of potentially aligned investors. We talk about why this critical stage of the process is still so inefficiently managed and implemented - with so much of this founder investor outreach still being so unaligned and in reality too often cold and generic. We discuss how the rise of low code / no code prototyping and side hustle startups, whilst great in terms of increasing the speed, ability and agility and also lowering the cost of anyone to conceive of and launch a startup, might also be inadvertently creating a noise to signal problem for the ecosystem, as it tries to filter through the resulting increased volume and vastly differing quality of startup deal flow. We also explore where we are on the adoption scale amongst investors for data driven processes, perspectives and tools now fully integrating with their existing deal funnels - particularly around early stage pre-seed deal flow - and the untapped value this might unlock in the ecosystem. For more information visit:https://venturhq.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/naishyadav/

Welcome to the Flightpath podcast. Each episode of Flightpath acts as a dedicated Briefing with a leading industry voice currently navigating their unique path into a new Deal Diligence™, that affects the way early stage deal flow and funnels might now generate and evaluate new and untapped market value. In this Briefing episode we talk to Soma Pirityi about how with his company ETA Technologies, he is pioneering applying data analytics to provide a much needed and currently missing agile and intelligent Deal Diligence™ on startup teams. We explore why when 75% of S&P500 companies use and integrate psychometric testing, very few people in venture employ similar metrics when evaluating startup teams that they're currently looking to back and advance. Particularly when 23% of those startups consistently fail due to a breakdown in team dynamics and with it an inability to operationally execute and strategically implement key ongoing milestones. Hear how Soma believes why by increasingly integrating AI and associated data intelligence into current deal flow, this naturally leads to an increasing move towards and reliance on the 'Entrepreneurial Team Analytics' that ETA facilitates and a move away from the 'spray and pray' approach to cultivating a startup portfolio. For more information visit:* https://www.eta-technologies.com/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/soma-benedek-pirityi/

In this Briefing, listen to Jed Ng chart his journey from developing the leading API marketplace to now launching the pioneering syndicate school - AngelSchool.vc - that he is currently now actively scaling widely in territories, markets and sectors across the venture ecosystem. Start by downloading the free Building Angel Syndicates eBook: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IeexQIAK5U2Du2A3uMTQuYY8I0CK4H2E/view?usp=sharing To then learn more about how to rapidly build and engage with your own angel syndicate please visit: The Syndicate Program that helps experienced angels build LP networks and lead syndicate deals built on a 1000+ LP network organically that invests up to $1MN per startup. Apply here for your 8 week x 2.5 hr cohort based program. Syndicate Program deck: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sqzUR897vnJ7Ibs70nAxsVvtP9EhoD83/view?usp=sharing Visit www.pilotround.com to explore how our unique Deal Diligence™ platform easily integrates with your existing funnel to provide agile evaluation on your pre-seed deal flow.

In this last episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast in 2023, we are fortunate to close this Series 6 by getting talk to AJ, who has recently stepped down as the CEO of the leading invite only entrepreneurial community Foundrs.

We get to hear how its original founders initially conceived of, formed and launched such a successfully a community. Accompanied by the insight of what it was like to have the privilege to be subsequently charged with the responsibility to continue to nurture and support it.

We learn how Foundrs achieves its success via a super active online founder support network and a combination of onsite events and intimate gatherings. To be then further fuelled and underpinned by a combination of common identity, shared sense of ongoing purpose and a consistent evidencing and surfacing of ‘behind closed doors’ member conversations and peer support - when management aren’t even looking or promoting that member interaction.

We discuss how the rise of leading syndicates like Ventures Together and pioneering accelerators like Unrest that are increasingly designed to deploy capital very quickly and diversely are aligning and feeding into the approach and ethos of successful communities.

Intelligent capital that is looking for ‘Default Alive’ lean approaches increasingly fuelled by FounderTech and avoiding the ‘Fatal Pinch’ of being ‘Default Dead’ by now avoiding a formerly encouraged blitz attitude to scaling quickly and early.

Finally we get a nuanced insight from AJ as to how to distinguish an “Audience” from a community, as its engagement dynamics become more and more important and central to the early stage founder investor conversation. Primarily that the former is when you’re talking and broadcasting directly 1-to-many and the latter is when the communication is amplifying many-to-many interactions. Insights that he is now looking to share and nurture in his current role as a fractional community consultant, here to now support others trying to now launch and nurture a genuine engaged community.

Connect Further

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aj-foundrs/

https://www.foundrs.co/

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast it was a pleasure to talk to Jem Stein who is the Syndicator at Daring Capital focused on reimagining the social enterprise model - particularly in its early stages.

We discuss how in this social enterprise space, even more than most early stage venture sectors, the asymmetries around networks and access to capital that we often explore on the podcast, really come to the fore and into play - frequently affirming biases around what and where things get founded.

In his case, how does a really great social entrepreneur, with high founder market fit, trying to navigate and unlock the potential of a niche in which they are trusted and embedded, access that initial tranche of capital that enables them to demonstrate the potential of their approach, show the nuanced skill of their operational delivery and evidence their complex market understanding.

We also touch on how traditional venture models with high 5-10 x (and beyond) models do not align with the potential of this type of social enterprise founder, where a 2-3 x return might be a real strategic result, generating a lot of value and achieving a lot of social impact in the process.

We also talk about how the increasingly popular syndicate model of investors - that is sensitive and open to leveraging agile capital tools alongside aligned FounderTech - is most likely the right model to innovate this social enterprise investment sector and how Daring Capital as such a syndicate based model wishes to take advantage of the market timing and opportunity around these emerging and evolving early stage market shifts.

Explore and connect further:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jem-stein-8751959a/

www.daringcapital.co.uk

https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/adebowale-commission-on-social-investment%EF%BF%BC/

https://www.consideredcapital.io/

https://www.libraryofthings.co.uk/

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast, it was a pleasure to talk to Sam Marchant, an early stage founder turned investor with multi-stage asset manager Hambro Perks. A fund relatively distinct in its market positioning in its capability to come in at the initial pre-seed stage but also scale up to a Series C round and beyond.

We get into a deep and nuanced conversation around whether the initial runway for early stage is now becoming flatter and longer. In the sense that with less capital a truly talented exceptional domain expert founder can now achieve more with less. Leveraging increasingly Gen AI and no code Foundertech to test, prove and even monetise the minimum viable assumptions behind their startup quicker.

We explore whether this involves a recalibration - for those exceptional founders who are often unique in their ability to navigate, identify and unlock new value in deep verticals - of expectations around their ongoing operations, future scale and eventual exit.

Finally we ask whether we just at the beginning of how this emerging conversation and how it will now play? Particularly if this change in early stage founder dynamics has a knock on effect in how venture and their LPs start to reconfigure their early stage founder portfolios and value offerings.

Connect further

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-marchant

https://www.hambroperks.com/

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast, we talk to Sarah King about how her and her Co-Founder Claire Dunn are positioning Obu to find and back female founded UK companies seeking £250,000 to £1,000,000.

How they’re trying to amplify and leverage the power of inclusive design to try and unlock the potential of these businesses as a force for good. To empower a new wave of investors to see early stage investing in female driven founders - that currently only receive just 1% of venture capital - as a chance to bring new perspectives to the problems in the world they now want to see tackled and hopefully solved.

We hear how alongside recently successfully securing their first two investments for Moody Month and Proper Plan via the Obu platform, they have also engaged inclusive design principles to successfully lobby the government to increase the eligible SEIS time limit for startups from 2 to 3 years. A very concrete example of how a big win for female founders also then creates a longer SEIS runway and window of opportunity for all entrepreneurs in the ecosystem!

Building on this, we discuss how if a lot of the change that FounderTech wishes to bring about is behavioural rather than technological, is there a better way to frame and tell the stories and engage the tools that help re-engineer current diversification biases simply and fundamentally because they no longer serve and nurture the best economic outcomes?

Finally we touch on how this feeds into and fuels the core of the mission behind and woven into their brand name itself. Obu - Over Being Underfunded!

Connect Further

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahlking

https://www.obuinvest.com/

In this episode of the podcast it was great to talk to Adam French who is a partner at Houghton Street Ventures, a previous co-founder of Scalable Capital and active angel investor. Houghton Street Ventures is quite unique in that it is a dedicated early stage fund investing across a wide thesis specifically for founders emerging from the 200,000 alumni, students and faculty of LSE.

As such Adam is consistently across a diverse and constant range early stage deal flow with founders across multiple sectors. In that way he is very placed to sense, synthesise and suggest what the imminent future horizon looks like for the early stage ecosystem.

Building on this we discuss how FounderTech might unlock a whole new wave of untapped latent entrepreneurial potential. How this might lead to the rise of the 1 person million dollar business, driven by agile fractional teams, leveraging and amplifying capital efficiently inside scalable niches, to the point that founder’s first round might also be their last round.

Adam notes that the rise of the ChatGPT and more recently specialising GPTs are key to this ecosystem shift. A shift that he is not just exploring theoretically but has personally leveraged himself to design, doe and build “evAIuate”. His own dynamic FounderTech that leverages AI to put a pitch deck in anyone’s pocket.

Visit and connect at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-french-2192034a

https://www.evaiuate.com/

https://houghtonstreet.com/

www.scalable.capital

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we get to talk to Judy Leung who is the founder of Sweqlink. A marketplace for work-for-equity opportunities that is targeting a key bottleneck and catch-22 in the startup ecosystem. Namely how when you’re an early stage founder with limited resources in terms of capital to attract the talent you need, do you incentivise and engage that talent?

To help with this process, we hear how Sweqlink divides that talent into 3 distinct categories - Makers > Movers > Manifestors. Each bringing different skill sets and perspectives to the table. How the platform - which is still in its MVP phase - essentially acts a middle man and matchmaker between founders seeking that talent and people with those skills now looking to deploy that talent into an early stage startup.

We discuss how this feeds directly into the shift and orientation around the engagement and leverage of fractional teams by that early stage founder. How status is starting to be recognised and conferred on those founders who are using FounderTech to experiment and test their operational acumen and execution before committing to the huge capital and human resource of engaging and servicing a full time executive and management model.

Finally we touch on how these changes are generally welcomed because they increase agility, openness and transparency in the early stage ecosystem. However, like with most experimental and emerging FounderTech, they are still fundamentally behavioural rather than technologically driven - in order for the new dynamics and engagement model around platforms like Sweqlink to be tested, flourish and succeed.

Engage further

https://www.sweqlink.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/judyleeleung/

In this episode we talk to Marcus Exall, an experienced UK based angel investor that takes a distinctly different approach in contrast to the volume, numbers game and tax efficient driven approaches utilised and leveraged by many of his early stage investor contemporaries.

We hear how over the course of his 30 angel investments, Marcus does not have a particular thesis or portfolio bias.Instead we hear how he genuinely sees angel investing as a journey. With the first key and non-negotiable step being evaluating the founder for their values, intent, agility, resilience and gaining a deep understanding as to their deep motivation why they are trying to launch their startup in the first place. For him writing a cheque typically in the £25,000 to £35,000 range, also represents his bet on empowering a founder to try to navigate and create a future that he might also want to participate and live in.

This is mirrored within the criteria and evaluation Marcus applies to himself, where he will assess whether he is the right investor to provide a safe harbour of honest feedback and value-add support for the founder as and when they invariably need it, as they navigate the increasingly complex and uncertain terrain of their launch.

Equally we hear upon making an investment, Marcus wants that money to be deployed and go to work as quickly and efficiently as possible and how to that end how is an angel investor in leading FounderTech like Odin and also MVPR.

Finally, we also hear how Marcus has helped productise and scale this approach by launching UP AND TO THE RIGHT to help founders successfully create, build, and scale their start up by offering playbooks, original tools, and helpful courses to further incubate and accelerate their journey.

Explore and Connect >

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusexall

https://www.u2r.co/

https://www.endvr.biz/

In this, the first episode of Series 6 of the FounderTech Decoded podcast it was a pleasure to talk to Joe Lewin, CEO and Founder of Foundy.com the UK’s leading M&A platform.

We hone in on the increasing difference in expectations around planning and framing an exit. Between founders who have bootstrapped and fuelled the growth of their startup with sustainable revenues and ownership versus those who have taken VC money early and are therefore focused on chasing that 20-30x return of the mythical unicorn.

Building on this we talk about and explore the key concept of efficient capital. Capital that fully adopts and integrates the potential and reach of FounderTech tools, alongside leveraging increasingly popular operational modalities like fractional teams to now change perceptions around status, legitimacy and investor norms. How this shift in legitimacy will increasingly lead to placing a higher value on smaller teams executing and achieving traction quicker and more agilely with less capital.

We explore how at Foundy they are now adopting and amplifying this approach around things like using AI to reduce legal due diligence around a deal from months to minutes.

How they are also busy currently closing their next round, so they can continue to incorporate and amplify these new dynamics in order to radically alter and re-engineer timelines and functionality around all aspects of M&A planning and execution. With the ultimate aim and vision of becoming the Rightmove of M&A!

In this special edition of the FounderTech Decoded Podcast we document the first live in person gathering of the UK community at the invite only FounderTech Collective event in London - 15/5/23.

Over the course of the evening we explore via a 4 part fireside chat format, the key themes and strands that have emerged over 5 x Series over the past year of the FounderTech Decoded podcast.

It's a chance to intimately listen in to the emerging debate live the room, that is also hopefully shaping and informing the future of this important conversation for startup ecosystem.

As it now evolves and iterates to become more open, agile and transparent for all.

Part A | The Problem of Asymmetry

Featuring the insight of: Martin Barnes @ Pitch Club, Ken Valledy @ The Startup Lexicon and Serkan Ferah @ PitchSpace

The recalibration of deal communication
The valuing of “Fast No’s” over Slow Maybe’s
The rebooting of legacy systems, tools & frameworks
The translation of cryptic language

Part B | The Conditions for FounderTech

Featuring the insight of: Hattie Willis @ IfWeRaise, Serkan Ferah @PitchSpace and Chris Booth @Findrs

The rise of no code/low code/MVA
The increasing currency of ecosystem intelligence
The untapped potential of deep and scalable niches
The opportunity for diversified and fluid capital

Part C | The Shifting Financial Terrain

Featuring the insight of: Gareth Hawkins @AngelSyndicate, Anthony Rose @SeedLegals and Ifty Nasir @Vestd

The role of ASA’s in compacting deal flow timelines
The rise of SPV’s, syndicates, solo capitalists
The need to coordinate liquidity in the angel community
The influence of dynamic cap tables and incentives

Part D | The Potential Future Ecosystem

Featuring the insight of: Daniel Sawko @ Ship Shape, Jim Shirley @ FundingHero and Matt Hussey @ The Brink

The valuing of openness and transparency
The initial elevation of founder market fit
The new KPIs for startup teams and talent
The nurturing of healthier founder archetypes

Want to keep in the loop of the evolving FounderTech conversation, then please subscribe at foundertech.substack.com

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded it was fascinating to talk to Tom Lawrence founder of leading FounderTech PR, comms and content platform MVPR. We talk about how his experience working for Edelman - the largest PR agency in the world - informed his sense and perspective that there was a gap in the market for startups who increasingly didn't have the budget in their funding to warrant hiring a boutique agency to handle and manage their comms on an ongoing basis. Alongside this supply side of the comms value chain, Tom increasingly saw opportunities in the demand side. Where journalists who themselves were increasingly being distributed and dispersed to a wider range of niche audience delivery hubs - Substack / Medium etc - alongside more traditional media channels, needed a constant flow of filtered and considered content to write about. He launched MVPR to be the platform that bridged the gap in that double sided marketplace. Additionally, we discuss how once you have a platform like MVPR in the mix, interesting perspectives and opportunities present themselves when it comes to data. Suddenly in both real and residual time you can see a founder and their startups' current and historic comms reach. A ROI insight that can not only be leveraged in planning going forward but also with investors as you start to scale up. Where a sort of new Content Intelligence emerges. A classic case of FounderTech coming in and providing agility, more openness and transparency in an area of the startup ecosystem that was still largely informed by opaque practice and legacy systems crying out to be reinvented. Connect further with Tom: > tom@mvpr.io> https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmlawro> www.mvpr.io

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast it was really good to talk to Gareth Hawkins, who is Investment Director at the Block Dojo London incubator and Partner at Henley Business Angels.

Gareth has also invested in a portfolio of 30 startups - several of which are key FounderTech platforms such as Connectd.co and Pitch.Space - which we’ve previously been lucky enough to talk to and feature previously in this podcast.

Given Gareth’s insight into the space, this discussion is a insider tour through the state of play in the contemporary angel landscape as it stands today and where it could potentially arrive in its next iteration. With FounderTech now playing a potentially key role in driving and evolving that new horizon.

This is being accompanied by a rise of an emerging generation of investors, who increasingly see angel investing as a new asset class and are demanding new models and platforms that help them access and manage the agility and liquidity of that asset.

We talk about how lack of innovation in the systemic structure in the ecosystem is itself possibly a key driver of market failure and contributes to hindering unlocking its untapped ‘idling’ founder potential. This includes angels still primarily acting in silos rather than in groups that are fluently aligned and coordinated around their ongoing portfolio preference and a curated funnel focus.

To address this, we discuss how Gareth is currently launching AngelSyndicate.uk in June, as an end-to-end community, syndication and deal-execution platform for business angel networks, that provides a single point of application for founders to reach multiple regional groups of angel investors.

Connect with Gareth:

gh@angelsyndicate.uk

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gareth-hawkins/

https://www.angelsyndicate.uk/

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we talk to Mary Lin, Co-Founder and CEO of pioneering alternative investment platform Odin. We discuss:

Referrals vs. Warm Intros:
Why referrals will always be a key source of deal flow for investors and how technology can alleviate some of the issues related to that.
Gender, Diversity and Impact in tech.
As a founder who typically steers clear of terms like “diversity” and “impact”, Mary shares her views however on how she thinks about and frames them, particularly around gender differences and improving participation in the venture ecosystem Lowering the Barriers
Finally, we talk about how companies like Odin are lowering the barriers to entry for both founders and investors to build and invest in companies. Mary shares why she thinks this is crucial if we are to create a future that is aligned with society's needs. Connect with Mary> www.joinodin.com> https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-yizhi-lin/ > https://blog.joinodin.com/p/progress

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we have a long overdue conversation with Serkan Ferah founder of PitchSpace. Long overdue, because a lot of the original impetus for the original FounderTech conversation came from working with early stage founders across all sectors and consistently experiencing their ongoing frustration with the pitch deck - as a creative tool, strategic framework and also as the go-to driver of nearly all initial investor communications.

Pushing this further, you can say the pitch deck has become the key symbol of the lack of innovation and change in the venture ecosystem. Still relying on a legacy tool that clearly doesn't consistently perform well.

So it’s no surprise that Serkan has come along with Pitch Space to radically redesign and rethink how it fundamentally functions and operates.

We discuss how the clue is in the title and a key to unlocking the potential future of the pitch deck is to understand that it is informed by two components that are present and backed in and one that is too frequently absent.

1> the Pitch which is its narrative

2> the Deck which is its mechanic

3> the Relationship which is its function

We explore how with PitchSpace they are trying to bring all 3 dynamics together and ask whether this is melds into a new category of 'Narrative Design'. That automates and innovates the mechanical parts of 1 & 2 above whilst focusing on and elevating the narrative and relationship components, so they're embedded and baked into the process from the start.

It feels like the start of a completely new conversation for what the much dreaded Pitch Deck could now evolve into and empower founders and investors going forward.

Connect with Serkan:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/serkanferah/

www.pitch.space

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we talk to Hattie Willie, who is deeply involved in the ongoing support and development of founders navigating the early stage ecosystem from a capital, personal narrative and wellbeing point of view. Drawing on that broad experience, we explore how a typical founder has to experience and endure wave after wave of rejection. Which means that psychologically they to have a degree of resilience that is too commonly unacknowledged let alone understood, when charting a course to launch their startup and navigate trying to secure early stage venture. Added to that, we discuss when you enter that investment room and deal conversation say as a woman or from a minority background, those odds are often inherently and substantively stacked against you. Where long held confirmation biases unfortunately still hold much influence and sway on deal flow and decision making. We try to reframe one of the key assumptions that puts strain on founder and an expectation that is baked into most investment conversations. To suggest that we need to understand that the founder that charts a complex path into launching a venture, is very often not the same founder to operationally grow and scale that venture - and more often than not should not be expected to be so. Building on this, we question is it time to redefine a different version of and model for what constitutes and successful founder and if in doing so, could we collectively unlock and tap into the current latent 'idling capacity' of the venture ecosystem as a whole.Connect further with Hattie:> https://www.ifweraise.com/> https://www.linkedin.com/in/hattie-willis-she-her-2b47b376/> https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/fundraising-as-a-diverse-founder-with-guests/id1622164990?i=1000584583714

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we get the chance to talk to Jonathan Hollis, who is Managing Partner at Mountside Ventures and whose mission is to optimise the fundraising process for European startups and investors. We discuss how asymmetry around network effects continues to influence and inform most of the capital allocation in the early stage space. One perspective as to why is that in the course of their lifetime, even an experienced founder will probably be at most across 2-3 companies, whereas an experienced VC will review 100s of deal flow opportunities - possibly and probably per quarter. This creates an imbalance in market perspectives and network effects that spill into and inflect ongoing deal dynamics. We explore the lack of diversity, regionally and impact currently in venture and ask whether this due to inefficiencies in capital deployment identifying and backing talent early or as a result of the reliance on primary and secondary networks to source and fund deal flow. With warm intros still making a successful investment 13 x more likely! Finally, we talk about the 3 categories of capital allocation that Jonathan thinks might be help drive innovation in the deployment of venture: i) data driven capital ii) alternative / revenue based finance and iii) SPV vehicles. All of which are currently generating a much need optionality and choice for both founders and investors engaging with and evaluating deal flow. Connect further with Jonathan: > https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhjhollis/> jonathan@mountsideventures.com> https://www.mountsideventures.com/startup-and-vc-events

https://airtable.com/shrqhI5iowDahtunb

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we talk to Marion Marincat. The dynamic founder of hearing wellness platform Mumbli, that is currently reshaping the way cities are designed and social spaces are navigated for sound. For the first time designing, delivering and scaling Sound As A Service. Mumbli is a startup Marion felt compelled to launch, after himself going through an unanticipated but dramatic period of personal hearing loss, which caused him to become aware of how many of the environments we have to daily navigate have not properly considered, let alone factored in sound and hearing wellness into their architecture, design and utility. In this way it's a chance to hear a founder with exceptional aligned founder market fit, pioneering a valuable 'Scalable Niche', with a developed team, that is underscored by demonstrable IP, consistent founder thought leadership and market case studies, still have to consistently experience the erratic frustrations of navigating the early stage startup ecosystem. Without naming names, hear Marion walk through investment case studies that range from all too desperately familiar to any fundraising founder to the tragic-comedy of feeling compelled to respond after an investor provided arms-length feedback, after just 17 seconds of pitch deck review. Just to try introduce some equanimity and rebalance the inbalanced asymmetry that seems to creep into the experience of way too many early stage founder investor conversations and interactions. Connect here:> www.mumbli.com> marion@mumbli.com> https://www.linkedin.com/in/marionmarincat

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we talk to Ollie Austen the Co-Founder of Startup 2 Standup. A diverse, growing and engaged community of experienced founders who want to help and support each other as they navigate their journey through the startup ecosystem.

The conversation is a window into the current status of the founder conversation, drawing on Ollie's experience of personally talking to up to 100 founders a month, to listen to and understand their current needs, frustrations and the frequent isolation between their current erratic experience contrasted with investors often demanding expectations.

We talk about how if founders are the wealth creators of the future, why the expectation is always on them to have all the answers to prove themselves up front and whether the new emerging alternative modes of funding are a way to break that asymmetric deadlock, by creating more options and early stage paths to startup capital and funding.

We explore how what Olli calls 'resistance points' play a role in this. Those typical barriers and milestones that a founder must cross in order to be on the road to being 'successful' and why engaged communities like Startup 2 Standup are so vital in making founders feel like they're fundamentally not alone in that often lonely journey.

Explore and connect more here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ollie-austen

https://www.startup2standup.com/

In this episode it was a pleasure to talk to Daniel Sawko of ShipShape.vc We start the conversation looking at why the venture ecosystem is still so informed and driven by legacy frameworks, systems and thinking. We examine whether the roots of this stem from the fact that in just over a decade that ecosystem has been radically transformed from being essentially a cottage industry of private networks and insider driven deal flow, to rapidly mutating into a potentially diverse and disparate startup marketplace. Where for example the accompanying status of being and publicly identifying as a founder in the 2000's was still an outlier career choice. Compare this to now with the legitimation of not just role but also of the supporting cast of accelerators, incubators, educators and media outlets that ratify and amplify going down that startup path and journey. The discussion explores and posits whether it is these market shifts that the venture system hasn't adapted to and that FounderTech as an emerging ethos and growing community is fundamentally and openly targeting and addressing. With the hope that if you close the gap between the legacy ecosystem and the new long tail of founders wishing to access the market, find capital and launch their journeys into Scalable Niches, lies a huge amount of untapped potential. Potential that Ship Shape is now trying to unlock and enable as the first ever free investor search engine that empowers founders and investors to align around demonstrable and repeatable market expertise and proven niche domain insight. Allowing calibrated capital to now better flow in theory to where it is most needed and can generate the most value and return for both sides. Explore further:> www.shipshape.vc> https://uk.linkedin.com/in/danielsawko

It was great to kick off Series 5 of the FounderTech Decoded podcast talking to Oli Harris, the UK Managing Director of Funderbeam. We explore and discuss how to stimulate and bring about the envisioned changes and evolution in the venture ecosystem - so that it is more transparent, open and agile for all. We explore how to achieve this, the emergence of pioneering FounderTech platforms and solutions needs to now align and integrate with new capital models. We talk about how Funderbeam in its ability to create regulated and agile private markets around Scalable Niches, is integrated to this alignment and integration now happening. Linked to this is the effect this integration has on capital distribution and allocation. So venture capital starts off and becomes regionally and demographically unbiased.

Enabled to travel and flow in the direction exceptional founder talent with deep expertise, to further empower investors looking for genuine market innovation and opportunity.

Connect with Oli:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliharris

https://www.funderbeam.com/

Pilot Round is the first FounderTech platform to enable pre-product market fit founders to powerfully align with early stage investors. In order to secure the capital they need to initially have a chance to get their startup off the ground over their next 3-6 months of launch.

Please visit www.PilotRound.com to now learn more, sign up to use the Beta and Launch The Extraordinary!

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we talk to Christian Arno who has a multifaceted founder’s story that starts with building his own tech-enabled language translation startup to the point where it was engaging with mid-large companies such as Patagonia, Eventbrite and Virgin Pulse and from which he successfully exited from in 2021.

Challenged by his father to then take an active positioning and role in the climate conversation, Christian has recently launched Pawprint to transform any organisation by empowering every employee to contribute towards your sustainability goals. In a nod to his language background, translating micro actions and dialogue into impactful macro narratives.

Currently in the middle of a round for Pawprint, Christian reflects on the value of networks and a key team in raising capital, even though he is an active angel investor himself in the Scottish ecosystem and a member of investment community Ventures Together.

The latter a dynamic syndicate of 130 exited founders who review and act on deals weekly using transparency and engagement dynamics, which themselves can be seen to act as a form of FounderTech in the way they tightly frame and agilely funnel the deal flow conversation.

Connect with Christian at:

www.pawprint.eco

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianarno/?originalSubdomain=uk

Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023? Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of Pilot Round - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem.

Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/

FounderTechBulletin #PilotRound #FounderTechDecoded

In this episode we talk to Chris Booth CEO of pioneering startup recruiter Findrs. Propelia is excited to be doing a webinar with Chris on 2/3/23 where we’ll explore how FounderTech could start to creep into and apply to start up hiring policies and best practices. In this episode we touch on and open up some of the themes we’ll be discussing and exploring in the Webinar

Why FounderTech is part of a movement towards rewiring the early stage venture ecosystem to that is it is more agile, open and transparent for all. How FounderTech has evolved out of the increasing awareness and implementation of no code / low code methodologies by founders in their startup journeys, in order to develop that first critical market momentum and traction.

Building on this, why top talent that is likely to only be identified and engaged on a freelance basis in the pre-product phase, is likely to see the proper deployment of FounderTech as a sign of operational sophistication and fluidity? That automates unnecessary low level functions and enables them to do their best work and why such top talent should also be expected to bring their own FounderTech to the table.

Finally we ask, why you might be acting as or recruiting a CFTO (Chief FounderTech Officer!) sooner than you think?!

Book your complimentary place at the Why Leveraging FounderTech is now critical for your team Webinar on 2nd March 2023 at 12.30 here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/why-leveraging-foundertech-is-now-critical-to-building-your-core-team-tickets-542819416487

Connect with Chris:

www.findrs.co.uk
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-booth-0ba01852/

Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023?

Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of Pilot Round - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem.

Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/

Sign up for the Beta of Pilot Round at www.pilotround.com

FounderTechBulletin #PilotRound #FounderTechDecoded

In this episode we have a deep dive into the world of deep tech with Xavier Parkhouse-Parker COO and Co-Founder of Cambridge Future Tech. It’s also a chance to listen and gain insight into the framework of a Venture Builder model.

A model which elevates and fundamentally supports founders - often with a perspective, track record and insight of deep academic expertise - who are exploring Scaleable Niches into complex market problems that require deep IP and innovation.

In this model, support means everything. From multi-faceted advisory boards, mentoring, deep understanding and planning around market research and launch integration, as well as capital raising to create a defensible beachhead to scale and leverage going forward.

As we will with all guests on the Series 4, we then walk through, explore, challenge, counteract and gain further insight into The Switch Deck together - www.propelia.com/switchdeck

Follow Xavier on:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/xavierparkhouseparker
https://camfuturetech.com
hello@camfuturetech.com
https://a16z.com/book/the-hard-thing-about-hard-things/

Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023? Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of Pilot Round - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem.

Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/

Sign up to the Pilot Round Beta at www.pilotround.com

In this episode we have one of the most interesting and exploratory conversations of this Series talking with Jim Shirley. Where we navigate different facets and dynamics of the current venture ecosystem and how FounderTech might vividly reimagine it within a projectable short-term horizon.

First we explore Jim's own journey scaling and exiting from the highly disruptive new sector of micro breweries - which were very much the 'garage startups' of their day! - helping to build a culture where you were ‘proud to wear the t-shirt of the brand, to taking market share and eventually being acquired by a $3billion dollar mutinational.

We then move onto the evolution of venture driven by this low code / no code approach and how it changes the game in terms of the entry points, agility and fluidity with which a founder can quickly launch, test and iterate their startup in a very compressed timeline. A shift which also enables them to get off the funding flywheel that too many founders unfortunately get locked into and trapped in.

This leads us to explore Jim’s latest venture FundingHero which helps and educates founders through the 6 Pillars of fundraising. From exploring fundraising strategy to understanding funding types to framing due diligence, which also enables them to evaluate that they can demonstrate founder market fit and position them to solve their market problem better than anyone else.

As we will with all guests on the Series 4, we then walk through, explore, challenge, counteract and gain further insight into The Switch Deck together.

Follow Jim on:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-shirley-finance-director/
https://www.fundinghero.co.uk/

Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023? Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of Pilot Round - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem.

Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/

FounderTechBulletin #PilotRound #FounderTechDecoded

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we get to listen in to Puja Balachander’s founder story, that saw her go from meeting her co-founder to in the first week of her MBA to then iterating and launching their MVP as a WhatsApp based product that helped them inform and determine product market fit. We hear how she used the Chrome extension Contact Out and Mail Merge as a critical piece of FounderTech to identify and be backed by the right team of early stage investors and aligned forward thinking early stage pre-seed backers like Bethnal Green Ventures and Catch22.

Puja’s story is a brilliant example of the hustle and work it out as you go no code / low code approach. An approach that is much celebrated as an ideal founder path but very rarely well and successfully executed on. Perhaps in her case it was because she had the combination of the Founder Market Fit of working in the government and public services first combined with her other expertise in product development and design.

Puja’s story also illustrates that not all startup stories have to move towards their scale phase before exiting and how sometimes there is an inflection point where a sell to a partner is sometimes the best calculated and strategic right choice and how useful it is to have good investors and advisors around and on the journey with you if you hit this important inflection point.

Finally we use The Switch Deck to explore Puja’s new role working for ClimateTech fund Carbon13 and how her own founder’s journey helps inform her approach when evaluating and talking to early stage founders who often have solutions in search of problems, in startups who are at a similar stage to when she started her founder’s journey.

Connect with Puja:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pujabalachander/

https://carbonthirteen.com/

In this episode of FounderTech Decoded we are let into the 20+ year journey of Tim Whiston, as he moves from running a FTSE 250 business, through to engineering an exit as a founder to now accelerating business marketplace Iisme|&|co from its initial launch to its current growth seed funding round.

After considering a portfolio career post his exit, he met his Co-Founder Will at a virtual meet up during the pandemic. Amazed to see the inefficiencies and untapped potential around how businesses in the UK connected with each other in terms of sharing services and information, they launched and are now preparing to scaleing isme|&|co.

We explore how Tim’s training at the start of his career, as a chartered accountant and then working for one of the ‘Big 4’ firms, and then at KPMG, might have provided him with a different financial perspective into potential that many startup founders who are fresh to future modelling their businesses may lack. Something that he has experienced as an angel investor when evaluating early stage startups he wants to evaluate and to invest in.

We then use The Switch Deck to explore and discuss whether there is an untapped ‘capacity’ within the SME / Entrepreneur marketplace in the UK that FounderTech in its open intent and potential to rewire the early stage ecosystem could help nurture and unlock.

Connect with Tim:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-whiston-797499127
https://www.ismeandco.com/

Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023? Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of BlackBox - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem.

Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/

FounderTechBulletin #BlackBox #FounderTechDecoded

In this Episode we get to talk to Nick Moutter, who recently won the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award for his work with Moot powering the next generation of ecommerce with deep tech and innovation that moves it radically beyond the current capabilities of Shopify.We’ll listen to Nick comparing the grit, persistence and tenacity that a founder needs with his experiences when he was younger as an emerging professional footballer. We discuss how his own journey suggests that backing such a founder in the early stages with that grit over a longer arc and timeframe, will mean they are more likely to produce a ‘win’ and a long term return for their investors. We also discuss how a credible introduction carries the majority of the weight of an initial engaging investor conversation and also often taking money from the wrong investor is worse than not receiving investment at all. As we will with all guests on this Series 4 of FounderTech Decoded, we then walk through, explore, challenge, counteract and insight to The Switch Deck together. You can follow and hear Nick really put it through its paces and testing and pushing against some of its key assumptions up at www.propelia.com/switchdeck Connect further with Nick:

https://www.ey.com/en_uk/entrepreneur-of-the-year/uk-finalists
https://moot.group/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmoutter

In this episode we talk to Drew Rogers Rogers and have the opportunity to listen to her founder’s story as it progresses from arriving as a child to the UK not speaking the language. To a side hustle that became Number 1 on Google. To exiting in 2022 from her startup My Language Lab® fuelled by the changing and evolving demands of online students and learning in the pandemic.

Drew’s journey to exit is unusual because it involves taking in no outside venture but embodies the much vaunted but rarely executed agile / no code low code approach. An approach that informed and drove her path from an offline tutoring business to launching a platform driven business, with high product market fit informed by analytics, assessment and automation.

Hear Drew share how once she had identified her acquirer, she then looked to the endpoint she wanted for her exit and worked backwards. Engineering My Language Lab so it gradually became more and more valuable and sellable. Particularly as her founder’s story deeply connected and resonated with that acquirer, enabling her to fashion and frame exit on terms that were commercially as well as personally fulfilling.

As we will with all guests on this Series 4 of FounderTech Decoded, we then walk through, explore, challenge, counteract and insight to The Switch Deck together. www.propelia.com/switchdeck

Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023? Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of BlackBox - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem.

Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/

In this episode we talk to Chris Wickson about his journey from launching his B2B SaaS startup Akkroo, to it being acquired for $34m by Integrate in 2019 - which after his earn out period leaves him currently with the fresh vista of being an active angel investor.

However, instead of taking the obvious path of trying to leverage their point of view and market expertise, he and his co-founder are actively seeking out problems in verticals they have relatively little experience and insight into.

The logic being that rather than double down on their pre-existing confirmation biases towards certain industries and sectors, by coming afresh to a sector they may be able to see how they can leverage solutions and fresh thinking into legacy systems and markets.

We drill into this further by exploring a term called ‘Scaleable Niches’ that has come up in previous episodes of the podcast. This posits that instead of looking at and evaluating horizontal B2B SaaS based opportunities, the new and untapped value lies in going deeply in verticals where genuine insight, product driven IP and innovation play a lot more prominence.

If in this case new models are needed to map and chart where the most promising Scaleable Niches are and also the type of founder you might need to align with and back? A founder who has sufficient exceptional Founder Market Fit that they can propel you into and provide the unfair advantage in terms of deep market insight, networks and expertise that a Scaleable Niche with blue sky potential might provide.

As we will with all guests now on the podcast, we then overlap the insight of Chris’ founder’s journey onto different aspects of The Switch Deck - key shifts effecting the future of the early stage venture ecosystem.

Connect further with Chris:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-wickson

Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023? Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of BlackBox - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem.

Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/

In this Episode we take a turn into new territory for the podcast, into the rapidly evolving world of emerging markets with Francesco Cracolici. Not the commonly cited emerging markets of vibrant new investable sectors such as FinTech, HealthTech or PropTech but instead how you identify and invest in the launch and scale the ‘Uber of Ghana’ or the ‘Revolut of Mongolia’.

Francesco talks us through how once properly understood these emerging markets potentially represent new opportunities and horizons for investors, who are looking to gain a new form of first mover advantage by leveraging existing and proven successful tech models and platforms into these often greenfields territories.

In this way you are looking at model replication and rapid technical and capital deployment being the key differentiators into a successful launch path into emerging markets, which often do not have the legacy of established ecosystems.

We discuss how in these markets and ecosystems FounderTech can really add value and accelerate the learning and adoption curve of these new and replicating startups. We also talk about how the market creation of such rapidly scaleable companies is potentially the quickest way of lifting developing companies economically and why he is launching Crossfund to accelerate and further stimulate this change.

As with all guests in the Series 4, we explore aspects of Francesco’s journey via The Switch Deck. Particularly of interest was understanding how in these emerging markets the pitch deck performs very well as an instrument and tool to filter and evaluate which opportunities to focus on, assess and potentially then back. Explore the deck here: www.propelia.com/switchdeck

Connect further with Francesco:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesco-cracolici/
https://www.crossfund.com/

In this episode it’s been great to talk to founder Luke Loveridge about his experience not only exiting a startup with HomeLINK but then going on to currently launching another one with Propflo - for which he recently won Startup of the year at the Tech South West Awards.

Tech South West was conceived of and launched by Dan Pritchard in 2018. A brand expert who moved to the region, he recognised the opportunity to supercharge its potential as a major tech hub. In that time, Dan also launched the Tech South West Awards in 2019, and with the Tech South West team, developed the tech cluster organisation to run virtual accelerator programmes, commission key reports and build its membership to over 3000-strong, all helping to put the South West as a region firmly on the UK’s tech map.

Bringing the perspective of the regional investor to the conversation is Ben Cooper, who as well as now being involved in the Awards is an active member of the Bristol Private Equity group - a leading regional angel syndicate. As well as being an active NED and strategic advisor to startup and scale ups.

With these 3 perspectives, this episode is a real window for anyone wishing to get an insight into how you begin to nurture, stimulate and interconnect the various nodes of a region to create the conditions for a vibrant regional hub outside of the traditional founder and investor London bias and focus.

As with all guests on the Series 4, we then walk and talk and overlay the insights of the above through the framework of The Switch Deck together.

Connect further:

https://propflo.co.uk/
https://www.techsouthwest.co.uk/awards-2022 and https://program.agency/
https://www.bristolprivateequityclub.com

In this episode it was a pleasure to talk to Alison McMurtrie about her different route to becoming a recently exited founder.

A journey where her future ‘co-founder to be’ unbeknownst to her had targeted and pitched her a role to become involved in her cyber security startup, only to find that 18 months later they both arrived at an early exit by selling the IP of the business rather than the business itself.

As a result of this exit, Alison had the opportunity to cross the aisle and become an active angel investor and a startup and SME advisor with her company iDunn Consulting.

Hear her describe the challenges of being an early stage female angel trying to invest in deeply innovative product driven - as opposed to SAAS / ecommerce - business from her home base in Ireland.

Alison highlights why most venture finds this type of actual real world product investment hard. We also hear why with this type of investment she prefers a concise one pager as opposed to receiving a pitch deck. Followed up by an introductory call where she makes 80% of her investment decisions.

As we will with all guests on the Series 4, we then walk through, explore, challenge, counteract and gain further insight into The Switch Deck together.

Connect further with Alison:

https://www.idunn.ie/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alisonmcmurtrie/
https://twitter.com/idunnconsult

As we commence Series 4 of FounderTech Decoded, we will be using The Switch Deck to help frame our forthcoming conversations which will primarily focus on founders.

The Switch Deck are the 10 key shifts in early stage venture that help further align founders and investors, that we explored and synthesised from Series 1-3 of FounderTech Decoded.

In this Episode we have an amazing open conversation with Karl Swanepoel, who is the youngest exited founder we have talked to on the podcast. For context, Karl had to find an exit to his first startup at 15 because he wasn’t yet legally old enough to have the PayPal account to run it!

After recently raising his pre-seed round for his new freelancer start up @Revolancer from SFC Capital and now onto his next fundraising round, listen as he walks through The Switch Deck and gives a masterclass as to how an early stage founder can be self-directing through persistent leverage to counteract investor resistance and engagement.

Visit www.propelia.com/switchdeck to accompany your listening as we walk through and analyse each of the 10 insights.

Connect further with Karl:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlswa/
www.revolancer.com
karl@revolancer.com

Throughout this podcast Series, I've repeatedly come back to Propelia's key premise that the lens of Founder Market Fit, when intelligently aligned and strategically evaluated alongside the metrics Product Market Fit, is key to empowering the dynamics of FounderTech to help rewire the early stage venture space.

I've alluded in various podcast Episodes, to how my own founder's journey which started elevating extraordinary talent in the record business, is parallel to then moving onto and launching Propelia. Where we have for over a decade consistently modelled and analysed the journey and trajectories of early stage founders for their Founder Market Fit.

As we prepare to launch the MVP of our own piece of FounderTech 'BlackBox' which builds and leverages these insights, I thought it was a good time to now share more...

So in this Episode, our Head of Comms Matt Hussey turns the mic on me to hopefully make a convincing case as to why I believe the market timing is now right 'BlackBox'. Why it is potentially poised to be the first FounderTech platform that powerfully integrates with founders and investors to scale Founder Market Fit in the pre-seed and seed venture space.

Listen and then learn more:

Introduction to FounderTech: https://mailchimp.com/courier/article/dan-simmons-foundertech-venture-capital/

Exploring Founder Market Fit: https://www.angelinvestmentnetwork.net/foundermarketfit/

Watch me pitch my original startup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwHYFisbhUE&t=65s

Visit www.propelia.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-simmons-a40658122/

In this Episode of FounderTech Decoded we talk to Justin Langen, Head of Investor Partnerships at Uncapped. In this conversation we zoom in on the evolution of using different and new financial products to reframe traditionally stigmatised approaches around instruments used to fund debt, to now hopefully propel venture into a much more agile and open space.

How this venture landscape that has traditionally veered towards equity as the default go-to, is starting to see the introduction of new tools and platforms around restructuring and offering debt-based solutions, start to gradually adjust and reconfigure the funding conversation. Where such debt is not seen as an end of the line emergency vehicle but a much more proactive and dynamic part of a founder’s startup runway.

We discuss how at Uncapped they are starting to explore calling this ‘Non-Diluted Funding’ and how they are learning that this type of venture debt is particularly suited to SaaS models and platforms. Where the fundamentals and unit economics are more easily made visible and known, in order to determine if there are distinct levers that can be amplified to stimulate further growth, revenues and return. Particularly when these models are also plugged into FounderTech APIs like Xero and Chargebee, to offer a much better real time macro and micro view of the scaling startup via which to quickly evaluate the business.

Finally, we talk about how viewing and delivering Non-Diluted Funding in this way can actually provide a very strong signal, point of intelligence and financial datapoint when raising a further equity round. Giving founders new found flexibility and runway security and in doing so also potentially strengthening their negotiating hand with VCs for their equity rounds. All of which allows for more intelligence and optionality in the venture landscape going forward.

Explore further and connect with Justin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-langen-528873151/
https://www.weareuncapped.com/
https://www.saastock.com/

In this episode of FounderTech Decoded, we are excited to talk to Francesco Perticarari about his experience of leveraging Silicon Roundabout - the largest Deep Tech founder meeetup and community in Europe - into a new sister venture fund Silicon Roundabout Ventures. A fund he is currently in the process of launching, aimed at identifying and investing in early stage tickets in DeepTech European startups.

We discuss how in framing and designing the fund FounderTech like Vauban (whilst also evaluating market alternatives like Odin) is enabling him to launch the fund in a rapid and agile way that would have simply not been possible even just a few years ago. Particularly for an outsider entering the venture space for the first time, looking to leverage a community driven perspective, backed by their particular market insight and sector point of view.

We also explore how the fund aligns with a potential parallel diminishment of low hanging B2B and B2C SaaS opportunities in the venture space. Where even in relatively recent dynamically backed VC sectors like FinTech, previous startup winners like Monzo and Revolut are now much more quickly replicable and therefore harder to differentiate and distinctly defend going forward. Given this, why Francesco believes the next big market opportunity for early stage venture is in Deep Tech. Backing startup challenges which can only be solved by founders leveraging deep R&D and complex Innovation or by exploiting valuable algorithmic niches.

Finally we discuss how FounderTech when leveraged properly, works brilliantly when it replaces low value functions in the ecosystem, in order to then elevate and amplify high value founder insights and investor interactions. Seen in this way FounderTech might essentially represent the new APIs of the venture system, that fluidly enables really advanced startup and funding innovation through a mixture of now better amplifying access to capital, deep founder driven insight and aligned community.

Explore further and connect with Francesco:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/fperticarari/
https://siliconroundabout.ventures/
https://siliconroundabout.tech/
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/silicon-roundabout-16832027154
https://blog.francescoperticarari.com/

In this episode we talk to Nick Telson to share his experience and insight from both sides of the table - as a new startup founder in 2010 to life as an exited founder and early stage investor in 2022. We talk about how whilst the traits, values and robustness needed by a founder on a character level essentially remain the same, that FounderTech tools and platforms are increasingly changing the agility around framing and also accessing early stage venture capital.

We discuss how it must be remembered that whilst the core act of raising money by an early stage founder is still essentially a very human driven process, it is also underpinned and informed by the metrics and dynamics of an investors deal funnel.

We explore how the limitations of the pitch deck as a largely static tool designed around product market fit, doesn’t consistently behave very well when trying to amplify and assess those human driven traits. Could we learn from other industries like recruitment, as to how they reimagined static key legacy tools like the CV, into much more dynamic human driven platforms, that better convey the candidates story in a much more compelling way?

Finally, we explore his recent return to being a startup co-founder with his sales cycle platform Trumpet, his own investment in FounderTech platform Landscape and how platforms like AngelList and Odin that enable startups to create their own SPV’s, alongside the rise of founder driven capital and Solo Capitalists might represent key FounderTech market developments that further point to an adapting and iterating new future for early stage venture.

Explore further and connect with Nick:

https://horseplay.ventures/
https://www.sendtrumpet.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicktelson/
https://anchor.fm/pitch-deck

After talking to the innovative FounderTech platforms in Series 1 of the FounderTech Decoded podcast and pioneering FounderTech investors in Series 2, we are excited in Series 3 to get to a remote round table where we’re talking to exceptional pre-seed founders!

A rare chance to hear and drop in on an honest conversation how these types of founders currently experience and navigate the current pre-seed venture ecosystem but also how they would like to reimagine and reframe their early stage startup journey through the lens of FounderTech.

In this Episode we cover:

Why exceptional founders solving complex problems that they intimately know how to navigate want to be evaluated via the lens of Founder Market Fit

The opportunity for investors to differentiate themselves by understanding and critically analysing the deep tech requirement of founders

The persistent and commonplace frustrations with Pitch Decks as the main founder investor instrument and comms device. Particularly when recent research reveals that it is only viewed on average for 2-3 minutes

The merits of investors micro-slicing the phases of founder onboarding

Why it’s wise for founders to reach out to other portfolio companies that investors have already invested in

Finally, why an honest and clear ‘Fast No’ from an investor is often much more appreciated than a Slow Yes that is ambiguous and sucks up unnecessary time and energy

Many thanks to our Series partners www.preseednow.com and https://www.linkedin.com/company/pitchclublive/

Connect With The Founders:

www.creatrclub.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-marsden-9bb58519/
www.tutorbloc.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/mercurius-saad/
https://www.untapwater.com/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-trant/

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://try.docsend.com/fundraising-report
The investor rejections for Airbnb - https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-7d894cbaa084
FounderTech tools discussed: https://pitch.com | https://www.loom.com/ | www.landscape.vc

In this Episode, we talk to Roei Samuel founder of Connectd about how you can use and leverage FounderTech to now further level the playing field in the venture capital sector. How if everyone in the space is initially more aligned, it will release a lot of liquidity into the early stage space, that will enable more founders to hone in on, navigate and solve valuable market problems.

We explore how the dynamics of this space have often been skewed via the lens of venture firms whose principal decision makers have traditionally often come from the world of finance rather than first experiencing the early stage startup trajectory as founders themselves. This naturally biases them towards more product market fit and metric driven evaluative frameworks, that ultimately exclude pursuing any further meaningful conversation or engagement with more diverse pre-revenue founders in their funnel.

Building on this, we also touch on the dangers of attracting ‘devil’ investors. The shadow side of angel investing where right from the get go there is little understanding and alignment between the founder and investor, which invariably leads to problems down the line. We talk about how the rise of founder driven capital and solo capitalists could help bridge that gap and enable these informed types of investors to better evaluate early stage founders. Founders who are elevated and celebrated for using the least amount of capital in order to generate the most market authority and traction over their problem space.

We also discuss how when there is so much transactional complexity in the early stage space, we need FounderTech to provide the ‘utilities’ that help translate that complexity into meaningful and fluid engagement and traction. Where both founder and investor are able to better identify, evaluate and engage with each other and how Connectd as a platform is now set up and positioned to achieve and accelerate this realignment and bring more visibility to this underserved and undervalued asset class.

Connect with Roei:

Web: www.connectd.co
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roei-samuel

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://twitter.com/gregisenberg
https://latecheckout.substack.com/

In this conversation we talk to Anthony Rose who is founder and CEO of SeedLegals. An outsider to the legal and investment community, who ended up building one of the original FounderTech platforms that would go on to ultimately reimagine both of those sectors.

We talk about how when you are an outsider, you can sometimes frame and envision possibilities for a problem space in the market completely differently. In Anthony’s case he realised that the main product opportunity for SeedLegals was not - as he initially and reasonably assumed - the faster delivery of a set of legal documents. He came to realise that’s actually almost incidental and a small piece of the puzzle, not the actual puzzle itself. That the real value and opportunity lay in enabling founders to have confidence with how they initially engaged, navigated and progressed through the complexities of the startup venture space.

This led to repositioning SeedLegals as ‘the fastest way to do your funding round’ and the development and introduction of their flagship investment products SeedFAST and Instant Investment. Both of which went onto inform and help frame what they define as agile investment. Both have led to more money now being raised via SeedLegals outside of a traditional funding round than within a traditional funding round.

We also explore how there are 4 distinct typical investor personas that inform a funding round which are not the same in intent or capacity and how founders need to calibrate their pitch accordingly to align with these personas. We highlight how all an investor can go on in the early pre-product and pre-revenue stages is teasing out the signals founders have agency over. That one of the only true signals and datapoints an investor can evaluate is the content the founder can produce and put out that creates thought leadership in their space and demonstrates authority over their market sector.

Ultimately we focus and hone in on how FounderTech, in order to further rewire and reimagine the rules of the founder investor landscape, has to behave like a series of utilities. Utilities that are designed to increase the fluidity and agility of that founder investor dynamic and conversation. Utilities that continue to erode and reduce the inefficient asymmetries of the early stage startup space so it is ultimately more inclusive and open for everyone.

Connect with Anthony:

Web: www.seedlegals.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anrose

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://mikebutcher.me/2015/07/01/the-press-release-is-dead/
https://sifted.eu/articles/interpreting-investor-feedback/
https://www.momtestbook.com/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Western-Philosophy-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415325056

A History of Western Philosophy (English)(Hardcover)

In this Episode we have a very open conversation with Amrit Sami diving into and taking the time to understand and explore the human aspects of the early stage founder investor relationship. Amrit is an Associate at Symvan Capital who is focused on identifying and evaluating pre-seed SEIS investments for the venture fund.

We discuss why SEIS itself is a shining example of innovative FounderTech, that we in the UK should be proud of and actually celebrate more than we do. An innovation that’s helped stimulate many pre-seed investments and make this initial difficult phase of the early stage startup journey much easier over the last decade since it’s been introduced.

We also look at how SEIS capital is best suited to demonstrate a Founder Market Fit, that enables an early stage founder to navigate and traverse that difficult pre-revenue and pre-product phase. How as a founder, demonstrably showing a market authority and thought leadership driven expertise, accompanied by an ongoing deep curiosity around your sector, is hugely important to initially providing critical further data points. Subsurface cues that can help propel you from the pitch deck into a more nuanced level playing field conversation with an investor.

An open dialogue where you can then be evaluated by more human metrics and dynamics and whether you can then take an investor on a compelling journey with you. That this is the aligned richer conversation that smart forward thinking investors might now want to use FounderTech platforms to help better enable, evaluate and engage in. To accelerate and quickly determine if they are right for you as much as you are for them!

Connect with Amrit:

Web: https://www.symvancapital.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amrit-sami-4a1baaa4/

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://readnoise.com/
https://davidepstein.com/the-range/

In this conversation we talk to Jake Stanley who is Investment Manager at E2E Capital Ventures, where they focus on enabling early stage founders to target, develop and grow their own investor network before they embark on raising their pre-seed and seed round. We discuss how if seen through that light, your investor network is a crucial tool that represents a building block of FounderTech.

We discuss how raising early stage investment aligns with and might be seen as a marketing campaign - replete with strategic comms aimed at engaging aligned demographics in a targeted and methodical fashion. That taking the logic to its conclusion issuing your eventual shareholder’s certificate with the right valuable investor can be seen at and represents an optimal targeted ‘sell’. That founders who are the most backable can demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of these sales qualities up front.

We touch on why when it’s so crucial to the ongoing growth and development of their startup so few engage someone permanently in the role of a ‘Chief Investment Officer’. Whose role and focus it is to primarily and continually refine, define and develop this investor network. How most founders don’t think like this because they fundamentally underestimate how hard it is to raise early stage funds.

More than this, smart angel investors want to see that you have this ability to attract other investors and have an active investor network because in essence this piece of FounderTech potentially then de-risks their future investment. We talk about some very simple but open and accessible tips for identifying your 'Bronze, Silver and Gold' investors within your network including accessing and referencing publicly available cap tables of similar startups to yours, that investors have invested in to determine and pre-qualify the size, frequency and focus of that investor.

Finally we talk about how at E2E they have built a master investor database and their own FounderTech to help founders be able to target and craft structured campaigns over an initial 3 month period, in order to now build the most valuable investor network for them and their startup going forward.

Connect with Jake:

Web: https://www.e2ecapital.ventures
Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/jhstanley

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://www.amazon.com/Yes-Destination-How-You-There/dp/0966398130
https://stevenbartlett.com/the-diary-of-a-ceo-podcast/

Go for No! Yes is the Destination, No is How You Get There

In this conversation we talk to Eamonn Carey, formerly of Techstars and more recently a General Partner of venture funds Tera Ventures and The Fund. In our discussion we focus on why ex-founder’s launching and managing funds could be a very emergent piece of the FoundTech puzzle. We touch on how he arrived at this insight after returning from the US, where the emphasis from this founder driven perspective focuses primarily on the potential of a startup rather than initially framing and assessing problems.

We discuss how if you’ve sat in the seat of the founder and experienced first hand the problems you face, trying to launch and fundraise for you early stage startup, this gives you a different perspective on how you not only evaluate that startup but also how you are able to better empathise with the actual stage of the journey the founder is currently on.

This stops you from automatically focusing on product driven data points that can’t be demonstrated at this stage and looking instead for other proxies, symptoms and signs that indicate that the founder is currently capable of demonstrating Founder Market Fit. Things like having sophisticated hiring plans in place or also whether the founder has evidently done Due Diligence on the investor to see if they are right for them.

Finally, we get into why language around the investor ecosystem for a founder can often be unnecessarily opaque and how with the recent successful publishing and launch of ‘The Startup Lexicon’ with Ken Valledy he is keen on now demystifying this language so it can be widely accessible and understood. How this in itself is an important foundational piece of FounderTech, because if founders and investors can’t start their dialogue fundamentally and clearly understanding each other, how is that relationship going to then align, bloom and prosper going forward?

Connect with Eamonn:

Web: https://www.tera.vc/
Web: https://thefund.vc/
Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ecarey

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Lexicon-Demystifying-everyday-language-ebook/dp/B09XG34QXS
https://www.aprildunford.com/obviously-awesome
https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/
https://www.theconsumervc.com/

None

In this Episode we have a really great open conversation with Gian Seehra, about his experience post his role at Octopus Ventures, advising and supporting early stage founders. Gian has been a part of over $300m in venture funding in his career and has now helped founders raise raise $80m from pre-seed to Series A since starting advising founders!

We talk about how you square the circle of pre-revenue investment by encouraging VCs not to be weighed down by legacy models and encouraging them to start to use tools that enhance the ability of the founder to be able to demonstrate their validity and worth, outside of and before the metrics of revenue kick in.

We explore how it is not expressed enough in the venture space, that the true purpose and driver of Product Market Fit within a seed round is not to prove and underscore those revenue metrics but instead demonstrate that with this capital injection into a startup, there is a path and a reasonable expectation that the founder can then get to Product Market Fit within the next 2-3 years. A small inflection and nuance but critical point of difference.

We discuss the rise of solo capitalists and how their deep expertise and sector value add could make them increasingly important to recalibrating this conversation. We also touch on how both for an investor and founder building a personal brand is going to become more and more important in order to elevate and differentiate yourself within the emerging FounderTech landscape.

Finally we talk about how Gian’s experience both as a VC and now as an independent advisor has given rise to his unique Fundraising Founder Framework. A framework that he is currently using to evaluate and advise the founders that he now talks to and engages with.

Connect with Gian

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/gianseehra
The Fundraising Founder Framework: https://www.gianseehra.me/the-fundraising-founder-framework
Twitter: @gianseehra

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://www.shortform.com/summary/what-you-do-is-who-you-are-summary-ben-horowitz
https://www.ted.com/speakers/andrea_berchowitz

In this Episode we talk to Neil Dillon, Head of Equity at Swoop Funding.

We discuss that when almost all founders have all heard of venture capital, how it is that very few early stage startups get access to and a chance to secure traditional venture backing? How, when even with all the mainstream coverage of the startup scene, there isn’t much information or stats on different types of pre-seed capital available to early stage founders?

One reason for this might be the perception that because most of these startups are deemed and expected to ‘fail’, that there is no value in analysing and also empowering them with diverse and agile alternatives to early stage funding.

Building on this, we talk about how proving traction to investors can take on different forms and that demonstrating a track record doesn’t have mean already having a great exit under your belt. It’s increasingly more about showing your resourcefulness in accessing and deploying the most efficient amount and valuable use of capital in the shortest amount of time.

Finally building on this, how rapidly assessing, accessing and leveraging alternative capital instruments like Asset Finance, Invoice Finance and Startups loans via an early stage investor platform like Swoop, can seem like magic and enable you to get started, determined and informed much more by your startup’s own trajectory and timeline without giving large chunks of your time and equity away up front.

Connect with Neil and Explore Swoop Funding:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-dillon-6a2a0554
Web: www.swoopfunding.com
Twitter: @SwoopFunding

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://sifted.eu/
https://fullratchet.net/

In this first Episode of Series 2 of FounderTech Decoded, where we talk to forward thinking and pioneering investors who are helping define the FounderTech space from a venture perspective, we are delighted to kick things off and talk with Jonathan Sun of Horizan VC.

We explore how Horizan is currently pairing two innovative investor instruments - the Future Earnings Agreement and the Advance Subscription Agreement - in order to now increase fluency and transparency in the early stage venture space.

Building on this, we also discuss about how zero sum mentalities might no longer be the best approach to now help develop and nurture the startup ecosystem as a whole and why ‘too early’ as a go-to pass from investors when a founder is pre-revenue, makes no sense when virtually all early stage investments by their very nature, will almost always be largely driven and informed by intangibles.

Finally, we talk about how it’s time to start celebrating, encouraging and backing founders employing and designing no code / low code solutions in order to rapidly and agilely demonstrate and prove high pain points that are not straightforward, in new market opportunities that are not yet saturated.

Connect with Jonathan and Explore Horizan:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-sun-652541131/

Twitter: @horizanvc

Email: info@horizan.vc

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://horizanvc.substack.com/p/high-pain-points-not-straightforward-fd4?s=r
https://www.indieldn.com/
https://capitalallocators.com/

In this episode we talk to Phil Wakefield founder of Oxogen.

We discuss how years ago, becoming a founder was a radical choice that required a huge leap of faith. A leap often involving great personal and financial risk and requiring huge amounts of capital just to even begin to get your startup off the ground.

We talk about about how it’s time to take an ecosystem that was traditionally completely unaffordable and inaccessible for 99% of the people and putting it within the range and means of 99% of people.

Where with the increasing rise of no code / low code tools and methodologies, before you even take a first step leaping into the unknown to launch your startup, you can and should now take the time validate, evaluate and iterate the essential dynamics and fundamental assumptions of your idea first.

Connect with Phil and Explore Oxogen:

www.oxogen.io
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwkfld
https://oxogen.co.uk/

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://a16z.com/book/the-cold-start-problem/
https://tim.blog/podcast/

In this episode we talk to Martin Bryant founder of PreSeed Now.

We ask why in an age of social noise and startup content, he has returned back the simple but direct platform of a bi-weekly newsletter to create a fresh signal to hopefully cut through the early stage deal flow noise and create a more nuanced form of PreSeed evaluation.

How by taking a journalistic approach to identify and the time to properly profile exceptional founders early everyone wins. The founder is able to communicate their proposition more clearly and the investor can get a more nuanced sense of what strategically they are now looking to achieve and looking to target.

We also explore why the traditional pitch deck now often struggles to communicate these founder opportunities and tell these founder stories in a compelling and informative way.

Connect with Martin and explore PreSeed Now:

https://www.preseednow.com/
https://twitter.com/martinsfp
https://anchor.fm/makingsenseofvc/

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://www.getrevue.co/profile/geekout
https://www.platformer.news/
https://www.techdirt.com/

In this episode we talk to Luciana Gasser founder of Cheers Smart Contracts.

We navigate how founders can start reducing the static nature of their startup commercial agreements so they move from a multi-headed monster towards becoming much more dynamic and harmonised multi-faceted instruments.

How previously signed contracts and agreements that have now have become dormant in a shared Dropbox or Google Drive, can now be re-imagined so they are a real time dynamic indicator of strategic value, commercial progress and engagement across any startup KPI's and ongoing strategic feedback.

Connect with Luciana and Explore Cheers:

https://cheerscontracts.com/
https://www.facebook.com/CheersContracts
https://www.linkedin.com/company/cheers-contracts

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805
https://jb.online/pages/way-of-the-wolf
https://thedecisionlab.com/thinkers/psychology/carol-dweck
https://open.spotify.com/show/78Ycp2RECumPsuyU19tWve

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

In this episode we talk to Mike Stevens one of the co-founders of RightFounder.

We dive into why when the co-founder relationship is so integral and often critical to the success of a startup, very little analysis and evaluation is done up front looking at the base assumptions and fundamental dynamics that inform these relationships.

When the cost of getting this wrong is huge but the value of getting it right is equally potentially transformative, we explore why do startups often leave that risk on the table and that key relationship to just circumstance and chance?

Connect with Mike and explore RightFounder:

https://www.rightfounder.com/
https://www.stevens.earth/
https://twitter.com/openmikestevens

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1398605441/ref=tsm_1_fb_lk
https://mastersofscale.com/
https://www.sethgodin.com/

In this episode we talk to Tania Diggory founder of Calmer.

We explore how perhaps if the way you nurture, stimulate and retain talent in your team is increasingly one of your biggest differentiators and assets, then perhaps you should encode that wellbeing into your business plan and projections from the get go.

This includes moving away from a bias towards a one size fits all approach to startup culture - such as is embodied in something like hustle and burnout culture - and towards a more calibrated sense of mental health built around the individual’s particular needs and drivers.

Where each team member’s dynamics are properly understood, enabling them to aim at not only achieving but also sustaining their optimal performance in the organisation over time.

Connect with Tania and explore Calmer:

https://www.thisiscalmer.com/
https://twitter.com/thisiscalmer
https://www.instagram.com/thisiscalmer

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://www.rescuetime.com/
https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability
https://jayshetty.me/podcast/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16286419-entrepreneur-revolution

In this Episode we talk to Ifty Nasir the founder of Vestd.

We explore why if equity is consistently the one thing that focuses and aligns everyone in a startup, how we can start to engage with it in a much more dynamic, active and fluid way.

How we can create tangible, measurable and specific goals within our milestones and KPIs, the value of which can be then reflected and rewarded to the recipient via equity in real time.

This in turn makes founder partnership conversations more agile and responsive and evolves the current cap table from its more often than not static form, towards a more vital and responsive tool within the startup.

Transforming the role of equity from what it has been into what it now could be going forward.

Connect with Ifty and Explore Vestd:

https://www.vestd.com
https://twitter.com/VestdHQ
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ifty-nasir-9686139/

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://slicingpie.com/mike-moyer-slicing-pie-equity-splits-startups/
https://robbiekellmanbaxter.com/the-membership-economy/

In this episode we talk to Martin Barnes founder of Pitch Club.

Martin is an expert in preparing and honing the pitching techniques and frameworks that impact the presentation and communication of early stage founders as they try to attract investment for their startups.

Drawing on his extensive experience around understanding and practically evolving all aspects of pitching, via his bi-weekly and peer supported remote founder events, we explore how the way founders need to communicate their core proposition within a pitch is potentially shifting.

Away from an always on broadcasting of your ‘Call to Action’ towards a more nuanced conversation and sophisticated investor storytelling and engagement.

Connect with Martin and Explore PitchClub:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/pitchclublive/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinbarnespresentations
https://eightsecondstoconnect.com/

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ditch-Pitch-Steve-Yastrow/dp/1590791266
https://yastrow.com/product/ditch-the-pitch/
https://joshbraun.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-braun

Ditch the Pitch: The Art of Improvised Persuasion

In this episode we talk to Adam Barlow Head of Operations and Growth at Landscape.

We discuss his experience and role at accelerating the first ever “glassdoor for VCs” from the ground up.

We learn how this has also progressed into the more recent additional launch of scouting platform OpenScout.

How both platforms are bringing a much needed radical transparency to the early stage founder investor space. Additionally how that transparency, once in place and when it starts to increase equal accessibility of founder investor information, can help inform a more purpose driven capital rather than just investment with purpose.

Connect with Adam and explore Landscape:

https://www.landscape.vc/
https://twitter.com/Landscape_vc
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-barlow-67929117a

Widen your perspective with these APIs:

https://openscout.landscape.vc/
https://anchor.fm/mario-gabriele/episodes/The-Future-of-Solo-Capitalists-e1e5p68

The trailer for the forthcoming FounderTech Decoded podcast series from Propelia, featuring the entrepreneurs, investors and founders who are creating informing this new venture category.

www.propelia.com