If you wish to increase your individual VC fund someday, beginning a podcast isn’t a foul approach to start.
Steven Bartlett, star of British TV phenomenon Dragons’ Den and host of Europe’s most downloaded podcast, The Diary of a CEO, is now elevating a $100m VC fund to again early-stage corporations.
And, as may be very a lot the zeitgeist in Europe proper now, his backers are nearly fully present or former entrepreneurs themselves.
“Once I communicate to mates who’ve constructed nice corporations right here, the suggestions I’ve heard over and over is that there’s a sure fatigue and pessimism in direction of taking capital from buyers that haven’t been there and achieved it,” Bartlett tells Sifted.
Fortunately for him, a serial founder himself, his many many hours of podcasting have given him an “extremely in depth community” of European entrepreneurs — a lot of whom are actually backing his new fund, Flight Story, he says. He received’t really give us many names although, or verify how a lot of the fund has closed. His workforce insist that he has “verbal and contractual commitments for your complete quantity”.
He’ll be investing in some fairly buzzy areas — biotech, blockchain and house — and trying to find underrepresented founders particularly.
“If we don’t again the subsequent female-founded unicorn within the subsequent decade, I’d contemplate myself a failure with this fund,” he tells Sifted.
Scratching the VC itch
As Bartlett admits, elevating and operating a VC fund is “plenty of effort”.
Why, then, given he’s already a millionaire, is he bothering?
“At this part of my life, making a load of cash doesn’t appear a major sufficient motivator to undergo hardship,” he says. “My ardour in life is constructing corporations, taking issues from 0 to 100.
“It’s going to allow me to make use of my community, my sources, to construct better corporations, to speed up them in a method that I don’t assume they’d be capable to speed up in any other case.”
He’s now spent two years engaged on this fund — “funds are a lot simpler to boost once you’re taking big swimming pools of capital from establishments, they’re very tough to boost once you’re taking small cheques from nice profitable founders” — and has three offers able to signal, he says.
Bartlett, who apparently thinks that operating a VC fund is a aspect hustle, reckons it’s going to take up “about 30-40%” of his skilled time. His brother, Jason Bartlett, an investor who beforehand labored at UK pension fund Railpen, can also be working for the fund. The 2 brothers beforehand cofounded one other funding automobile, Catena Capital.
Flight Story Fund
The fund will make investments $1m-$10m in as much as 10 early-stage startups primarily based in Europe per yr. Little or no of the fund can be reserved for follow-on investments.
Bartlett’s buyers embody Alan Barratt, CEO of sports activities diet model Grenade, and Christian Angermayer, the billionaire tech investor and founding father of biotech firm Atai Life Sciences (An organization Bartlett has labored with for a number of years as an investor and “artistic director”, based on LinkedIn). He received’t share any additional names.
All of his buyers have agreed to assist portfolio corporations working of their fields of experience, he says.
They’ll additionally play a key position in operating due diligence on potential investments. The fund, he says, has a board of “technicians” who’ve years of expertise analysing corporations from a due diligence perspective. That board consists of his brother and Andy Leck (CFO of Bartlett’s advertising and marketing firm Flight Story).
“As soon as an organization passes that forensic evaluation, it’s going to go to an funding committee consisting of me and 4 others, after which to an LP committee,” Bartlett says. Once more, he received’t identify who else is on the funding committee aside from Angermayer.
On the LP committee is one investor from every of the fund’s (pretty broad) goal funding areas — biotech, healthtech and wellbeing, blockchain, house, commerce and expertise.
Dripping in dealflow
Dealflow won’t be an issue from the sound of issues. “We obtained simply shy of 1,000 inbound enquiries from entrepreneurs final month for funding or assist in some capability,” Bartlett says.
He additionally thinks he’ll be capable to discover the sorts of investments that copycat mainstream VCs miss out on. “The founders we’re focusing on sometimes aren’t searching for capital, however different types of assist — for me to hitch their board of administrators, or for considered one of our LPs to assist their enterprise or open up their community.”
Within the coming months, he says he’d prefer to “crank” that dealflow up “a number of multiples better”.
He’s additionally very a lot hoping to again loads of underrepresented founders — and says the fund has set “some inner targets as to how various our allocation is by way of founders”.
“We’ll launch these statistics on the Flight Story web site because the fund begins making offers, and telling the story of our funding range throughout our social channels,” he says. “For us, it’s an adjoining however vital campaign we’re on.”
Amy Lewin is Sifted’s editor and cohost of Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast, and writes Up Spherical, a weekly e-newsletter on VC. She tweets from @amyrlewin
