The EIS & VC Navigator

While we have focused on venture capital and EIS/ VCT investors on the podcast, ultimately it is all about the companies that we invest in. Here we find out about two of them, together with the EIS fund managers who invested in them. Weedingtech supplies machines and supplies that can kill weeds without using herbicides. Its CEO, Leo de Montaignac, discusses how it works, some of the challenges he...

Valuations are a frequent topic of discussion for venture capitalists and founders alike, and are extra topical just now. We get Dave Foreman to draw on his experience to place them in context. He starts off by outlining what's happened in the past couple of years and where the market is now. He talks about what is or is not a reasonable valuation, with a particular focus on SaaS companies. Dave d...

Edtech is far from uncommon in EIS investing, but is still a little away from the mainstream. Today Matthew O'Kane from Nexus Investment Ventures discusses his experiences from investing in the area. We talk about the sector a little and why the target customers may not be who we think they are. However, the bulk of our discussion is a dive into the eight year journey with Boclips, a market place...

Foresight Group recently announced that it was buying most of Downing's venture business, including two VCTS and EIS funds. To talk about, this episode's guests are Matt Smith, a long-standing Partner at Foresight, and Jack Eadie, who moved across with the Downing business. After introducing the deal itself, we discuss some of the motivations for the transaction and where Foresight see complementa...

While we have touched on regional investing several times in the podcast, we have never discussed it directly. Michael Vassallo worked as in London before returning to the North East, where he set up Maven's regional office, so he is well placed to discuss the pros and challenges of investing there. We start by looking at the big picture and some of the reasons why the UK regions get less investme...

ESG is an area that is work in progress at the moment. Andrew Noble is a partner at Par Equity, but is also on the Steering Committee of the ESG_VC initiative, which is trying to pull together a standard framework for venture capital. We cover a wider range of areas in our discussion. Andrew talks about ESG generally and gives a framework for how he thinks about different types of ESG. We discuss...

Platforms are part of the essential plumbing for advisers and investors in most investment areas, but the tax-advantaged space has lagged mainstream markets. Dan Rodwell, CEO of GrowthInvest, comes on to discuss why that is and how they are looking change it. GrowthInvest has been on a journey itself, so we start by finding out how it has evolved and why. We chat about the tax advantaged market as...

Its rare for an IFA firm to be started from scratch, and even rarer for it to have a preference for tax advantaged or efficient business like EIS, VCTs, BR and SEIS products. Matthew Bugden cofounded One Four Nine, an IFA firm that does just that. We talk about why they started the firm and why they settled on the strategy they did. We discuss the challenges of getting a new firm off the ground, i...

Modwenna Rees-Mogg has been involved in the world of angel investing for a couple of decades. As the founder of AngelNews, a news service focus on this area, she had a wide perspective on the market and the trends within in. We spend the first half of our discussion talking about the angel market and its structure. She discusses the rise in "tourists", how experience investors have recently been c...

In a slightly different episode, the EIS Navigator host, Brian Moretta, talks about diversification drawing strongly on excerpts from previous guests. Support is supplied by Tom Britton of SyndicateRoom, Sanjeev Gordhan who was then at Newable, Stephen Page of SFC Capital and Paul Tselentis of 24 Haymarket. We start by talking about how venture capital differs from quoted equities and how this lea...

One of the challenges that venture capital investors have to accept is that there probably won't be liquidity for their shares until the company exits. Several companies have been trying to change that, not entirely without success, with JP Jenkins one of the longest standing. Their Head of Corporate Development, Mason Doick, comes onto the podcast to discuss the state of play and prospects for th...

The venture capital industry has seen steady flow of new entrant over the past few years, whether EIS or GP/LP funds. Richard Hoskins of Kin Group speaks with almost all of them and discusses the challenges and pitfalls for those who want to start a new fund or invest in one. We start by discussing the current environment. We talk about the people who want to start funds, what their motivations ar...

The partnership between Foresight and Williams Advanced Engineering is unique in the EIS and VCT space. Andy Bloxam manages this area for Foresight and he gives us an insight into this unique relationship. We start off by discussing how the relationship came about, and how it works in practice. We dig into how it has evolved over time, how Foresight and Williams balance their relative strengths an...

Getting financial and transaction data on private companies can be challenging. MarktoMarket aims make that easier, which gives CEO Doug Lawson a great perspective on the market, which he shares in this episode. First we talk about data. We chat about what the issues are, and how MarktoMarket aims to get around those. Doug talks about how some of it is looking in the right place and how patterns e...

St James Place is the biggest writer of business in across the whole tax advantaged market. In this episode we get Luke Barnett on to discuss how they select individual products and how that translates into panel building. Luke gives great insights into how they look at individual products and how they weight up the different strategies, how they look at teams and track records. We also discuss fe...

Unusually for an EIS fund manager, VGC has moved it the market from the institutional end. Their focus on consumer and digital media is somewhat unusual in the sector and we effectively do a case study on one of their investments. Kick Game is a premium sneaker retailer. Parminder talks about how they identified the company as the right player in a market and stalked it to invest. He also discusse...

Social impact investing is an area that sounds good in principle but is often not well understood by those not involved in it. We asked Emma Steele, who runs the social benefit funds at Ascension, to come on and discuss investing in this topical area. We get her to define a social benefit that is investible and she brings some examples. We talk about the twin objectives of profit and social benefi...

Most angel networks start organically, with the members drawn from a geography or having a particular interest. 24Haymarket has taken a different approach, with a distinct philosophy. We invited its CEO, Paul Tselentis, to discuss what it did and why. He talks about how 24Haymarket started, with an early focus on experienced private equity professionals. We discuss how they leveraged these contact...

While 2021 wasn't quite as dramatic as the previous year, it was still an eventful one. The EIS navigator team have got another all-star panel to discuss what happened. Mark Brownridge, Director General of EIS Association, Neil Cole, Head of Wealth Planning Solutions, UBS Wealth Management, and Kealan Doyle, Director, Symvan Capital join Brian to pick through the debris and the prospects for 2021....

The recent COP26 conference has stimulated a surge of interest in how we can make a difference as investors. Nick Lyth set up Green Angel Syndicate to solve that problem and in a wider ranging discussion we cover his story, experiences and philosophy. There are many practical challenges, from finding the right companies, what could be their impact and how you measure that. We also discuss timescal...

In this episode the tables are turned as the usual host, Brian Moretta, has recently published a paper on how venture capital fits into retail investor portfolios, with some surprising results. Andrew Aldridge steps into the host seat to discuss the paper. The heart of the paper is the consequences of venture capital being a diversifying asset compared with equity and bonds. Brian discusses what t...

With COP26 having just finished, ESG is back on investors agenda but so far it hasn't delivered. We get Matt Jellicoe of OnePlanetCapital on to discuss why and what we can do about it. Matt draws on his experience of setting up a new fund that is environmentally focused, and finding out that the way ESG is applied to investments wasn't helpful. We discuss the difference between ESG and genuine imp...

Recently, SFC Capital and Beauhurst issued a report about the seed investing market. It showed some interesting, and rather worrying, trends. In this episode, Stephen Page, CEO of SFC Capital discusses the report and the seed market. The big news in the report is a decline in seed funding over the past couple of years. Given this seems to go against trends in other parts of the venture capital mar...

In September, Gresham House announced the intention to buy Mobeus and add their four VCTs to its existing Baronsmead VCTs. Bevan Duncan returns to the podcast to discuss the deal and its rationale. We cover the strategic reasoning as well as how they chose a manager. We dig a bit into the diligence, including how they assessed past performance. As a deal that is about growing rather than cost savi...

Lucius Cary first raised money for a small restaurant chain in the late 1970s. The difficulties of doing that inspired him to start a newsletter connecting startups and investors. Four decades later, he is on the seventh iteration of his fund. We start with Lucius's own story. He tells us how he found his first investors in an environment with no infrastructure at all. He tells us how this inspire...