The EIS & VC Navigator

John Glencross has been at the forefront of the EIS and VCT world for over two decades, co-launching the first approved EIS fund in 1999. We take advantage of this to get a long-term perspective on how the market and the Calculus investment process has changed over time. We start at the launch of their first fund, with the challenges of a product that was even less well known that it is now. John...

Scott Weavers-Wright is a serial entrepreneur. When we had him on last year ( episode 12 ), we only managed to discuss one of his first exit so we had to get him back for more. We pick up his story from where we left off, with Scott getting into investing with his business partner Fred. He explains how this led to him funding the creation, then running Elevaate, a platform that allows online store...

Investors and founders all-to-often see legals as a necessary evil. SeedLegals is changing that, thinking about how how to get better and solutions for all parties. In this episode its Founder, Anthony Rose, talks about what they are doing and how they have developed one the past few years. We discuss what the aims of legal documents really are, how investors and founders should think about them a...

Video gaming is a huge market, but relatively niche within EIS. Steve Iles has spent his whole career working in and helping the video games industry and his current focus is at the intersection with funding. We start off by talking about the history of video gaming and how it has shaped the industry as it stands today. This leads into the attractions of the different business models and what what...

EIS & VCTs have been described by several guests as one of finances best kept secrets, which makes the job of advisers challenging when they recommend them. Stephen Jones has a lot of experience dealing with these, and has won several awards for the quality of his services in the tax-advantaged area. This is the second part of a really good discussion which is split over two episodes (see epis...

EIS & VCTs have been described by several guests as one of finances best kept secrets, which makes the job of advisers challenging when they recommend them. Stephen Jones has a lot of experience dealing with these, and has won several awards for the quality of his services in the tax-advantaged area. We had a really good discussion which will be split over two episodes. In this one, Stephen ta...

International expansion is key to success for many startups, but also fraught with difficulties. Tofiq Qureshi of Innvotec has worked in several countries and brought technology to many more, so has lots of experience of internationalising. Getting timing right is the first challenge and we discuss when is right for a startup to look overseas, and when is too early. We also talk about figuring out...

We've touched on angel investing several times on the podcast, so it was time we got a business angel on. Kirsten Connell is an unusual angel, in that she has a background in venture capital, but, like many angels, has strong experience in one area, which in her case is cybersecurity. We talk about how she got into angel investing and what her approach is. We talk about sourcing deals and diversif...

Generating sales in critical for any business, so its good to get someone on who has a playbook that works. Mads Jensen of Superseed focusses on B2B SaaS and helping his investee companies get those early sales and, when appropriate scale up. We talk about the challenges for startups: how to find those early customers, the difference between soliciting enough customer feedback and losing focus, wh...

While multi-stage venture capital management is common in the US, few firms have, so far, managed to develop it successfully here. Mercia is has probably developed the widest range of capital pools in the tax-advantaged world. We get Dr Paul Mattick on discuss their approach. While the benefits of multiple pools are clear, it does bring challenges to. We discuss how Mercia addresses these, buildin...

We all can see big ideas, but its often not clear how to translate them into investible ideas. Impact investment is one of the highest profile ideas just now, so we have Dan Somers of impact investors Boundary Capital to talk about this. He talks about how they drew investible themes out of the big idea, and how that works when it comes to looking at companies. Inevitably, this involves measuring...

Corporate finance is an essential aspect of venture capital investing. Steve Harris is CEO of Committed Capital, with a strong corporate finance background and a long history of venture capital investing. In a widely ranging discussion, we cover many important areas, including company valuations, how to assess financial projections and plans for what happens when things go wrong. We also ask wheth...

Although consumer markets are a big part of quoted markets, they are something of a niche in EIS & VCTs. Pembroke specialise in consumer companies, with a portfolio including hospitality, food, fashion and wellness businesses. We talk about the philosophy for investing, how they can make venture scale businesses and the challenges of operating consumer-facing locations and online facilities si...

Product market fit is a much discussed, and much misunderstood topic, in venture capital. Matthew Cushen from Worth Capital recently wrote a great blog article on the topic, so we though we'd get him on to speak about it. We chat about what product market fit actually is and how you get it in practice. We also discuss how the company knows they have it and how an investor knows that too. Matthew b...

We love a good entrepreneurial story and Jasper Smith has a great one. We discuss how he started as an 18-year old building demonstrators for Sky, and how that developed into a series of television related jobs and businesses. As importantly, these experiences have strongly influenced his philosophy as an investor, giving him a holistic view of what founders need from their investors. We also touc...

Although investing in drug development would seem to be ideal for EIS investment, it has been a somewhat niche area. Sunil Shah is hoping to change that, with o2h Ventures have recently launched the UK's first Knowledge Intensive Fund focused on this area. Sunil gives a great perspective on how investing in the industry has evolved over the last couple of decades, and how these changes work in the...

Venture capital has long been dominated by idiosyncratic decision making, so SyndicateRoom's systematic data-driven approach is genuinely unique. This hasn't developed overnight, and we discuss SyndicateRoom's progression from a platform offering individual investments to the radical diversification approach that they use now. This is built on studying the whole of the UK market, which gives insig...

While most VCT and EIS investors probably have some knowledge of quoted equity markets, listed investments using these schemes have very different characteristics from the mainstream. The Baronsmead VCTs invest in both unquoted and quoted companies and Bevan Duncan and Ken Wotton manage the respective portfolios there. We go through the whole process, discussing the differences in how investments...

Marketing is a make-or-break area for almost all startups. Having started his career in advertising, Velocity Capital's Rajeev Saxena is an expert on the topic, particularly digital, and we probe his knowledge to get insight for both investors and startups. We discuss wide range of areas: the growth of subscription models and how startups looks at them, the mistakes startups make and the support t...

2020 has been a challenging year for many and the EIS industry is no exception. The EIS Navigator team have got together an all-star panel to discuss what happened. Mark Brownridge, Director General of EIS Association, Ewoud Karelse, Head of Tax Advantaged Investments, Tilney Smith & Williamson, and Kealan Doyle, Director, Symvan Capital join Brian to pick through the debris and the prospects...

Measuring sustainability is not a trivial challenge and there seems to be a plethora of options now. Vala Capital's Max Middleton and Jake Wombwell-Povey have done a huge amount of work in figuring out how to apply sustainability frameworks to startups and small companies. We take advantage of this to discuss some of the different frameworks, the differences between them and what they really mean...

Ian Warwick worked in various executive roles in the US before founding Deepbridge. We focus on one of these, Aftersoft, a software company that Ian was brought in to turn round. Over five years, he turned things round and put the company on course for a successful exit later on. We discuss the challenges of entering a difficult situation and finding the right path, including what to cut and when....

Scott Weavers-Wright achieved two very successful exits before he founded Haatch. In the late 1990s, Kiddicare was a family shop selling pushchairs, car seats and the paraphernalia that babies and young children need. Scott persuaded the family to launch a website, which was the start of a decade of immense growth in which it beat many household names and became the largest in its category in Euro...

Before joining Newable, Sanjeev Gordhan worked on the advisory side of the industry. He has a lot of experience in helping investors decided how much money to put into venture capital and unquoted investments. We discuss how investors should approach this and the difference between theory and practice. We also get into how you should spread your venture capital allocation between different segment...

As a relative newcomer to the EIS industry, Andy Davidson of We Are Nova sees it a little differently to many of us. For the last year or so, he's been challenging the industry to create market funds for EIS, akin to index funds for equities and bonds. We discuss what that would mean for investors - not only the advantages but also some of the challenges of making it happen. This is the second par...