1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Spencer Crawley of Firstminute Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the highlights of your portfolio? Tell us about what stage and what condition you encountered when you chose to invest in them. What is it about them that caused you to place the bet?

Spencer Crawley: I have to think through my head about which ones are public and which are not. I mentioned the gaming business in Berlin. It’s a business called Klang. We invested in the A round at the beginning of this year. Elliot, a colleague of mine, sourced that business by trailing through a list of 2,000 names that flushed the conference in Helsinki. He met them there and started to open a dialogue with them. They’re building an MMO.

The business was founded a couple of years ago but its timing had become really interesting. When we met them, they had success with their initial >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Spencer Crawley of Firstminute Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We just announced a partnership with EIT Health. They are going to be accelerating 115 companies with us. The first 15 have been named.

Spencer Crawley: How did that come about? That seems really impressive and exciting.

Sramana Mitra: We have very deep connections in Europe. I am married to a European. My husband, Dominique Trempont, was Steve Jobs’ right hand at Next. He’s on the Board of one of your British media conglomerates DMGT.

Spencer Crawley: I’m on the fourth floor of Northcliffe House. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Spencer Crawley of Firstminute Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your definition of seed. What do you like to invest in stage-wise? I’ll pre-qualify that question by giving you some context. At least in Silicon Valley, seed has fragmented into pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-Series A, small Series A, and then the traditional Series A. How does it look like from your point of view and the European landscape?

Spencer Crawley: This week, I’ve heard seed two, mango seed, seed extensions. The semantics have gotten imaginative. I think for us, we set up the fund to be deliberately opportunistic. By that I mean we invest in the best founders anywhere, whilst having and holding deep thesis across a number of areas. We really wanted to be able to be agile and back founders wherever we see them. >>>

414th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With George Spencer, Seyen Capital

^{George Spencer, Senior Managing Director at Seyen Capital, invests in SaaS companies, mostly in the Midwest, from a small fund out of Chicago. The interview contains an excellent discussion on ideal levels of capitalization for good exit prices.}

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Spencer Crawley of Firstminute Capital (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Spencer Crawley was recorded in November 2018.

Spencer Crawley is Co-Founder of Firstminute Capital, based in London and focused on European startups.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your firm and yourself. 

Spencer Crawley: We’re a new seed fund. Obviously, that’s what the world needs – more seed funds. We’re based in London. We launched the fund in the summer of 2017. We’re a $100 million fund. We’re backed, predominantly, by tech entrepreneurs. We have about 50 founders of technology businesses invested in the fund. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nihal Mehta of ENIAC Ventures (Part 5)

Nihal Mehta: We like un-sexy industries. I’m looking at a construction company that’s storing construction history on the Blockchain. When people say they’re using Blockchain, more often than not, you can say, “You probably don’t need to use Blockchain for this.” There are some really interesting native use cases of Blockchain that we’re excited to learn about and invest in.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. It’s something that has come up in some of the talks that I’ve given recently about this whole automation thing. India’s development, to a very large extent, depended on this massive BPO industry. I think that’s going to go away in the next decade or two. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nihal Mehta of ENIAC Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Based on what you said, I want to provide some commentary to our audience about the team issue. You hear me talking about multiple co-founders and he’s talking about a full-stack team. Those two are mutually dependent. You can only have a full-stack team if you have multiple co-founders.

If you have to hire people and build out a team, you cannot complete a team by hiring at that stage with that little resource. Certain investors would only invest in full-stack teams at the seed stage and the only way to get to that is with multiple co-founders.

Nihal Mehta: There’s one addition is in many cases, you have solo founders. They are technical. They can build and ship products themselves, >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nihal Mehta of ENIAC Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Very well. It’s definitely the age of the incumbents these days on the B2C side.

Nihal Mehta: Consumer venture funds are actually going down in size because gone are the days of Instagram, WhatsApp-like billion-plus acquisitions. Google and Facebook will just try to build it or buy it before it gets big enough. The return profile of these startups tends to go down. You have to have a smaller fund size to return your fund.

On the enterprise side, there are so many more opportunities. On the SaaS side, you have Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe competing for the MarTech stack or the CRM stack. There’re still huge gaps where entrepreneurs can grow very quickly. That being said, I read a stat on Facebook recently. 40% of millennials have removed Facebook from their phones. Snapchat is not doing well either. I think there’s a real opportunity for very large breakout unicorns over the next few years. >>>