Episode Details

Venture Capital is nigh-on essential for many ambitious, big-build, fast-scaling Fintechs and Techs in general. Fund raising is essential. Thus how the VC market is evolving is of the utmost importance to ambitious firms and founders.

In this episode Josh Bell one of the founding partners of leading London-based European-wide VCs Dawn Capital who have raised over a billion to invest in growing businesses joins us to look back, look around now and look into the future. How can you best raise funds? Plenty of learn…

Topics discussed include:

• sitting in an office :-O
• Airbnb’s flotation and sudden rise to being worth over $100bn
• Y combinator’s 100,000x return on a ten year investment :-O
• discussing major turning points in history from railways to tech – what are the characteristics of such
• how long will mega-opportunities continue?
• “software today is a trillion dollar opportunity”
• tech companies are “hoovering-up” what was previously done offline
• Josh’s career journey
• founding Dawn with two partners in 2007
• the importance of specialising in VCdom to become a good VC
• experience leads to better ability to spot the patterns inherent in what works
• when Dawn were founded 13yrs ago there was 1/30th of the amount of capital going thru VCs in Europe as there is today…
• US firms now coming to Europe looking for opportunities and co-investing – again a very different world from just over a decade ago
• the importance of pattern matching in FS/business in general
• the most important VC in the world is the Welsh-by-origin Sir Michael Moritz Chairman of Sequoia – a huge portfolio of investing in and being on major firm’s Boards
• VC evolution in the 20thC – Bessemer the first VC fund over a century ago
• the importance of the silicon and then dot com boom in accelerating growth of Venture Capital
• the importance of money rolling over from one success to be re-invested in the industry
• the 21stC evolution of European VC making huge strides to follow-along the US trajectory from a decade or two earlier
• VCs connecting supply and demand for a particular type of capital
• Dawn has to cap the size of the funds they raise – a nice problem to have but one essential to do in order to be able to find enough excellent investment opportunities in order to keep returns high
• the industry as a whole performs poorly – the power law in performance and potential shakeout
• within VCs the power-law applies