Venture Europe

Anthony Danon is a co-founder and general partner at Cocoa, the angel fund 100% backed by founders. Anthony has spent the last 7+ years as an early-stage VC focused on investing in what he calls "fintech is everything". He started his career as an operator in fintech, building credit risk models for an invoice financing company. As an investor, Anthony has been lucky to partner with companies such as TrueLayer, Primer, Wayflyer, and Ramp Network, to name a few. Prior to Cocoa he was a Partner at Speedinvest leading their Seed fintech strategy across Europe and an investor at Anthemis Group before that. All that, after a failed career as a graffiti artist and an attempt at becoming a professional soccer player. During this episode, we discuss how Anthony become a partner in a relatively short time, the key elements that make a good investor, and the positioning and mission of Cocoa.

Before joining Index, Nina was a Financial planning and analysis Lead for Google’s AdSense team where she managed a multi-billion dollar book of business covering Amazon, Ebay, and IAC. Nina started her career as a high yield bond trader at Citigroup and She also started HIVE Ventures, the first seed venture fund focusing on Armenian entrepreneurs, where she invested in over 30 companies. At Index, Nina focuses on venture and growth investments in enterprise SaaS, vertical SaaS, and AI. She is excited by the combination of software and payments to help legacy industries transition from using pen and paper workflows to adopting more modern, vertical-specific solutions. Nina works with transformational companies like ServiceTitan, Shopmonkey, Gong, and DeepScribe. During this episode we discuss about vertical Saas, VC career advice and how to separate a great a pitch from a great founder. Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Nina Achadjian Partner at Index.

My guest today is Ulric Musset the founder of Vauban. Vauban is a venture capital platform that makes it easy for investors & VCs to launch their funds, SPVs and syndicates. Over $1bn has been invested via Vauban's platform since its launch. Ulric is an angel investor as well as an entrepreneur with a keen passion for supporting the venture capital ecosystem. During this episode, we discuss what led Ulric to become an entrepreneur, the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, and Vauban's mission. Let's go and talk with Ulric.

My guest today is Andrei Brasoveanu Partner at Accel. He joined the fund in 2014 and works with the team on Web3/crypto, enterprise software,  developer-oriented software, open-source, security, and financial services. Andrei has led Accel’s investment in Sky Mavis, Sorare and Nansen among others and he has also worked closely with Celonis, Instana, Monzo, Personio and UiPath. Prior to Accel, Andrei spent a decade in the US working for some of the largest equity high-frequency trading firms in the country. Andrei is originally Romania. He graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics from Princeton and an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School. Let's go and talk to him! 

My guest today is Hannah Seal - Partner at Index Ventures. Before joining Index, Hannah managed the consumer marketplace business for Ebay in the UK, and set up the General Merchandise business for Ocado. At Index, Hannah is passionate about helping visionary entrepreneurs from day one, and supporting them as their companies scale and grow. She is particularly energised by founders who have an unfair advantage in tackling daunting problems in technical or challenging markets. Her investments for Index include Remote, a platform to enable distributed working; Multiverse, the company bringing apprenticeships into the digital age; Fonoa, the automated tax platform; and Beauty Pie, the online cosmetics and beauty subscription service. During this episode, we discuss her first day at Index, how she assesses founders for grit and perseverance, and the future of work. Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Hannah Seal Partner at Index.

My guest today is Henrik Landgren co-founder and CPTO of ArK Kapital a precision financing company that empowers technology businesses to grow faster with non-dilutive capital. They recently closed a 165M Euro seed round of Equity and Debt capital - round led by LocalGlobe with participation from Creandum and some prominent angels including Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, Zettle by PayPal founder Jacob de Geer, Embark Studios founder Patrick Söderlund, King founder Sebastian Knutsson, and EQT Ventures founding partner Hjalmar Winbladh Prior to ArK, Henrik was a partner at EQT Ventures - the Swedish venture capital fund that announced its first 566m Euro fund in 2016. At EQT Ventures Henrik was also leading EQT’s Motherbrain division. Motherbrain is the data platform that supports EQT to be truly data-driven in finding and assessing the best tech start-ups to invest in. Before EQT, Henrik worked as the VP of analytics at Spotify during 2010-2016 when Spotify was one of the highest-growing scale-up in Europe. He is the mastermind behind Spotify’s award-winning Analytics team building it from the ground up and contributing to many major strategic initiatives to build the world’s largest music subscription business. In the words of Ted Persson from EQT - Henrik has made “analytics” his trademarks, from Spotify to EQT Ventures and now ArK. During this episode we discussed about data-driven decision making and the DIBBs framework, how to build a data-driven culture and why Henrik is called the 9-minutes man. Without further ado, please enjoy this excellent conversion with Henrik Landgren co-founder and CPTO of Ark Kapital!

My guest today is Eléonore Crespo co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, the business planning platform (gopigment.com). Prior to Pigment, Eléonore was an investor at Index Ventures, working side-by-side with entrepreneurs and spearheading investments in Alan, Spendesk, Swile and Slite. Before Index she worked as a senior analyst at Google, reporting directly to the EMEA president and CFO on matters of strategy and planning. During this episode we discussed about how she managed to raise 73M dollars 1 month after giving birth to twins, why as a founder you should always be hiring and the importance of calibrating of what great talent looks like for certain positions. Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Eleonore Crespo co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment!

Sebastian Mallaby is an English journalist, author and a Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Formerly, he was a contributing editor for the Financial Times He has written many well known books as  The Man Who Knew, More Money Than God, The World's Banker and the one that we will focus on in this episode: The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. In writing The power law Sebastian had unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time like Sequoia, Accel, Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Chinese partnerships such as Qiming and Capital Today. Main takeaways: 💃 The best VC funds in the world engineer frameworks to consider the effects of the power law in their assessment process. 🤺 Europe is the new exciting frontier for Venture Capital. 👁️ The long lasting VCs implement support (emotional as well) for the junior VCs to become successful. ❤️ This was an excellent conversion on the birth, timeline and present of Venture Capital and the law powering it! Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Sebastian!

High-conviction investing - with Ophelia Brown, co-founder and partner at Blossom Capital. Blossom Capital was founded only 4 years ago, and recently raised their third fund of around 380M Euros and became one of the largest Series A investors in Europe having invested in the likes of Checkout (est. val. $40B), Moonpay (est. val. $3.4B) and Pigment (est. val. $500M). Blossom's mission is to supercharge the most visionary founders in Europe, enabling them to build companies which compete on a global scale. Previously she was a General Partner at LocalGlobe, where she invested in a number of exciting companies including Echo, Tessian and Zego and before that with Index Ventures where she led investments in Big Health, Call9, MarvelApp, Osper and Typeform and worked closely with Credit Benchmark, Peoplevox and Robinhood. During this episode we discuss about her first job in VC, the best and worst advice she has received and the characteristics of world class founders. Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Ophelia!

My guest today is Roland Manger - co-founder and Partner at Earlybird. With over 1.5 billion EUR under management, eight IPOs and 30 trade sales, Earlybird is one of the most established and active venture capital firms in Europe, having made investments in formidable companies like UiPath, N26 and Forto among others. Founded in 1997, Earlybird invests in all development and growth phases of technology companies and has grown to several autonomous, dedicated and specialized teams, focusing on different geographies and sectors. During this episode we discuss about the inception of Earlybird, the importance of balance between cohesion and autonomy in an investment team, and how the assessment of startups has changed over the last 20 years. Please enjoy this excellent discussion with Roland.