1. What have been your biggest learnings at Antler,Houghton Street Ventures, Scalable Capital and Goldman Sachs and how have you applied them to your roles at Portfolio companies?
Goldman taught me markets are humbling. You’re never as clever as a good year makes you feel. Scalable taught me distribution beats a beautiful product, every time. And investing at day zero taught me the idea barely matters at the start. The founder is everything. So I push our founders on two things relentlessly: get in front of customers embarrassingly early, and only hire people who’d run through walls.
2.’ The US techlash is real’ (FT 23.08.26)…Rather than fighting rearguard court actions, tech companies would be best advised to heed the changing political and legal mood.They should redouble their efforts to run safer, privacy preserving services that demonstrably serve the public interest as well as consumer needs…’Do you agree?
Half agree. The “stop fighting, appease the regulators” framing is too meek. You don’t build enduring companies by reading the political weather. But the underlying point is right for the wrong reason. Privacy-preserving, genuinely useful products aren’t a defensive crouch, they’re just better businesses. When building Scalable, trust wasn’t the cost of doing business. It was the business. The best founders treat it as the product, not the PR.
3. What lessons should be learned from the rapid downward spiral of Situational Awareness and the potential market volatility that surrounds concentrated bets on AI stocks?
The lesson isn’t about one fund or one stock. It’s two old truths people forget in a boom. First, borrowed conviction: when everyone crowds the same story, the price already assumes it’s true, so you’re not investing, you’re index-hugging a consensus. Second, never use leverage. Buffett said it best: “When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.” Concentration flatters you on the way up and finds you out on the way down.
4. What should entrepreneurs understand about your fund before taking your money?
That we come in at day zero, sometimes before the idea is even right. So we’re backing the person, not the plan. Two things follow. We’ll challenge you hard and kill weak ideas fast. That’s the value, not the cheque. And we’re all in if you are. Want a passive name on the cap table? Wrong fund. Want someone in the trenches from week one? Right one.
5. What needs to change for more UK startups to become £1bn global companies and where is the UK ecosystem still structurally weak?
Two things: one money, one mindset. The money: our pension funds barely touch venture. Trillions sat in low-risk assets while the scale-up capital flies in from America. That’s changing, too slowly. The mindset matters more. Too many brilliant UK founders take the safe £50m exit instead of building the billion-pound company. We’re not short of talent or ideas. We’re short of patient capital and founders who refuse to sell early.
