Last week saw Crowdfinders and the EISA host the ‘Who’s Who at the Zoo’ event at London Zoo. A variety of speakers, myself included, fed a hungry audience of investors and potential investee companies, some valuable and tasty morsels on the Start-up and EIS marketplace .
For starters, we learned from Angel Den’s Bill Morrow “successful founders have passion – an unshakeable belief in what they’re doing; humility – a real self-awareness of what they are and aren’t good at; and wisdom – that allows them to accept they need help.”
Then, “anyone at the moment can find money. Raising capital is not the most difficult thing, staying in business is.”
Logical then, that Oxford Capital’s own Head of Venture Capital, Tom Bradley’s presentation explained that, “we are active in almost all the companies we invest in. We try to assist the best teams with getting the best outcomes.”
We don’t wear rose-tinted glasses though. Tom revealed that statistically “70% of VC funded companies return less than was invested”. And, when asked about the greatest lesson we’ve taken from our investment experience in this sector, I answered, “In venture capital, if you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried.”
The point is, any good investment manager with experience in this space is fully aware of the statistics. That’s part of what prepares them to take risk and succeed, driving the search for the outperformers that take the overall performance sky high. It motivates expert, in depth due diligence, where only the best opportunities make it to investment stage. And it doesn’t end there. Tom again; “We start with small investments into companies. The best due diligence we can do is working with the companies we invest in. If we find they’re doing well, we’ll invest more money and back growth.”
But what about the future? According to Lord William Hague’s key note speech, “the UK has a critical mass when it comes to certain industries and skills and that includes tech start-ups. That’s not going anywhere, and the Government understands the need for immigration policies after Brexit that continue to allow in the skills needed for the UK to remain a world leader in the tech space.”
No wonder this is where our focus lies, “the UK is a fantastic place to start a technology company today.” (Tom Bradley).
But, it’s still a jungle out there, so for more information about leveraging the experience and expertise of Oxford Capital’s Ventures team and co-investing with us, go to www.oxcp.com.