Andy Etches

We’ve raised €1.5Bn across our studio ventures 🎉 I realised: Funding is a function of future clarity. When we work with founders, we ask them to go 5-10 years into the future. Get concrete. Not just a vision, but a plan you can walk through, step by step. - What’s your CPA? And over time? - What channels are driving your growth? - What needs to be true in the market for this to work? - What does the team look like now, in 6 months, 2 years etc? - What will you do if something big changes? (New tech, new rules, new rivals?) The more detail, the easier it is for investors to see what you see. When you pitch with this level of clarity, you don’t sound like someone asking for money. You sound like the CEO of a unicorn, inviting people to join your story before the world catches up. You start to embody that future leader. Investors feel it. They respond to it. Founders, if you’re pitching, ask yourself: Can you describe your business in 2030 in extreme detail?

169

9 Comments

“The UK has the best talent in the world, but we sometimes lack ambition”   Grateful for Neil Buchanan @ Lodestar Space (‘bodyguards for satellites’) inspiring and educating our emerging founders spinning out from UK Atomic Energy Authority (thank you) > If you’re pre-idea and pre-cofounder you’ll benefit from doing the Entrepreneurs First programme (if you can get on). The speed of learning and environment truly accelerate founders > Unlocking early adopter demand: LinkedIn outreach, speak to people with common interests, build networks, keep the cadence of outreach, running a customer discovery process (‘mom test’ - Rob Fitzpatrick ) > Sizing the opportunity: top down look for $10BNs to $100BNs market problems and then look bottom up with an eye to the future. Bottom up is always the sobering one and should be your north star - never lie to your team, investors and worst of all: yourself.  > Engaging VCs often: reduce the risk as much as possible (team, market, tech) show how you’re hiring to fit a few key gaps can be fine > Founders need to be confident to be selective with the investors they partner with. Being mindful if you’re taking investment from a key player in an industry (is it for their ultimate M&A activity, is it going to impact your sales). Ideally you’re ambitious and don’t want an early exit but also investment from a defence prime if you’re dual use can unlock channels > Building for dual use or defence? Prioritise USA GTM in the short term. > Finding non-dilutive sources of cash: run a process to identify relevant organisations, keep an open mind / keep it wide to keep options open. Keeping burn low you can achieve a lot prior to dilutive capital > Don’t get distracted by the shiny numbers of a big raise - it's needed for strong talent acquisition & credibility boosting but the best talent will resonate with the high impact mission & tech dev to get there - the rest of your time for focus on where it needs to be: customers and sales > Geopolitics impacting decisions on which markets to target, hiring decisions, who to have on the cap table ▪️If you’re an investor / founder and you’d like to do a lunchtime Q&A to educate and inspire our emerging founders please DM

60

4 Comments

This week on the podcast we were joined by Cliff Obrecht, co-founder and COO of Canva. He was an amazing guest. It was great to get his take on the IPO landscape, where Canva is on the AI adoption curve, and the advice he no longer gives to founders. A few takeaways: Managing your company well is the only thing that matters. Valuations can be wrong by a lot. If you keep growing and keep compounding, you can still come out on top. In Canva’s case, that means a billion dollars cash in the bank and eight years of profitability. It’s easy to build hype, especially around AI. It’s much harder to cross over into the mainstream the way Canva has done. Initial product traction for an AI tool is great, but scaling to people who don’t know or care what people are saying on X is how you build a billion-dollar company, and it will be interesting to see who is able to do it. The internal mandate for AI is to try everything. There are some guidelines (you only get two LLMs but they don’t care which two) but for now, Canva employees can use what they want. He expects to consolidate as the winners become clearer over the next 12-24 months. When public markets were valuing companies as lower than the private markets, the incentive to IPO wasn’t particularly strong, especially for Canva who simply didn’t need the money. With the public markets the way they are today, however, it becomes a bit more appealing. The cost of running AI is high but it will come down. Cliff is already starting to see it. It gets more efficient as you pick the right model for the job, running AI on device or self-hosted, etc. For now, it might cost 4 cents an image, but over the next six months, they’re counting on it dropping to .02 cents an image. The upfront costs are not indicative of long-term spend. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/guuQUdN7

72

2 Comments

Great to announce a project we've been working on for quite a while, the launch of Fortell Health. The Fortell.ai and MTM_Services teams have been working really hard to build the best client registration product for behavioural health clinics in the United States and Canada. The problem we're looking to solve is acute. Many Certified Community Behavioural Health Clinics are suffering high turnover of their teams and staff burnout leading to a vicious cycle of hiring and rehiring, training and retraining. Part of the reason is the pure volume of paperwork and time to register a client. In keeping with our unofficial motto of helping people do MORE what they love and LESS of what they hate, we've built ´voice AI registration´ that enables behavioural health clinics to register people faster and with far less effort. Instead of having to spend the 8 hours of their day registering clients (and it takes at least an hour to register one client) navigators can greet clients, get them settled, let the AI takeover for capturing the client data, and then take them through to the next stage to see the clinician. It's one of the best use cases I've seen of allowing humans to do the bits we're good at: empathy, behavioural health knowledge, true expertise and then letting the AI do the heavy lifting capturing client data and uploading to the Electronic health record. While there are lots of AI tools that are trying to replace therapists, we're squarely in the camp of using AI to get rid of the tasks people dislike and allowing teams to make a bigger impact face to face. If you want to join the 200 people attending the webinar today, you can sign up below.  https://lnkd.in/dVC6mNNP

45

6 Comments

AI’s New Growth Engine: Lessons from the UK’s AI Sector Report. The UK’s latest AI Sector Study reveals key global insights into the rapid adoption of AI. With a +103% surge in Gross Value Added (GVA) year-over-year, the findings highlight two critical takeaways for businesses and economies worldwide: 1—Integration is the New Success Metric: The majority of AI’s economic impact comes from established companies integrating AI into core operations—not just AI start-ups. The future belongs to those who scale AI effectively across industries like finance, manufacturing, and beyond. 2—The Struggle for Scale and Sovereignty: While innovation thrives, scaling remains a challenge, with 53% of firms citing limited access to growth capital. Additionally, reliance on foreign cloud and AI infrastructure raises critical questions about sovereignty and control. Governments and businesses must decide whether to embrace foreign investment for rapid growth or prioritise domestic capabilities to avoid becoming “technology takers.” As the AI race shifts from invention to industrial integration, the focus is clear: Who will seize the opportunity to scale AI sustainably and strategically? #ArtificialIntelligence #Innovation #DigitalTransformation #EconomicGrowth Luis Lancos Ulli Waltinger Boris Scharinger Bernd "Benno" Blumoser Azita Esmaili Mike Hill FBCS Mirko Ross Rob van Kranenburg Mia Shah-Dand Nicolas Babin Pascal BORNET Pierre Pinna Markus Schaffhauser Peter Koerte David Bray, PhD Mei Lin Fung Peter C. Krell Eugenio Mallol 🚀 Ellen Schramke Kevin O'Donovan Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr Paul Hobcraft Melanie Gabriel Anja Hoffmann Stefan Suwelack Anne Mareike Schlinkert Dr. Michael Haft Claudia Becker Felix Georg Mueller Antonius Gress Thomas Power Timothy "Tim" Hughes 提姆·休斯 L.ISP Neville Gaunt 💡⚡️Sally Eaves

47

6 Comments