👋🏾 Hi friends!

As election fever ignites passions in the UK (not entirely sure what is going to get ignited across the Atlantic), tribalism and the fight for the hearts and minds of the population is underway.

Sadly, from my perspective neither of the main parties are really giving me much hope for the future instead trying to galvanise the country around either adding VAT to private school fees or conscripting 18 year olds into National Service.

It’s going to be an interesting 6 weeks, that’s for sure.

Thankfully, I’ll be spending at least one of those weeks far from the madding crowd attending TOA Berlin 🇩🇪 

Actually, not just attending, I’ll be hosting their pitch competition, MC’ing a couple of the mornings and talking on a panel discussing Reimagining Work: The Future of Productivity and Value.

If you are thinking of heading over to join thousands of founders, investors, creatives and leaders – and of course l’il ol’ me – then enjoy a 30% discount on me – make sure you secure your place and book here 💪🏾

Look forward to seeing you there!

I’m well underway writing about all the things I’ve learned from the last couple of decades as founder, CFO and CEO, so sign up for early access to Off Balance – The Book and feel free to share with anyone else you think might enjoy it 😄.

Now let’s get down to business…

In this weeks Off Balance:

🎙️ Shwetank Verma and Henry Goodwin, Partners at Leo Capital on Nothing Ventured
⚡️ Who <really> holds the power in the boardroom?

Talking the India Advantage with Leo Capital 🇮🇳

In the latest episode of Nothing Ventured, I spoke with Shwetank Verma and Henry Goodwin, Partners at Leo Capital, a VC fund investing in early stage, technology centric opportunities investing anywhere from $500K – $2M in early seed rounds or pre-Series A rounds in India, South East Asia and now the Nordics.

Prior to joining Leo, Henry worked at various law firms in London and in Asia, ultimately as Partner and Head of Asia for Taylor Vinters and then as Partner at PwC Legal International setting up their TMT specialist team in Singapore. He worked with Octopus Ventures as their Venture Partner for SE Asia before joining Leo Capital as Europe lead where he is now launching their Nordic fund.

Shwetank is a Co-Founder of Leo Capital and prior to founding the fund, founded MyHealthMate which he exited to Ambicare Clinics. He also worked in the corporate innovation space with MetLife Asia in Singapore, where he led open innovation and partnerships with startups.

Top takeaways:

1️⃣ Stimulating the Early Stage Ecosystem in Singapore: Henry shared the concerted effort by the Singaporean government to stimulate the early stage tech ecosystem between 2010 and 2020. The incentives and the introduction of capital into the system have been pivotal in fostering growth and innovation in the region.

2️⃣ The India Advantage: Shwetank explored the India Advantage, emphasising the vast talent pool in India and the potential for Indian diaspora to create global impact.

3️⃣ Expansion into Europe and Nordics: Henry and Shwetank discussed Leo Capital’s expansion into Europe and specifically the Nordics in late 2023. They emphasised the importance of a global mindset and the strength of talent in the Nordics.

Beyond this, we spoke about:

🇸🇬 How Singapore is stimulating the early stage ecosystem.
🇮🇳 Talent in India is now global.
📈 How loss making startups can now list on the Indian stock exchange.
🌍 Launching in the Nordics and how smaller markets bring global mindsets.
🚀 Why becoming an entrepreneur has gone from shame to game on in India and the diaspora.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts!

If you have any feedback on the podcast or the newsletter, just reply to this mail or ping me online!

If you like what I’m putting out, do give me a follow on LinkedIn and Twitter.

(If you are trying to connect with me on LinkedIn, maybe read this post I wrote and make sure to start your request with “Off Balance” and, importantly, tell me why you’d like to connect 💪🏾)

Now let’s get into it.

Off Balance

For those of you who have been following Off Balance for some time now, you’ll know that there are two elements to raising capital from VCs – the economics of the deal (what is the valuation, how much is being invested for what % ownership) and then there are the control elements (what voting powers, what reserved matters, who gets a board seat and so on).

Currently we’re seeing throughout our client base that control starting to be exerted in a much stronger fashion as investors seek to push back on excessive spending or take a stronger line with poorly performing portfolio companies.

In some instances, that may well mean some pretty big shake ups in the organisation – including potential changes at the senior leadership level – so it is important for founders to understand board dynamics and scrutinise their shareholder agreements to see who is able to do what and when.

But I want to explore a slightly different point, one that many people don’t necessarily appreciate, and that’s who holds the actual power in the boardroom.

Who Holds the Power in the Boardroom?

This is quite the contrarian take, but do bear with me.

So you’ve set up your company, maybe you’re one of two co-founders, you’re both directors in the business and things are pretty breezy.

Then after slogging away fuelled by ramen, hope and stale coffee you start seeing some traction and decide it’s time to open up your cap table and invite some investors on board.

You go through a few months of rollercoaster emotions, one VC in the data room, another talking about diligence, more rejections than you can count, but the glimmering of hope.

Until finally you get a term sheet – and they’re willing to lead!

It all seems ok, the valuation is more or less as you expected, you’re going to have to carve out some additional equity for the team, which is fair enough and the investor want a seat on the board.

But of course they’re not taking the whole round. So you’re going to need another investor, and they will come in on the same terms.

Fast forward another month or two as dilligence is done and long form legals are inked and you finally have cash in bank and it’s time to put that money to work.

You file all the necessary paperwork and add the two Investor Directors to the board but now you’ve got a slight problem, there are now 4 of you on the board – what happens if you get to a deadlock?

Well that’s solvable through a number of ways, but maybe, to keep everyone honest, it’s worth bringing in an external Chair to run the board and hold the casting vote.

Wonderful, this feels like a pretty grown up place to be in doesn’t it?

You’ve set up quarterly, maybe even monthly board meetings, where you can strategise how you’re going to take over / disrupt / create the market / competition / industry.

This is going to add so much value to how you run things, finally you have the support you need on the big stuff.

But at some point, you wake up with this nagging question in your head. You’ve now got 2 co-founders, 2 investors and 1 non exec Chair on the board.

So who is running things?

Who actually holds the power?

Some might say it’s the Chairperson, after all, they hold the casting vote, they are able to change the trajectory of the business and influence the rest of the board as the neutral voice at the table.

Others might say it’s the Investor Directors, after all, it’s their cash on the line, and for lots of startups it’s their cash they’re going to rely on to some extent in the future – it’s really hard to convince new investors to come on board when you’re existing ones either don’t take up their pro-rata or don’t like where the business is heading.

You may even think it’s the CEO especially if things are going well (though it is always worth remembering, it’s probably going to be easier to replace the CEO than it is a board member – remember what happened to Travis Kalanick at Uber?).

But often it’s the last person you might imagine it to be.

So this is my contrarian take:

Having sat through 100s of board meetings from startups to corporates there is a truism that emerges…

The person (or potentially people) that hold the most power in a board meeting are the following:

📝 The person who sets the agenda.

✍🏾 The person who writes the minutes.

Why is this the case?

Because if you set the agenda you direct the flow of the meeting. You shepherd people in the direction you want the discussion to go.

You can tackle hard topics tangentially rather than head on and steer the conversation towards the outcomes you’re looking for.

People rarely question the format, progression or detail of the agenda so, once set, it is quite easy to steer the board meeting in the direction you want to.

Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean you can steamroll the meeting, if you try and do something that is clearly contentious, be prepared for push back.

But all other things being equal, setting the agenda gives you a great deal of power to influence the flow of your board (or any other) meeting.

The second powerful role is held by the person writing the minutes.

Your role is to record salient points from the meeting and the pertinent actions that arise.

Think about this for a moment. You are writing the definitive record of a meeting that people will refer back to over subsequent months, if not years.

You essentially dictate how people ‘remember’ the meeting in the future.

In fact, it may not even be the case that the people referring to your minutes would have even been present at the meeting because board members change on a regular basis.

The other thing about minutes is that very few people truly understand how to write a good set of them. Most people default to some university style notes with lots of Person A said x and then Person B responded with y – much of which is peripheral to the actual core message that needs to be recorded for posterity.

I have, over time, gotten very good at writing minutes, mainly because I have spent A LOT of time in board meetings over the years. The trick is to write short form notes in the meeting in the style of your finished minutes and then condense and circulate within 48 hours of the meeting having wrapped up – this allows for maximum contribution to ensure that the record is straight.

When I wrote about this topic on LinkedIn a while ago, a lawyer came back with this comment:

Now I’m by no means suggesting that every person that sets the agenda or writes the minutes has some sort of Machiavellian desire to hijack the meeting for their own purposes, simply that most people would assume that power only ever sits in the hands of the people either making the decisions or investing their cash.

The reality is that you’ll almost always get others’ inputs into both the agenda and the minutes.

But how you write the way the meeting flows and what the outcomes were is more powerful than most people understand.

As always, my office hours are open, if you’d like to chat about this or anything else, just grab some time 😊.

I hope you found Off Balance #37 useful. As always, I’d love to get your feedback and understand the sort of topics you would love to hear about.

Just hit reply to this mail or drop me a line at [email protected] and let me know 😊

🚀And that’s a wrap for this edition of Off Balance – I’d appreciate your feedback so just reply to this email if you’ve got something you’d like to say.

📨 And if you think someone else might love this, please forward it on to them,

🎧 Finally, if you’re a fan of the Nothing Ventured podcast, please don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe wherever you get your pods – it really helps us spread the word.

That’s it from me so until next time…

Stay liquid 🙂

Aarish

👋🏾 Hi friends!

This week’s short and snappy edition is all about the super cool team at the super cool SuperSeed – an early stage B2B venture fund. Check out the conversation I had with founding partners Mads Jensen and Dan Bowyer, hope you love it as much as I loved recording it!

I’m well underway writing about all the things I’ve learned from the last couple of decades as founder, CFO and CEO, so sign up for early access to Off Balance – The Book and feel free to share with anyone else you think might enjoy it 😄.

Now let’s get down to business…

From boy bands to venture investing 👨🏻‍🎤

Check out the latest episode of Nothing Ventured where I spoke to Mads Jensen and Dan Bowyer, the amazing investors behind SuperSeed a seed fund investing in technical founders who are transforming how the world works and helping them hit their first million.

Prior to founding SuperSeed, Mads was co-founder and CEO of Sefaira, a company developing software for sustainable and high-performance building design whilst Dan built and exited 2 startups as well as having spent time as a boy band member and host on children’s TV.

Some top takeaways from this pod:

➡️ Hunger for AI in Business Transformation: Mads and Dan highlighted the massive interest and hunger in how AI is transforming businesses. With AI becoming more prevalent, there is a fundamental shift in how businesses are perceiving and utilising this technology to drive innovation and growth.

➡️ Need for European Nasdaq: The discussion touched upon the idea of creating a European Nasdaq to support tech businesses in Europe. The lack of strategic buyers in Europe often leads to companies seeking exits in the US. Establishing a European Nasdaq could provide more opportunities for companies to grow and scale within the region.

➡️ Focus on Building Big Independent Businesses: While the goal is for companies to build big independent businesses, the reality often leads to exits to US trade buyers. This trend highlights the importance of companies being structured to work with US markets and partners to achieve significant growth and success.

They also talked about:

🚀 How Dan and Mads went from a boy band and IBM to raising a fund.
？ Whether there is a lack of risk appetite in Europe
📈 How European venture was only 2 – 3bn a decade and a half ago and we’re now 10x of that.
🏎️ Speed of sale speed of scale

Check it out!

Else listen on Spotify or Apple

If you have any feedback, or if there’s something you’re desperate to see me include, just reply to this mail or ping me online – I’m very open to conversations.

If you like what I’m putting out, do give me a follow on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

(If you are trying to connect with me on LinkedIn, maybe read this post I wrote and make sure to start your request with “Off Balance” and, more importantly, tell me why you’d like to connect 💪🏾)

Don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe to Nothing Ventured on Apple, Spotify or YouTube, it really helps more people see what we’re doing – you can find links to these (and more including my Office Hours) right here!

As always, my office hours are open, if you’d like to chat about anything finance, tech or venture releated, just grab some time 😊.

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I hope you found Off Balance #36 v. As always, I’d love to get your feedback and understand the sort of topics you would love to hear about.

Just hit reply to this mail or drop me a line at [email protected] and let me know 😊

🚀And that’s a wrap for this edition of Off Balance – I’d appreciate your feedback so just reply to this email if you’ve got something you’d like to say.

📨 If you think someone else might love this, please forward it on to them,

🎧 Finally, if you’re a fan of the Nothing Ventured podcast, please don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe wherever you get your pods – it really helps us spread the word.

That’s it from me so until next time…

Stay liquid 🙂

Aarish

👋🏾 Hi friends!

It’s been a sunny week in London, though sadly, having been in meetings all weekend I didn’t really get much of a chance to enjoy it 😢 , even more frustratingly, I also managed to miss out on the spectacular light show that the country got to experience on Friday and Saturday evening as the Northern Lights came to the UK. Fortunately some of my neighbours got snap happy, so check out this incredible shot from the weekend 🤯 

I’m well underway writing about all the things I’ve learned from the last couple of decades as founder, CFO and CEO, so sign up for early access to Off Balance – The Book and feel free to share with anyone else you think might enjoy it 😄.

Now let’s get down to business…

In this weeks Off Balance, I’ll be chatting about:

🎙️ Ash Arora, Partner at LocalGlobe on the Nothing Ventured Podcast
🇪🇺 eu/acc – what’s the movement all about?

Why Ethereum is the Hugging Face of Blockchain…

In the latest episode of Nothing Ventured, I had a wide ranging and fascinating conversation with Ash Arora, the youngest Partner at LocalGlobe, a UK-based venture capital firm that focuses on seed and impact investments leading their web3 and blockchain practice.

Before joining LocalGlobe, she was Investments Lead at Polygon Labs leading the $100Mn Polygon Ventures’ Fund where she focussed on early-stage web3 startups with global LPs across the US, and Europe.

Three takeaways from this episode that are worth thinking about:

1️⃣ We are Soooo Early in Blockchain and AI

Ash noted that we are still in the early stages of both blockchain and AI technologies and adoption. Despite the hype and excitement around these fields, there is still a lot of infrastructure work yet to be done. The challenges of security, scalability, and cost have not yet been fully addressed, leading to immense potential for growth.

2️⃣ The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Blockchain

Ash introduced the concept of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in blockchain, drawing parallels to the famous physics principle. She discussed that in blockchain, it’s challenging to achieve security, scalability, and cost efficiency simultaneously. This fundamental problem underscores the need for innovative solutions and infrastructure development to overcome this trilemma.

3️⃣ Blockchain Use Cases and Real-World Adoption

We discussed the importance of real-world adoption of blockchain technology, focusing on practical use cases like land registry on-chain. While the technical aspects of implementing blockchain solutions may be feasible, the legal and regulatory frameworks need to evolve. The intersection of code as law and traditional legal structures presents a complex but promising landscape for adoption.

Beyond this we talked about:

🐇 How Ash went from knowing nothing about VC to going down a 3 month rabbit hole writing a paper on Bitcoin for Citi
🪙 Getting into crypto because she was restricted from investing anything else whilst at Citi.
🤷🏾 How 99% of the crypto community back in the day didn’t know what they were doing.
🎡 Feeling at home in London after landing for the first time for 20 rounds of face to face interviews with LocalGlobe.
🤝 Choosing LocalGlobe having 7 job offers in her pocket and using her 50+ question framework!

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts!

If you have any feedback on the podcast or the newsletter, just reply to this mail or ping me online!

If you like what I’m putting out, do give me a follow on LinkedIn and Twitter.

(If you are trying to connect with me on LinkedIn, maybe read this post I wrote and make sure to start your request with “Off Balance” and, importantly, tell me why you’d like to connect 💪🏾)

Now let’s get into it.

Off Balance

There is a bit of a movement going on at the moment – you may have come across it on Twitter / X – lots of folks with a variation of e/acc or 🇬🇧/acc or some variation on that theme in their bios.

And while the movement is already a couple of years old, I thought it would be valuable to unpack what’s going on from the lens of eu/acc which has struck a chord with people throughout the European ecosystem.

eu/acc

To understand eu/acc (or any other ?/acc) you first need to understand the overarching movement that surfaced in 2022 and gained momentum in 2023 amongst prominent people throughout the tech ecosystem.

That movement is e/acc or Effective Accelerationism.

The concept of effective accelerationism (e/acc), posits that civilization should align with the universe’s inherent tendency towards increased energy utilisation and entropy.

e/acc draws on principles from physics, suggesting that life and societal structures like capitalism are manifestations of these thermodynamic processes, optimising energy extraction for growth and replication.

e/acc advocates for a laissez-faire approach, arguing that open, competitive systems are better at evolving and adapting than those tightly controlled by top-down regulations.

This perspective envisions a future where human limitations are transcended, advocating for a dynamic and flexible framework that encourages innovation and evolution towards greater complexity.

It’s proponents summarise it themselves as follows:

At a broader level, e/acc is a progression of accelerationism (developed by British philosopher Nick Land and since fallen out of favour due to perceived or actual racist views including nods to eugenics and far right undertones). It is also a push back against the effective altruism movement which proposes a much more cautious approach towards AGI (artificial general intelligence) which it frames under ‘longtermism’ and again, e/acc is also a response to the degrowth movement which expounds a philosophy of reduced economic activity and consumption.

Now, while you only have to head over to Reddit to get a feel for the pop-pyschology vibes of the movement with plenty of physicists and PhDs showing their disdain for the movement as slightly nonsensical, probably the best quote I have seen about it is from this article in the New York Times:

Because what e/acc really is, is the seed of an idea that people can take and interpret how they want to. It has allowed for a plethora of sub /acc movements to take off, and this is where my interest really lies.

European Accelerationism

Let me preface this by saying the following:

I think it sucks that the UK exited the European Union.

I think that the European Union has some significant challenges and issues.

The ecosystem in Europe is not homogenous (which is kind of the point).

On 30th April 2024, Andreas Klinger (formerly CTO of Product Hunt, Head of Remote at AngelList and currently investor at Remote First Capital) posted a blog entitled: Dear Europe, please wake up – eu/acc.

In it he uses the the general objective of the e/acc movement but in a European context arguing for certain changes that could take Europe out of its (perceived and actual) malaise on the pathway to startup and technological growth.

The first part of his essay deals with probably the most prevelant problem in the European startup ecosystem, one that comes through in the podcasts I’ve recorded with VCs across Europe – though never as explicitly, nor providing the ultimate rationale, as Andreas does, as being the self doubt that Europe has driven by tropes and memes driven predominantly by our US counterparts.

If you live in Europe (the continent not the political organisation the EU) and have spent any time in the tech and venture ecosystem, I’d warrant that you have come across at least one of these statements either overtly or in meme form at some point online.

Andreas makes the case against each one whilst accepting that to some extent there is no smoke without fire and that, the continuing ‘belief’ in these tropes has the potential to become a self fulfilling prophecy.

He suggests that all the big themes – tech, AI, space-tech, climate etc. are all already being tackled in Europe. We don’t lack the ambition. Instead, according to Andreas, what causes us the most problem is friction.

And because of that friction, he proposes two issues that need to be tackled to help ‘unleash’ European accelerationism.

Creating an EU Inc.

Teach English as early as possible.

Europe has 750m people, the EU 450m all spread across over 40 countries. That means 40+ different legal systems, regulations, corporate law, employment law, tax regimes, customs, cultures and, of course, languages.

And as many investors I have attested to, one of the reasons that it is so hard to invest in certain jurisdictions is the bureaucracy that goes with that. Andreas talks about investing in a German GmbH as an example, requiring notaries, physical presence and all sorts of other friction that makes sure investors think twice before parting with their cash.

Norway has recently shocked the startup ecosystem with tightening of rules around their exit tax which would levy 37.8% on unrealised assets over Euro 43k that had been built up in the country. This has very specific and costly implications for founders looking to scale up and out of the country whose population currently stands at just under 5.5 million people.

So the case for an EU Inc is a strong one, if founders (and importantly investors) had a standard vehicle they could set up wherever they were based in Europe, this would lead to a far smoother process to launch and raise capital.

It is no surprise that in the US, the Delaware Inc has become the vehicle of choice for investors, and, as Daniel Glazer stated in my interview with him, it is with good reason that if you are a European based startup looking for US investment pre Series B, you are likely going to have to flip to a Delaware topco. Investors simply don’t want to have to figure out the regulations that will bind them in some other jurisdiction.

A Europe wide structure would definitely remove some of those challenges (though this would need to be tested over time as case law is explored and precedent is formed).

The case for teaching English from an early age is also not that controversial (at least in principle if not in practice). It is understandable that individual nations do not want to lose their cultural and linguistic heritage but the reality is that English is the lingua franca of tech, business and – especially in the venture ecosystem – the US is the most likely destination for growth.

As a linguist myself, you will never hear me arguing against the value of learning second and third languages, it expands horizons and allows for better understanding of those from other cultures and backgrounds.

But English, especially in Europe, comes with connotations. The backlash against linguistic imperialism is real. We have all heard the stories of the French wanting to ban ‘le weekend’ from the vocabulary in the early 2000s, and it still surprises me when I travel to Italy how few people have a functional understanding of English outside of the cities.

This has real implications if you are building in the venture space, you will rub fewer shoulders, glad fewer hands and generally struggle to expand outside your home nation.

Obviously this is not always the case and you can be successful without learning or being fluent in English, but when all is said and done, as Andreas states, doing so provides optionality for future generations whilst standardising media and networks as opposed to maintaining disperate and patchy nodes across the ecosystem.

Just a few days ago Andreas launched https://eu-acc.com/ alongside a Discord which quickly garnered several hundred members with the starting ambition to tackle the issue of the EU Inc.

I have interviewed many VCs across the UK / European ecosystem and beyond and there is something quite enticing about what Andreas is proposing. Not just because there should be so much more optimism around tech in Europe, not just because we want to ensure we don’t fall behind the USA, China and other emerging ecosystems like India, Israel and elsewhere but also because his approach is to work with regulators and standardise rather than attempt to overturn or antagonise. Collaboration is always a better way to effect change if you can.

But also, I am attracted to it because (unsurprisingly) Andreas doesn’t approach this with the techno-libertarian overtones that the US advocates of e/acc seem to promote.

And as he says, if the EU could adopt the Euro across the bloc then anything is possible.

What do you think, does he make the case for European accelerationism and do you subscribe to the thesis?

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As always, my office hours are open, if you’d like to chat about this or anything else, just grab some time 😊.

I hope you found Off Balance #35 useful. As always, I’d love to get your feedback and understand the sort of topics you would love to hear about.

Just hit reply to this mail or drop me a line at [email protected] and let me know 😊

🚀And that’s a wrap for this edition of Off Balance – I’d appreciate your feedback so just reply to this email if you’ve got something you’d like to say.

📨 And if you think someone else might love this, please forward it on to them,

🎧 Finally, if you’re a fan of the Nothing Ventured podcast, please don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe wherever you get your pods – it really helps us spread the word.

That’s it from me so until next time…

Stay liquid 🙂

Aarish

👋🏾 Hi friends!

As promised, every other week for the time being, I’ll just be dropping a short edition of Off Balance into your inbox, showcasing my latest Nothing Ventured podcast in case it had slipped your attention (in which case what are you doing?! Subscribe wherever you get your pods so you never miss another episode 💪 )

I’m well underway writing about all the things I’ve learned from the last couple of decades as founder, CFO and CEO, so sign up for early access to Off Balance – The Book and feel free to share with anyone else you think might enjoy it 😄.

Now let’s get down to business…

Queering Venture Capital 🌈

In this episode of Nothing Ventured, I sat down with Christian Tooley, the founder of i³ investing, the first, and only, registered organisation in the U.K. and Europe solely dedicated to queering venture capital – for both LGBTQ+ founders & investors.

His ‘day’ job is at Bain & Company where he leads a team across EMEA for Bain’s Venture Ecosystem focussed on venture capital as a service. Christian is an Ada Ventures angel a fellow of the Newton Venture Program and was previously a scout with BACKED VC.

Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Christian:

Intersectional Incredible Founders: Christian highlighted the importance of supporting intersectional incredible founders who bring a unique perspective and resilience to the entrepreneurial journey. How by focusing on diversity and inclusion, we can foster innovation and create a more equitable startup landscape.

Unlocking Queer Capital: Christian shared insights into how i3 Investing is partnering with Crunchbase to spotlight LGBTQ+ founders and provide them better access to capital. By creating a platform for queer entrepreneurs to connect with investors, Christian believes it is possible to begin to bridge the funding gap and support diverse businesses.

Historical Perspective on LGBTQ+ Entrepreneurship: Christian challenged the notion that LGBTQ+ entrepreneurship is a recent phenomenon, citing examples from ancient cultures where diverse gender roles and identities were accepted. By acknowledging the historical presence of queer individuals in entrepreneurship, it is possible to combat stereotypes and promote inclusivity in the startup community.

In this episode, we also talked about:

🤑 Taking the dusty world of consulting into the sexy world of venture.
🧑🏽‍💼 Whether you take the corporate out of corporate venturing.
💸 Angel investing with Ada Ventures in post product, pre revenue companies in the UK.
🏳️‍🌈 From the day job to the gay job – launching i³ investing
⚧️ Unlocking queer capital.
🙋🏽‍♀️ Defining Intersectional Incredible Founders.
🤝 Partnering with Crunchbase to put a spotlight on your diversity.

Check it out!

Else listen on Spotify or Apple

If you have any feedback, or if there’s something you’re desperate to see me include, just reply to this mail or ping me online – I’m very open to conversations.

If you like what I’m putting out, do give me a follow on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

(If you are trying to connect with me on LinkedIn, maybe read this post I wrote and make sure to start your request with “Off Balance” and, more importantly, tell me why you’d like to connect 💪🏾)

Don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe to Nothing Ventured on Apple, Spotify or YouTube, it really helps more people see what we’re doing – you can find links to these (and more including my Office Hours) right here!

As always, my office hours are open, if you’d like to chat about anything finance, tech or venture releated, just grab some time 😊.

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I hope you found Off Balance #34 useful. As always, I’d love to get your feedback and understand the sort of topics you would love to hear about.

Just hit reply to this mail or drop me a line at [email protected] and let me know 😊

🚀And that’s a wrap for this edition of Off Balance – I’d appreciate your feedback so just reply to this email if you’ve got something you’d like to say.

📨 If you think someone else might love this, please forward it on to them,

🎧 Finally, if you’re a fan of the Nothing Ventured podcast, please don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe wherever you get your pods – it really helps us spread the word.

That’s it from me so until next time…

Stay liquid 🙂

Aarish