FounderTech Decoded

19 | Daniel Sawko | CEO and Co-Founder of Ship Shape | The Free Investor Search Engine | From Legacy To Liberating The Longtail of Ecosystem Potential

In this episode it was a pleasure to talk to Daniel Sawko of ShipShape.vc
 
We start the conversation looking at why the venture ecosystem is still so informed and driven by legacy frameworks, systems and thinking.
 
We examine whether the roots of this stem from the fact that in just over a decade that ecosystem has been radically transformed from being essentially a cottage industry of private networks and insider driven deal flow, to rapidly mutating into a potentially diverse and disparate startup marketplace. 
 
Where for example the accompanying status of being and publicly identifying as a founder in the 2000's was still an outlier career choice. Compare this to now with the legitimation of not just role but also of the supporting cast of accelerators, incubators, educators and media outlets that ratify and amplify going down that startup path and journey.
 
The discussion explores and posits whether it is these market shifts that the venture system hasn't adapted to and that FounderTech as an emerging ethos and growing community is fundamentally and openly targeting and addressing. 
 
With the hope that if you close the gap between the legacy ecosystem and the new long tail of founders wishing to access the market, find capital and launch their journeys into Scalable Niches, lies a huge amount of untapped potential.
 
Potential that Ship Shape is now trying to unlock and enable as the first ever free investor search engine that empowers founders and investors to align around demonstrable and repeatable market expertise and proven niche domain insight. Allowing calibrated capital to now better flow in theory to where it is most needed and can generate the most value and return for both sides.
 
Explore further:
> www.shipshape.vc
> https://uk.linkedin.com/in/danielsawko 

18 | Oli Harris | UK MD of Funderbeam | Integrating Capital Models Into The Emerging FounderTech Ecosystem

It was great to kick off Series 5 of the FounderTech Decoded podcast talking to Oli Harris, the UK Managing Director of Funderbeam.
 
We explore and discuss how to stimulate and bring about the envisioned changes and evolution in the venture ecosystem - so that it is more transparent, open and agile for all.
 
We explore how to achieve this, the emergence of pioneering FounderTech platforms and solutions needs to now align and integrate with new capital models.
 
We talk about how Funderbeam in its ability to create regulated and agile private markets around Scalable Niches, is integrated to this alignment and integration now happening.
 
Linked to this is the effect this integration has on capital distribution and allocation. So venture capital starts off and becomes regionally and demographically unbiased.
Enabled to travel and flow in the direction exceptional founder talent with deep expertise, to further empower investors looking for genuine market innovation and opportunity.
Connect with Oli:
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliharris
> https://www.funderbeam.com/ 
 
Pilot Round is the first FounderTech platform to enable pre-product market fit founders to powerfully align with early stage investors. In order to secure the capital they need to initially have a chance to get their startup off the ground over their next 3-6 months of launch.
Please visit www.PilotRound.com to now learn more, sign up to use the Beta and Launch The Extraordinary!

17 | Xavier Parkhouse-Parker | COO & Co-Founder Cambridge Future Tech | Launching The Venture Builder Model At Scale

In this episode we have a deep dive into the world of deep tech with Xavier Parkhouse-Parker COO and Co-Founder of Cambridge Future Tech. It’s also a chance to listen and gain insight into the framework of a Venture Builder model.
A model which elevates and fundamentally supports founders - often with a perspective, track record and insight of deep academic expertise - who are exploring Scaleable Niches into complex market problems that require deep IP and innovation.
In this model, support means everything. From multi-faceted advisory boards, mentoring, deep understanding and planning around market research and launch integration, as well as capital raising to create a defensible beachhead to scale and leverage going forward.
As we will with all guests on the Series 4, we then walk through, explore, challenge, counteract and gain further insight into The Switch Deck together - www.propelia.com/switchdeck 
 
Follow Xavier on:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/xavierparkhouseparker 
https://camfuturetech.com 
hello@camfuturetech.com 
https://a16z.com/book/the-hard-thing-about-hard-things/ 
Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023? Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of Pilot Round - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem. 
Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/
Sign up to the Pilot Round Beta at www.pilotround.com

16 | Puja Balachander | Recently Exited Seed Stage Founder From Devie | Head of Venture Launchpad at ClimateTech Fund Carbon13 | Iterating Towards A Scaeleable MVP With Minimum Tech As Possible

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast we get to listen in to Puja Balachander’s founder story, that saw her go from meeting her co-founder to in the first week of her MBA to then iterating and launching their MVP as a WhatsApp based product that helped them inform and determine product market fit. We hear how she used the Chrome extension Contact Out and Mail Merge as a critical piece of FounderTech to identify and be backed by the right team of early stage investors and aligned forward thinking early stage pre-seed backers like Bethnal Green Ventures and Catch22. 
Puja’s story is a brilliant example of the hustle and work it out as you go no code / low code approach. An approach that is much celebrated as an ideal founder path but very rarely well and successfully executed on. Perhaps in her case it was because she had the combination of the Founder Market Fit of working in the government and public services first combined with her other expertise in product development and design.
Puja’s story also illustrates that not all startup stories have to move towards their scale phase before exiting and how sometimes there is an inflection point where a sell to a partner is sometimes the best calculated and strategic right choice and how useful it is to have good investors and advisors around and on the journey with you if you hit this important inflection point.
Finally we use The Switch Deck to explore Puja’s new role working for ClimateTech fund Carbon13 and how her own founder’s journey helps inform her approach when evaluating and talking to early stage founders who often have solutions in search of problems, in startups who are at a similar stage to when she started her founder’s journey.
Connect with Puja:
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/pujabalachander/
> https://carbonthirteen.com/ 
 

15 | Nick Moutter | EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Who Has Raised Over £40m Across Various Startups and Founder @ Moot | Empowering The Future Of Ecommerce

In this Episode we get to talk to Nick Moutter, who recently won the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award for his work with Moot powering the next generation of ecommerce with deep tech and innovation that moves it radically beyond the current capabilities of Shopify.
We’ll listen to Nick comparing the grit, persistence and tenacity that a founder needs with his experiences when he was younger as an emerging professional footballer. We discuss how his own journey suggests that backing such a founder in the early stages with that grit over a longer arc and timeframe, will mean they are more likely to produce a ‘win’ and a long term return for their investors.
 
We also discuss how a credible introduction carries the majority of the weight of an initial engaging investor conversation and also often taking money from the wrong investor is worse than not receiving investment at all.
 
As we will with all guests on this Series 4 of FounderTech Decoded, we then walk through, explore, challenge, counteract and insight to The Switch Deck together. You can follow and hear Nick really put it through its paces and testing and pushing against some of its key assumptions up at www.propelia.com/switchdeck
 
Connect further with Nick: 
https://www.ey.com/en_uk/entrepreneur-of-the-year/uk-finalists 
https://moot.group/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmoutter

14 | Drew Rogers | Exited Founder in 2022 | UK’s 100 most inspiring female entrepreneurs | How To Successfully Engineer Your Exit Without Taking On Outside Venture

In this episode we talk to Drew Rogers and have the opportunity to listen to her founder’s story as it progresses from arriving as a child to the UK not speaking the language. To a side hustle that became Number 1 on Google. To exiting in 2022 from her startup My Language Lab® fuelled by the changing and evolving demands of online students and learning in the pandemic.
Drew’s journey to exit is unusual because it involves taking in no outside venture but embodies the much vaunted but rarely executed agile / no code low code approach. An approach that informed and drove her path from an offline tutoring business to launching a platform driven business, with high product market fit informed by analytics, assessment and automation.
Hear Drew share how once she had identified her acquirer, she then looked to the endpoint she wanted for her exit and worked backwards. Engineering My Language Lab so it gradually became more and more valuable and sellable. Particularly as her founder’s story deeply connected and resonated with that acquirer, enabling her to fashion and frame exit on terms that were commercially as well as personally fulfilling.
As we will with all guests on this Series 4 of FounderTech Decoded, we then walk through, explore, challenge, counteract and insight to The Switch Deck together. www.propelia.com/switchdeck
Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023? Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of BlackBox - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem. 
Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/

13 | Chris Wickson | Co-Founder @ Akkroo and Twice Exited Founder | Finding New Opportunities Within Scaleable Niches

In this episode we talk to Chris Wickson about his journey from launching his B2B SaaS startup Akkroo, to it being acquired for $34m by Integrate in 2019 - which after his earn out period leaves him currently with the fresh vista of being an active angel investor.
However, instead of taking the obvious path of trying to leverage their point of view and market expertise, he and his co-founder are actively seeking out problems in verticals they have relatively little experience and insight into. 
The logic being that rather than double down on their pre-existing confirmation biases towards certain industries and sectors, by coming afresh to a sector they may be able to see how they can leverage solutions and fresh thinking into legacy systems and markets.
We drill into this further by exploring a term called ‘Scaleable Niches’ that has come up in previous episodes of the podcast. This posits that instead of looking at and evaluating horizontal B2B SaaS based opportunities, the new and untapped value lies in going deeply in verticals where genuine insight, product driven IP and innovation play a lot more prominence.
If in this case new models are needed to map and chart where the most promising Scaleable Niches are and also the type of founder you might need to align with and back? A founder who has sufficient exceptional Founder Market Fit that they can propel you into and provide the unfair advantage in terms of deep market insight, networks and expertise that a Scaleable Niche with blue sky potential might provide.   
As we will with all guests now on the podcast, we then overlap the insight of Chris’ founder’s journey onto different aspects of The Switch Deck - key shifts effecting the future of the early stage venture ecosystem.
 
Connect further with Chris:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-wickson
 
Are you a forward thinking investor, platform or founder that wants to be kept in the loop with all things FounderTech as the conversation continues to develop, iterate and evolve in 2023? Then simply subscribe to The FounderTech Bulletin and remain up to date with all key developments, including following Propelia’s launch of BlackBox - as its own powerful Founder Market Fit driven platform - into the early stage venture ecosystem. 
Subscribe now to The FounderTech Bulletin here: https://foundertech.substack.com/

12 | Luke Loveridge @ Propflo, Dan Pritchard @ Tech South West Awards and Ben Cooper @ Bristol Private Equity Club | The Journey To Making The South West A Vibrant Regional Hub

In this episode it’s been great to talk to founder Luke Loveridge about his experience not only exiting a startup with HomeLINK but then going on to currently launching another one with Propflo - for which he recently won Startup of the year at the Tech South West Awards.
Tech South West was conceived of and launched by Dan Pritchard in 2018. A brand expert who moved to the region, he recognised the opportunity to supercharge its potential as a major tech hub. In that time, Dan also launched the Tech South West Awards in 2019, and with the Tech South West team, developed the tech cluster organisation to run virtual accelerator programmes, commission key reports and build its membership to over 3000-strong, all helping to put the South West as a region firmly on the UK’s tech map. 
Bringing the perspective of the regional investor to the conversation is Ben Cooper, who as well as now being involved in the Awards is an active member of the Bristol Private Equity group -  a leading regional angel syndicate. As well as being an active NED and strategic advisor to startup and scale ups.
With these 3 perspectives, this episode is a real window for anyone wishing to get an insight into how you begin to nurture, stimulate and interconnect the various nodes of a region to create the conditions for a vibrant regional hub outside of the traditional founder and investor London bias and focus.
As with all guests on the Series 4, we then walk and talk and overlay the insights of the above through the framework of The Switch Deck together.
Connect further: 
https://propflo.co.uk/ 
https://www.techsouthwest.co.uk/awards-2022 and https://program.agency/
https://www.bristolprivateequityclub.com

11 | Justin Langen @ Head Of Investor Partnerships At Uncapped | The Rise Of Non-Diluted Funding As An Inflection Point For Raising A Round

In this Episode of FounderTech Decoded we talk to Justin Langen, Head of Investor Partnerships at Uncapped. In this conversation we zoom in on the evolution of using different and new financial products to reframe traditionally stigmatised approaches around instruments used to fund debt, to now hopefully propel venture into a much more agile and open space.
 
How this venture landscape that has traditionally veered towards equity as the default go-to, is starting to see the introduction of new tools and platforms around restructuring and offering debt-based solutions, start to gradually adjust and reconfigure the funding conversation. Where such debt is not seen as an end of the line emergency vehicle but a much more proactive and dynamic part of a founder’s startup runway.
 
We discuss how at Uncapped they are starting to explore calling this ‘Non-Diluted Funding’ and how they are learning that this type of venture debt is particularly suited to SaaS models and platforms. Where the fundamentals and unit economics are more easily made visible and known, in order to determine if there are distinct levers that can be amplified to stimulate further growth, revenues and return. Particularly when these models are also plugged into FounderTech APIs like Xero and Chargebee, to offer a much better real time macro and micro view of the scaling startup via which to quickly evaluate the business.
 
Finally, we talk about how viewing and delivering Non-Diluted Funding in this way can actually provide a very strong signal, point of intelligence and financial datapoint when raising a further equity round. Giving founders new found flexibility and runway security and in doing so also potentially strengthening their negotiating hand with VCs for their equity rounds. All of which allows for more intelligence and optionality in the venture landscape going forward.
 
Explore further and connect with Justin: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-langen-528873151/ 
https://www.weareuncapped.com/ 
https://www.saastock.com/ 

10 | Francesco Perticarari @ Co-Founder of Silicon Roundabout and Managing Partner of Silicon Roundabout Ventures | Leveraging FounderTech To Now Launch A Community Driven Fund

In this episode of FounderTech Decoded, we are excited to talk to Francesco Perticarari about his experience of leveraging Silicon Roundabout -  the largest Deep Tech founder meeetup and community in Europe - into a new sister venture fund Silicon Roundabout Ventures. A fund he is currently in the process of launching, aimed at identifying and investing in early stage tickets in DeepTech European startups.
We discuss how in framing and designing the fund FounderTech like Vauban (whilst also evaluating market alternatives like Odin) is enabling him to launch the fund in a rapid and agile way that would have simply not been possible even just a few years ago. Particularly for an outsider entering the venture space for the first time, looking to leverage a community driven perspective, backed by their particular market insight and sector point of view.
We also explore how the fund aligns with a potential parallel diminishment of low hanging B2B and B2C SaaS opportunities in the venture space. Where even in relatively recent dynamically backed VC sectors like FinTech, previous startup winners like Monzo and Revolut are now much more quickly replicable and therefore harder to differentiate and distinctly defend going forward. Given this, why Francesco believes the next big market opportunity for early stage venture is in Deep Tech. Backing startup challenges which can only be solved by founders leveraging deep R&D and complex Innovation or by exploiting valuable algorithmic niches.
Finally we discuss how FounderTech when leveraged properly, works brilliantly when it replaces low value functions in the ecosystem, in order to then elevate and amplify high value founder insights and investor interactions. Seen in this way FounderTech might essentially represent the new APIs of the venture system, that fluidly enables really advanced startup and funding innovation through a mixture of now better amplifying access to capital, deep founder driven insight and aligned community.
 
Explore further and connect with Francesco: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fperticarari/ 
https://siliconroundabout.ventures/
https://siliconroundabout.tech/ 
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/silicon-roundabout-16832027154 
https://blog.francescoperticarari.com/