Eileen Burbidge MBE - From early Skype employee to becoming the Queen of British VC

Founders, leaders, you have to surround yourself with really good people. You cannot do it alone.

I'm really well, thank you. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being on here.

Okay, first of all, I'm already killing this because I know these are supposed to be rapid fire, but I feel like I have to put a disclaimer. And if you don't like this qualifier, you can edit it out later. No, that's cool. But I think the rapid fire is really tough because all of these deserve context. The first one, and the reason why I paused and had to do that, the context on this one is I think there's lots of reasons people would expect me to say, or won't be surprised to hear me say, that the deal I'm most proud of is Monzo bank. But I want to qualify that it's not just because of the sort of financial success that it's become or the value that it's started to already develop and that it has as an enterprise value. I've said from the beginning, I do know there will be Monzo-nuts, so people who work at Monzo or who did work there years and years ago, I had said as far back as 2016, 2017, 2018, long before it was worth anywhere near where it's worth now, that I was really proud to have backed that team because it's always lived and delivered value in line with its values. And that was something that I feel was a privilege to watch and be a part of in the early days, even before we necessarily knew that it was going to be an objective success as well. So sorry, not very rapid for a rapid fire answer.

What was then TransferWise, but there's another one too, probably Onfido at the time. Those are probably my two biggest sort of anti-portfolio companies. And why is this a good one? Because we actually knew Kristo and Taavet really early on. They actually started in our offices. So on some lists or by some accounts, we get credit for investing in it actually. People still contact us in case we're willing to sell secondary things like that. So in some lists or some databases, we are down as an investor because they started in our office and we knew the team so well and so early on. I had the pleasure of working with Taavet at Skype in the early days, but we did not make that investment. And we almost saw it too early, or big lesson learned: we gave feedback on the model which they ultimately ended up incorporating. We should have just backed the team anyway.

There are so many. I think one of them is that anyone who is a VC is already independently wealthy. Another one would be that anyone in VC is necessarily clever, right, good, high quality. Those are probably maybe the top two.

I really thought about this question a lot because I don't know that I'm willing to say anything is particularly hard, in speech marks. I feel like it's a real privilege to be an investor of any variety, but a venture capital investor. I don't think anything is, again in speech marks, hard compared to what founders go through and other people that are involved in our day-to-day work. So I really don't think there's anything that's hard or difficult about being a VC. And I guess that also reflects that I think of it as a labor of love. Like everything that I do with it, I really enjoy doing it, and I think one has to enjoy doing all of it. I thought about what other people say and answer to this question. I've heard them say the hardest part is saying no, the hardest part is sifting through all the deal flow, the hardest part might be fundraising from LPs, the hardest part is getting distributions. Any of those things, again, I feel like those are very much first-world problems, and it's part of again the privilege of being an investor. So I really don't have an answer to that.

Oh, there's lots of things I'd like to change. Certainly the number of unpleasant people. Obviously not everybody, not all VCs, not everyone that I've worked with, but I do think it is a sector, or it's a job title, or it's an area that has so far been kind of self-selecting, or even not self-selecting but selecting of certain types of personalities and people of certain stature, accomplishment, or achievement, or certain backgrounds that don't really necessarily line up with being the most pleasant, likable, high integrity, nice to work with people. So put in another way, I think there are a lot of jerks, and I'd like to see that change.

Of course. So probably I think of it as a quite boring story, but I was born and raised in the midwestern part of the state, so in the suburbs of Chicago, which is largely a Caucasian white community, but as the daughter of first-generation immigrants. Both of my parents had come across to America separately to pursue higher education and then had my brother and myself, and so we lived in the Chicago area suburbs. So I was one of not very many East Asian people at my school or in the community. Certainly my parents had friends of people that were Chinese, but it was sort of almost very separate to day-to-day life and where my parents worked and also where we went to school. I mention that because I do think that shaped me a lot. When we talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, I obviously get asked a lot about gender balance and gender inclusion, and for me, for so much of my life until I was really an adult in the workplace, I only thought about ethnic inclusion or ethnic diversity and sort of othering, in speech marks, in that I really thought it was a big challenge for me being non-Caucasian in a really white dominating society. And I really thought there were no issues or no systemic challenges, and certainly far fewer, to being a girl while growing up than to being a Chinese girl. So for me, I think a lot of what I've done early on was to make sure that I could assert that I could speak English, that maybe I was good at other things other than math—by the way, I'm not good at math in my head—that I was not what the Asian stereotype was, and that I was as good as maybe a white colleague or a white contributor. So I was brought up in that way, and I guess very stereotypically was told how important education was, and I still believe that and of course try to impart that upon my kids. So school was really important. I think I was, they used to use these terms, they don't use them now, but academically described as a high achiever, and so I would do well on standardized tests and with grades and marks. But it got to the point where once I got to uni, I completely wasn't really rebelling against it, but I decided to just not work as hard or felt like I could coast or continue to coast, really, because I don't know that I felt I worked necessarily that hard through high school or any part of schooling, and I almost fell out of uni actually. So it was a good lesson learned, it was a reality check. And I feel really lucky because I got a computer science degree from the University of Illinois, but actually at the time that I was there, there were two computer science programs: one was in the math college and one was in the engineering college. And I was in the engineering college but had applied to general engineering, which was at the time probably one of the easier programs to get into, and then I transferred into computer science while there because I perceived that to be even easier than hardcore engineering. But coming out of university then with a computer science degree, I was working in sort of engineering roles, but I went to a telecoms company first, and it was probably most akin to product management where I did a little bit of coding but then most of it was interpreting technical requirements either to sales and marketing people or vice versa, and then kind of transitioned into more market development, business development roles. And that telecoms company actually transferred me out on a rotational assignment to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I then just absolutely fell in love with the tech sector, realizing that there was so much more to being in the tech sector than just programming, and that you had all these cross-functional roles or these other functional roles that we now know about. So then that's when I took a job at Apple as a market development manager, what they titled an evangelist at the time, for what's the predecessor to the iPhone but was the Newton personal digital assistant. This is BlackBerry days, this is before the Palm Pilot. And so I just stayed and fell in love with the tech sector from there. And so I was in the Bay Area for 10 years, for all of the dot-com boom and a couple of years of the bust. But I think I learned more in the last couple of years when things weren't going so well or weren't just easy pickings for everybody than I did for most of the dot-com boom. And I did think I was going to stay in the Bay Area forever, just kind of rotating through marketing, business development, market development roles, or product management. And actually came to London in 2004 to work at Skype and thought that it would be really valuable for my CV for staying in the Bay Area just to knock up some international experience for what I thought would be a year or two. And so 20 years on, I'm still here in London, now a British citizen, so dual national, and have given birth to four British citizens as well. And so I'm here now and really invested, both literally and figuratively, in the British ecosystem, in Europe, and in a lot of non-US opportunities really, because part of coming abroad in the first place was this thought process that Silicon Valley was probably a bit too insular and maybe not thinking globally enough or about opportunities that lay outside of the Bay Area or even the United States.

Oh gosh, there are so many learnings, but I also think there's learning in everything that we do. You can always take a lesson from any kind of experience. But yeah, of course, Skype was amazing. So many things. Even from you were just very generous there about how it worked out and how maybe that wasn't anticipated. I mean, that wasn't anticipated at all. And one thing that was really interesting for me looking back on it now is because I had a short-term mentality, which is going to sound really ironic, but because I was thinking so short-term, i.e., I just was looking for a role for a year, maybe two at most, I wasn't actually necessarily fixated on: is this going to be a really sustainable company brand? Is this going to be a winner? Is this the end-all be-all? Will it define my career? Anything like that. And I actually took the leap based on completely different criteria. Literally, what was going to be most fulfilling, gratifying, or valuable for me for the next year or two, seeing it as a stepping stone to candidly going back to the Bay Area is what I thought it was going to do. And so one thing that's interesting looking back at it now is I was really lucky actually. I got a job offer from not only Skype but also Shazam, which at the time was a completely different company. This is three years before the iPhone, so it's before Shazam really pivoted. But on paper, I think, and actually venture capital would have said the same, because Shazam had raised much more from VC at that point than Skype had done, and you would look at on paper Shazam being a quote-unquote safer bet than Skype because it had a patent portfolio. It certainly didn't have company founders that were under indictment in the US. It didn't have the risk I guess that Skype did. And it seemed like it was going to be a much safer bet, and it also had teams that were based in the US as well as the UK, so I could travel back and forth and potentially use that to rotate back around and all these things. But I ended up thinking about how amazing it would be for me, given where my experiences had been to date, getting exposure to a development team that was based in Estonia, getting exposure to a team that was being led by people who had done Kazaa before that, which had really fundamentally changed internet usage, broadband usage, how people were sharing content and things like that. And it was also smaller. There were only five people in London at the time. And I just sort of thought, okay, for the next year or so, this is actually going to be much more interesting than Shazam, which is probably more typical of what other tech companies were at the time. Again, it was pre-iPhone, so I didn't anticipate obviously what Shazam would go through in its growth following the iPhone and becoming a mobile app. But nonetheless, my criteria was totally different. So other lessons from Skype, other than thinking about what you want to get out of a particular experience and how you can personally benefit from working with people who will have unique experiences, because that's what I ended up indexing for and that's what served me really well. Another big one that I'd like to impart, even with companies that I work with today, is you don't need to be a success in the US to be a global success. And I think this is one that still is really hard and really tempting for people just to follow the established path of moving to the US or launching in the US in order to try and establish dominance. And Skype, I think, was a really great example of how you didn't need that. And it wasn't out of any kind of strategic genius or even trying to prove that initially. It was just a function of reality and practicality, which is Niklas and Janus could not travel to the US, so it didn't make sense to have an office there. It didn't make sense to curry favor with US consumers. It just made a lot of sense to focus on the opportunity outside of the US, clearly the home market here in the UK and all of Europe, and then actually to look further afield to Asia, which is really where I think Skype saw a lot of the hockey stick kind of traction initially. So that's one of the biggest lessons. Another lesson that was learned, which I think has been well proven now or at least better proven than that first lesson, would be that remote teams can work, or distributed workforces can work. So the development team was always based in Tallinn, and the business or commercial teams were always based in London, but that worked really well for us. I think it requires an enormous sense of discipline, and I don't think it's for all teams or all personality types, but it worked really well for Skype. Another lesson was just to push as hard as possible and just keep testing things, and not to necessarily be worried about competition. So one of the things that I wrestled with when I took the role or thought about joining the company was because I was such a geek or in tech already, I was mindful that there was already voice-over-IP product offerings. So you could already do voice calling of a certain kind: AOL Messenger, or AIM, or MSN Messenger, or Yahoo Messenger. In basically all the messaging apps, you could do voice calling, but it was terrible. The quality was awful. And Skype's first sort of tagline was that it just works, and it wasn't working on the other platforms. So for someone like me that was thinking about it as a job opportunity, I was like, well, how's this going to be different? How's it going to be better? And clearly, if it could have been better, AOL would have done it, or Yahoo would have done it, or all these companies with massive resources, Microsoft with MSN, would have done it. But being able to be confident in one's own innovation, in the IP that they had, in the learnings that they'd had from scaling, and how they worked with nodes and how they worked with voice processing and what they had done with music sharing or music file sharing, was just: don't worry about the competition, don't look around you, don't look behind you, execute on your plan, execute on your vision. And if something does work, if it's something that there is value for consumers, it will end up becoming an enduring, lasting proposition.

Oh, I mean, I have mad respect for Niklas, obviously. I have huge affection for my whole time there. I really feel like it was the experience of a lifetime, so there's nothing that I would speak ill of or nothing that I don't look back on with great fondness and just think that was so amazing and I was so lucky to have every part of that experience. I think that one thing Niklas did do extremely well was to hire. I guess it sounds like flattering myself actually, I don't think I was one of those, but his technical team was second to none, and I think anyone who ever had anything to do with Skype would attest to that as well. So that technical team based in Tallinn was amazing. And I think the sort of founding CTO team was actually made of a team of four, and I had the again great privilege to continue working with them even after I left Skype because they set up a small private fund, and that's actually how I got into investing. But that founding team was just unbelievable. And the most vocal of the four was a gentleman named Toivo, who was in effect the sort of CTO, and he was just phenomenal. I've not had the chance to meet or work with anyone who's quite of his caliber since then. But Niklas knew to defer to him, knew to give him reign, and knew that he would frankly be able to get it done. So a lot of what I think we did as a product team was mostly just act as a conduit between that development team and the business and the commercial teams and the marketing teams and the requirements in London. But Niklas was exceptional at working with or channeling and getting the best out of that development team with Toivo's help and Toivo's leadership. He was also really great at thinking strategically in terms of where things could go. I also had another lesson learned from Niklas directly, which I've talked about quite plainly. I don't have any qualms about this or any bitterness about this as well, but I was fired from Skype, and I get that, and I understand that. And that of course is Niklas's prerogative as the founder and as the company CEO. And that is something I continue to impart on founders today as well when I work with them as an investor: if something's not working for you, for the team, for you as a leader, you've got to make that change. And I respect that. It's a great lesson for me, and it's something that I think all leaders probably wrestle with. I'm not suggesting that Niklas necessarily wrestled with the decision for me, but the first time you do it, it feels like it's going to be so difficult, that it's going to end up costing a lot of time or overhead or energy, or it's just too difficult to do. But obviously, you've got to do what's right for the business and for you as a leader.

Yeah, sure. Although I don't know that I have too much advice for it because I think I just got really lucky, and I again feel really privileged to be investing today or even have had the chance to do it back then. So the way it happened for me was I had been working at Skype, I left Skype after I was fired, and then joined Yahoo here in London. I was then pregnant with my eldest, and so was staying here in London with my partner. And so I was working at Yahoo, but then on maternity leave. In that sort of intervening period, the business obviously was sold to eBay, and I mentioned the four founding engineers. They had 5% of the company's equity when it was sold, so they had enough resource then or had enough from their sort of upside to set up a private fund. It was 50 million euro, and they wanted to start investing sort of more as organized angels, but collectively as a group, out of what they named ASI or Ambient Sound Investments out of Tallinn. And so when I was on maternity leave from Yahoo, initially it just started with them asking me if I could look over a business plan because we had worked so closely together the time that I was at Skype, and we had delivered so much and obviously collaborated on so much. So I had such a great working relationship, rapport, and I think huge friendships with all of the Tallinn team. So they sort of asked me just as a friend, you know, you've been on the product side, you've been on the biz dev side, take a look at this. Could you take a look at this business plan and tell us frankly if you just think it's, or if you think it makes sense, and do you think that there's something here or not? Or it might have even been, listen, there's a founder that we think is working on something interesting, but they're based somewhere and they might be traveling through London or they might be based in the UK, but we're not going to necessarily ask them to fly out to Tallinn for us to meet them, so could you take a meeting and tell us what you think about them having met them face to face? So I was initially just sort of vetting business plans, product roadmaps, or even just doing founder references for them. And we didn't even use the vocabulary or anything, but I was effectively doing helping them with their due diligence. So I started doing that in the summer of 2006 and did that for about a year and a half actually. I carried on just supporting them while I was also working at Yahoo and just helping them make investments because it just seemed like a lot of fun to help people. Someone's thinking about investing in something and they say, what do you think? Does that make sense to you? And I was just offering my random, completely unqualified opinion, but in some cases they took it, in other cases they didn't. And then over that sort of two-year period, they ended up making four investments in London, and I would then carry on being sort of their board observer representative or their investor representative with those teams here in London. And it was a lot of fun, it was absolutely amazing. And I even considered, wow, I'd love to do this on a full-time basis, but probably not going to move to Tallinn and want to stay in London. Absolutely recognized, by the way, that I didn't think I was going to be able to get a job at a VC. So this is why I say I don't know that I have any good advice for anyone who would want to make that transition. I didn't have an MBA, I had a computer science degree. I don't know any macros still today in Excel. I'm not that kind of person or just an investment type. I had only operational experience and an understanding for technical concepts. So I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten hired as an associate at Index or Balderton or Accel, which were three big ones at the time, and didn't want to move to Tallinn. But through the course of the four companies that they invested in in the UK and that I started working with, I met my then what eventually became my founding partners at Passion. And so we started working together really in 2009 in terms of thinking about fundraising and what we wanted to do, and then started investing out of Passion Capital Fund One in 2011.

Yes, so the four founding engineers from Skype, they set up Ambient Sound Investments. They had a 50 million euro fund. They made four investments in London. I helped them with those. Through those companies, I met my future partners at Passion Capital. We started working together in 2009, and then we launched Passion Capital Fund One in 2011.

So I think for me, early stage always made the most sense because I had that experience at Skype and I knew what we went through when we were five people in London. At the time I left, it was about 50, and the talent team was between 10 and 15 when I joined and into the hundreds by the time I left. I joined right after Skype had raised from Index, but left right before the sale to eBay, so I kind of been through that stage. It made the most sense for me to apply my experiences to helping other people that might want to go through that similar stage. The other reason early stage makes sense is because of what I said I'm not good at. I'm not the Excel warrior, I don't look at profit margins and how to improve those over time, I'm not the one who's going to deep dive into cohort analysis. I'm the one who is more looking at how do you build the team, how do you establish the culture, how do you get working dynamics in place, how do you set about establishing a cadence and objectives, and how do you execute on those in the early days. For me, it's where I think I could lend the most experience and the best advice, but also assess what may or may not work. Tying it all together, early stage investing really is all about the people. Everybody says that probably about every stage of investing, but I do think it's even more true at the earliest stages because there's nothing else to diligence. You don't have a business model to look at, you don't have three years of financials, you don't have a profit margin to analyze, you don't have inventory, stock, or an IP portfolio. You just have these people who are telling you this is what I want to do, this is the reason I want to do it, and this is why I think I'll be able to pull it off. That's all you really have to go by. For later stage investing, you could look at a lot of other things, and if there's a model that's already working, you could potentially bring in new talent or swap out talent and optimize it further. For me, it is about early stage investing, it's what I enjoy doing, and it's always been about the people. People are what resonates with me most.

Easier to start with the red flags. For us, it's going to sound obvious, but we've long considered that in order to really build a successful business with massive enterprise value that is eventually going to be a really big team with lots of customers and stakeholders, the leaders of the business need integrity and the ability to be compelling to other people. I put that as a combination of things because one can be really compelling but also just be a con artist. The best con artists are really compelling and engaging, and they get people to go for what they're pitching. For us, it's a mix of that with integrity as well, wanting to build something sustainable, long-lasting, and of value to people. It's also got to be somebody that we feel we could trust. That doesn't mean we had to trust them to do the things we would want them to do or to have the same judgment as us, but meaning that we trusted what they were telling us. They could vehemently disagree with us and say, 'No, I'm going this way,' but then explain their rationale and thought process honestly. We needed to be able to trust that thought process and their communication. Those are probably the most important pieces, and everything else comes from that. The ability to be self-aware, recognize their strengths and gaps so they can fill in with other team members, and the ability to communicate. Not everyone communicates the same way; some are great in person, some are great at written communication, some are great with their design or UX. Whatever way it takes, they've got to be strong communicators. Everything else just flows from there.

Each of those are really specific circumstances for all of them, and it was never anything that we thought would happen. It's not as if we set up shop as an investor and thought we'd be a hybrid with a studio model or take operational roles. It was never planned. We started investing out of Passion Capital Fund One in 2011. My first time doing this was actually at Tide in 2018, some years into the journey. I should also qualify that I was an interim CEO at Monzo, but I appreciate the nod to the interim time I did there. Each had their own circumstances. With Tide, we had agreed with the company founder that the business was doing so well, just before Series B, that it might be the right time to bring in a scaling CEO. This happens often with tech startups; it's a very different skill set and characteristics of somebody starting a business versus taking it through to another step change. We got there with Tide, all the investors were bullish, the founder was brilliant, but we thought it might be time to bring in somebody equipped to scale. We ran a search with a search firm, agreed on a package, announced it to the company, had an all-hands, the founder did a great talk about handing over the reins and staying on the board. Unfortunately, the week subsequent to that, the candidate changed their mind and decided to do something else. That was a huge nightmare for us. We had to decide whether to tell the company to hold that thought or wait three more months. Instead of taking a step back, we decided to keep moving forward, even if sideways. The outgoing founder stepped out of the CEO role as announced, and somebody would come in as interim while we redid the search. I decided to do that. I'd been spending so much time with the founder during the transition, so it felt like I could do this. I wasn't going to implement drastic strategic changes, but there were talent issues to resolve, performance things to take care of, costs to look at, just to make sure things were in a nice place for when we found the right person. The idea was 99.9% of my time would be on the search for the incoming CEO. It took four months to bring in Oliver Prill, who has been a great CEO and taken the company further than we hoped. Then in 2020 with Monzo, it was a completely different setup. Tom Bloomfield has spoken about this openly. For at least a year before he left Monzo, he had been saying he was ready to go. I think we failed him as a board by not recognizing that sooner and putting a concrete succession plan in place. He first said it to me in summer August 2019. He took a three-week Christmas holiday, and when I asked him how he was feeling, he said bluntly, 'No, I haven't been sleeping because I'm dreading going back. I'm not in the right headspace for this.' Monzo had become a regulated bank with millions of customers and deposits, very different from the business he co-founded in 2015. My first involvement was to give him cover and have his back. He said he didn't want to deal with the people and regulatory aspects anymore, just focus on product and vision. I decided to go in three days a week to give him cover on the people side, building up the C-suite around him. Our chair, Gary Hoffman, stepped in to help on the regulatory side. Then three or five weeks later, we had the pandemic and the first lockdown. What started as a three-day a week support role became an all-hands-on-deck full-time gig that lasted 10 months. I helped with people stuff, which ended up being closing the service center in Las Vegas, implementing a redundancy program, salary sacrifice, and we ultimately took 25% of the cost out of the business in three to six months. We also got succession planning in place for Tom, and he left towards the middle of the year. We brought in TS as CEO, Sujata as COO, James as CFO, Mike Kudak as Chief Product Officer, new General Counsel, and new Chief Risk Officer. The entire C-suite was overhauled in 2020. It was a big job, the work of many. Looking back, if we hadn't already agreed that I might do a few days a week to support Tom, I don't know if I would have jumped in as much when COVID hit. It certainly made it easier because I was already attending his weekly or daily stand-ups. This was about what every business leader had to do in 2020: react to COVID. For us at Passion, it was obvious because of the portfolio value Monzo represented. What was going to be an exponential time for Monzo became potentially existential for the fund. Then with Fyfa, it's a deal I co-led with my Passion partner, Mullen, during lockdown in October 2020. We both passionately support reproductive health and believe it's been classically underinvested in. We were looking for something to do in the UK, and I had been an angel investor in a US company called Maven Clinic, so I believed in the Fyfa proposition. We backed it in October 2020, and it was doing really well. This was maybe closer to a Tide-like situation than Monzo, but even not close. It was a 10-person team in 2021 that wasn't quite jelling internally but doing really well commercially, signing up the likes of Centrica, NatWest, and Meta as clients. As investors, we thought they'd signed fantastic logos and were doing the impossible, but having difficulty building a culture and a well-functioning team. I thought I'd go in and bring in a CEO like I had at Tide, but it should be easier because it's a smaller team, earlier stage. I'd look for somebody who wants to be a startup founder but doesn't have their perfect idea yet. Coming off the back of Monzo, which took me months to recover from burnout, I thought this would be a walk in the park. I came in January 2022 and spent the first five weeks interviewing more than 50 candidates for CEO. At the same time, I wanted to continue hiring and help the team gel. I got emotionally invested with the people, the proposition, and the patients we were supporting. I fell even more in love with the company and the opportunity. I couldn't quite get the ideal candidate to come in. Part of this was because I had a certain amount of options to lend from an option pool to somebody to take on the risk of being a startup founder but with a fraction of the equity they would have if they were the founder. There was a mismatch. The type of people I was looking for would want and command the equity they deserved if they started their own business, and I was trying to appeal to them with a fraction of that. That's why I wasn't able to find the ideal person. At the same time, I was falling more in love with it, thinking, 'What happens if I try to keep doing it myself?' Now, two full years later, I still love it. It's another labor of love. You make time for the things you love. I'm really proud of everything that Fyfa has achieved as a team and company in the last two years. I'm lucky the team accepted me with all the other things I do with Passion. We closed a seed round in May last year, and I'm really excited because we've got some of the best backers you could ever hope for.

No, that's so disappointing, isn't it? I wish I could say yes, but other founders will tell you that I still survey people and ask them what tips and advice they have. I shared some time in an airport lounge with Kristo from Wise a few months ago, and I think he thought I was trying to set him up. He thought I was being really weird because I asked him how he does this and anything he's learned. I don't have a good answer for this, but what I can say is you have to do it. Even though there is no recipe book, no playbook, no obvious way to do it, no way to know if you're making the right call, you have to do it. Founders, leaders, you have to surround yourself with really good people. You cannot do it alone. It will be a shortcoming if you believe you can or decide you want to. It is a show of leadership to trust in other people, to show you can collaborate, delegate, channel, develop them, and take out their strengths and weaknesses while supplementing people around them. The only advice I would give is you're going to spend a lot of time with this person. You're going to want to trust them with decisions you can't or don't have time to take. You need to live with that, so make sure that's a person you feel you can do that with. Don't just bring them in because their CV looks great, because they were at your largest competitor, or because your VC recommended it. It's got to be someone you're going to feel happy to be beholden to to a certain degree. The other thing I would say is with equity, on one hand, don't be too stingy because creating a bigger pie together makes more sense than trying to be stingy on percentages of a percentage point. On the other hand, especially with executive hires, you can always add to an equity grant if it's working out really well. Think about how you stage the overall equity. A new executive coming in says, 'When we get to an exit, I want to own this much of the business.' That's great. Think of a plan of how you work up towards that versus offering it in a package from day one.

I think the first thing we have to do is stop saying that we trust our deal flow and it's not in the deal flow, or that we're just not seeing entrepreneurs or more diverse entrepreneurs aren't coming to us. We need more people on a wholesale basis to recognize we need to change the way we source our deal flow and the sources for that. It's incumbent on us as investors to do that. The other thing we need to do is really take a hard look at ourselves and the actions and behaviors we do and see how that might be projecting onto the types of people we want to attract. If we genuinely want to attract more diverse people, I won't name names, but there's a really well-known fund who just concluded an internal investigation about some inappropriate behavior and decided there was nothing to prevent the original partner from coming back. Is that going to scream out to people that they are an inclusive place that recognizes what people value if they come from diverse pathways? I would say no. As an industry, we've really got to walk the walk.

Gosh, I don't know. Again, I don't think I have great advice because I think I've been really lucky and fortunate, and I still ask others for advice. But I do think, even just speaking to you, I've realized that a lot of what I've described, whether it was when I took operational roles or when I moved to London in the first place, is to not try and answer the question of what if X years out. Don't try to answer what it looks like 20 years, 10 years, 5 years, or 3 years out. Look at what you can assess for yourself, pros and cons, with the information you have to hand now and with what you're trying to achieve in the near term. For me, it was what do I want to achieve out of being in London for a year, what do I want to achieve to help Monzo in the next six months, what do I want to achieve for Tide, for Fyfa, and all the other companies I work with. If you do that to the best of your ability with all the information and data, don't ignore data that might be contrary or negative, then it puts you in a better position to make that same decision again when new information arises. Hopefully, that's how you get closer and closer to the longer term outcome.

I mean, everything, right? I'm so excited about everything. I've got qualms about elections in both the US and the UK, but in terms of our sector, our industry, investing, founders, I'm an investor so I'm an optimist. I think there are great opportunities to back fantastic people, to try and get more attention on things that are undervalued or don't get enough attention, to invest in areas that have been historically underinvested in, and to see some great companies and founders just really punching through this year. I think there'll be so much in so many different sectors.

She's very much alive, but it would be Dame Stephanie Shirley. I don't know if people will know her. She's getting on a bit and her history is not quite as recent anymore, but I think she's an absolute legend. I would love, and I don't even know if it's classic mentorship, I just love to hear more and more stories of what she has overcome and achieved. The one-liner that a lot of people say, but this really trivializes everything she's come through, is that she adopted the name Steve in correspondence instead of Stephanie because she found that people responded more with a male name. Everything she's achieved by building up her IT business when she did, what she overcame in her childhood, and all of her advocacy, she's such an inspiration. I would just love to spend more time with her. She is a real aspirational guest for me.

Thank you.