Introducing ourselves as new(ish) angel investors

Jonathan and I have spent time over the last nine months building our network in the angel investing space, and making our first 7 investments, all of which have been made in a personal capacity. As many of the investments are now public, we wanted to share a few words to introduce how we’re thinking about investing.

Our personal portfolio so far

Firstly, the investments and their founders - and we're super excited about them:

• Condense Reality (Nick Fellingham): Streaming live content into the metaverse via in-game virtual events.
• Creator Fund (Jamie Macfarlane): VC fund that invests in PhD, academic, and student founders building Europe’s next generation of technology startups driven by university innovation.
• Progression (Johnny Burch and Neil Cameron): A no-code platform to build, manage and scale career frameworks. Helping growing organisations to support their teams to know how to grow at work and what's next for them by providing clarity around their personal development.
• RideTandem (Alex Howes, Huw McLeod, Tatseng Chiam): Turns local transport providers into smart shuttles for work, education and more, building solutions to help the 50% of people who live in small cities and towns (specifically blue collar workers) to get to work.
• Shellworks (Insiya Jafferjee, Amir Afshar, Ed Jones): Creates truly sustainable alternatives to plastic packaging.
• Signaloid (Phillip Stanley-Marbell, via Creator Fund): Quantifying uncertainty within complex data calculations; Signaloid shows real-time exposure to risk when computations are made on empirical data.
• xigxag (Kelli Fairbrother and Mark Chaplin): xigxag aims to lead the biggest-ever innovation in digital reading and shape the future of books. They’ve set out to build the most advanced digital reading app in the market, with a proprietary listen-and-read x-book concept and market-first features for audiobooks. xigxag’s proprietary technology allows users to navigate the audiobook without interruption, but also see illustrations, search in the text, lookup words, take notes and share quotes. They can switch between reading and listening or read along.

Things that interest us

When, having made the decision to start investing in a personal capacity, we started meeting with established angels and taking our first meetings with founders, we certainly wouldn’t have described ourselves as having an investment thesis. We still don’t, entirely. Quite quickly, though, we started to narrow our focus, and the companies we’ve been the most excited about tend to follow into one or more of the following three categories.

Sectors we’re keen on

Not an exhaustive list, but these include:

• Sports, media and entertainment. Jonathan has spent many years in and around this space, and we’re thrilled to be dipping our toes into the metaverse with Condense and the digital media world with xigxag.
• HR Tech?/ People Leadership. Given Catherine’s professional background in the people space, and both of our experiences building companies and teams from scratch, we’re excited about tools that help drive the HR sector forward and create a better employee experience. We believe Progression is an outstanding solution in this space.
• Female tech (broader than FemTech). We’re super interested to talk to teams who are building products that contribute to achieving gender equality; and more than a little obsessed by exploring how technology can be used to solve societal challenges standing in the way of women’s full economic participation.?

Where we’re excited by the potential in a space, but we don’t feel like we have enough expertise ourselves to justify direct angel positions, we’re not averse to backing other investors at a fund level to get exposure, as we’ve done with Creator Fund.?

Businesses where our professional skillsets can be particularly helpful

• Specifically, businesses with significant communications, public policy, and reputation challenges; or where practical experience in the Talent, Reward, and DE&I spaces can make the difference.?

Doing the right thing

• Female and underrepresented founders. Building on Catherine’s background leading SoftBank’s diversity-focused funds in the US and Europe, we’re excited about putting our money where our mouth is in terms of doing something about the shocking stats on funding going to female and underrepresented founders.?
• Social purpose. We’re excited by great commercial opportunities which have a core purpose of solving social challenges. Tandem and Shellworks are great examples in this space. We’re focused on not being London-centric, and the Creator Fund gives us access to the brightest innovation coming out of the world class universities across the country.?

This will definitely be a work in progress over time, so we’re not feeling the need to limit ourselves to these spaces just yet, but this has been a helpful way to start structuring our thinking as we build our personal portfolio.

Us as angels

This is our first time working together in any sort of professional context, so that’s been fun, insightful, and endlessly entertaining! We believe that our complementary set of skills makes us valuable to the founders with whom we partner.

Jonathan is CEO of Milltown Partners, a global advisory firm working with companies and individuals to solve their most complex communications, public policy, and reputation challenges. The firm’s clients include some of the world’s highest profile technology firms.?

An experienced entrepreneur in his own right with a strong multi-disciplinary skillset, Jonathan has built Milltown Partners into an international firm of 110+ individuals with operations in London, San Francisco, and New York and clients across the globe.?

In addition, he serves as a Senior Advisor to Bruin Capital, an investment and operating company that specialises in working with capital partners and management teams to build best-in-class, global, sports, media, entertainment, marketing, and technology companies.

Jonathan was previously Chief of Staff to the CEO of WPP, the world’s largest advertising, communications and public relations company. At WPP, he served on the founding team for ESP Properties, commercial and creative advisors for sports and entertainment rights holders. He started his career as a Strategy Consultant at Bain & Company, working in sectors including music, publishing, luxury goods, telecoms, and financial services.

Catherine is the first female Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, the world’s largest technology investment firm with $130+ billion under management in the two SoftBank Vision Funds. She sits on the Investment Committee for the $100m SB Opportunity Fund and is the executive sponsor of Emerge, SoftBank’s successful tech accelerator for underrepresented entrepreneurs.

An experienced and trusted executive coach at C-suite level, she works with companies within the SoftBank portfolio on leadership, talent, and operating challenges, including as a Board Director.

Catherine is a member of the SBIA Remuneration Committee; is a Director of the firm’s corporate entities in Israel and Jersey; and oversees the HR, ESG and Real Estate teams. She is also a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

Both of us participate in the LocalGlobe Fellows program to connect world-class practitioners with the next generation of break-out startups. Catherine is also a member of Alma Angels, an inclusive community of angel investors (women and men) who are passionate about actively investing in and supporting ambitious female founders building companies with global scale.

Next steps

If you’d be interested in talking to us about potential investment opportunities, our DMs are open.