The Power of Edges

“We exist to make great companies happen that otherwise wouldn’t” - what does this mean in practice??

It’s a question that surfaced this week after hearing exciting news from two of our portfolio companies on different sides of the world. Statement in the UK has officially launched their card payment provider comparison platform after securing ￡1.5m in funding , and Frontline is revolutionising construction planning from Singapore with their newly-announced seed round of $700k .?

B2B payments and Construction aren’t catching the same rabid attention as some other markets these days, but they’re solving real problems for real people. There are a lot of underserved and overlooked markets like this, ripe for disruption and big wins. The only question is “who?”, and this is where EF makes a real impact. Rather than following trends, we push founders to build where they’re uniquely positioned to win.?

Powerful startups come from unique intersections of exceptional people. It starts with finding your Edge , the specific, personal, competitive advantage that answers “who?” with “me”. The co-founders of Statement and Frontline each had unique and complementary Edges, so we asked how they identified and activated them.

Co-founders of Statement , Ed Hardy (CEO) and Olivia Stannah (CTO), both had market Edges in the payments space. Their “classic EF” ideation process started with writing down all the problems they’d faced. “We had seen the problem of identifying the right provider and onboarding with them from both sides of the table as the most painful and toughest challenge in the room,” says Ed, “Every conversation we had with merchants and providers grew our conviction that this was the right problem to be tackling.”

Luis Martinez (CEO) and Ricky Ding (CTO) of Frontline don’t look as though they have complementary Edges: Luis’s background in engineering and construction and Ricky’s in quantum optimisation are worlds apart. The magic came when Ricky’s questions about how to optimise construction planning and management made Luis realise he had just been working around the problem instead of tackling it throughout his career.?

Without these four identifying and combining their Edges, there wouldn’t be a Statement or a Frontline. “I would have focused on some of the problems I knew the industry had from my experience working in construction, but where I wouldn't be adding a 10x value,” says Luis. Similarly, Statement’s founders “would never have met” if it wasn’t for EF, never connecting the problem on both sides of the table.?