The Invisible League Table: Why Some Angels Quietly Beat the Rest, and What Their Motivation Has to Do With It
She’d been in the syndicate longer than I had, and she had no idea she was losing. We were having coffee, the good kind, in one of those Edinburgh places that charges you for the privilege of sitting down. She’s younger than most of our members, sharp, does something clever in professional services that pays […]
The £340,000 Habit: What Angel Investing Research Really Says About Due Diligence and Returns
Most angel investors would have done better in a tracker fund. The research has said so for the better part of two decades, and most angels have smiled politely and carried on. That sentence should annoy you. Good. It’s meant to. Because the interesting thing about angel investing isn’t that it’s risky, which everyone knows, […]
Thirty years of UK angel research describes the same problem.
Most of the industry is still working around it. There’s a paper Colin Mason and his collaborators published in 2017 that does something quietly devastating. They asked 238 UK angel investors why they’d declined deals. Seventy-one per cent of the rejections came down to one or two reasons. Across the two surveys, between fifty-nine and […]
Berkus to AI – Why Early Stage Valuation Keeps Getting More Sophisticated And No More Accurate
Every angel investor has had this moment. You agree a pre-money valuation. You sign the paperwork. And you know, somewhere behind the eyes, that the number wasn’t calculated. It was negotiated. The framework gave you cover. The framework was the negotiation. You probably wouldn’t say so over dinner. You might say it after a second […]
The £100,000 Startup Race is the structural opposite of a pitch competition, and that’s the point
Why the UK has spent thirty years running the one mechanism Colin Mason’s evidence says does not work. And what a programme designed for how angels actually decide looks like instead. There is a particular kind of British invention – the pitch competition – that has achieved, over thirty years, an almost perfect record of […]
Revenue Is the Brightest Star. But Investors Navigate by Constellations
Why 99% of fundable founders never get funded – and what the ones who do know that the rest don’t. There is a peculiar ritual performed in startup ecosystems across Europe roughly 300,000 times a year. A founder, having built something real (a product with paying customers, evidence of a market, months or years of […]
The Clock You Didn’t Know Was Ticking
SEIS, Start of Trade, and What Every Founder Entering a Startup Race Needs to Know There is a mistake that costs UK founders tens of thousands of pounds in potential investor tax relief, and it is made not out of greed or negligence but out of enthusiasm. The moment you start trading, a clock starts. […]
The Alchemy of £1 Billion Built Without Permission
An inconvenient finding. A free programme. And a race worth entering. There is a peculiar consensus in British entrepreneurship, held most fervently by those who benefit most from it being believed. The consensus is this: female founders fail because they can’t access capital. The solution, therefore, is more capital, delivered more equitably, through better-designed funds […]
How The £100,000 Startup Race is Different from Angel Syndicates
The Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas: The £100,000 Startup Race isn’t trying to be a better angel syndicate. It’s doing something syndicates don’t do at all. That distinction matters – and a Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas is the clearest way to show it. Blue Ocean Strategy, developed by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne at INSEAD, […]
The Game That Fixed Both Sides of Fundraising | The Startup Race
A Question Asked Above Skyscanner In 2015, I was running a founder/investor event on the top floor of Quartermile 1 in Edinburgh. Skyscanner occupied the floors below us – a company that would soon sell for £1.4 billion, one of Scotland’s first unicorns. That lunchtime, surrounded by founders and angel investors, someone asked a question […]