Meagan Loyst

I couldn’t be prouder to be a Venture Partner at Isomer Capital (aka the best European FoF - at least for me) as we just announced the launch of our pioneering £100m secondaries fund. This fund is dedicated to acquiring stakes from LPs in various VC funds, tapping into a massive and largely unexplored market. 🌟 Key Highlights: - Focused Investment: Primarily targeting stakes in VC funds, with selective investments in private companies. - Robust Funding: Already over 20% funded, thanks to strong support from Nordic family offices and a German foundation. - Market Potential: With a growing number of private tech companies and a VC liquidity crunch, Europe's VC secondaries market is poised for rapid growth. - Track Record: This isn’t Isomer’s first foray into the secondaries market. As a firm we’ve done several secondaries deals with portfolio companies and VC firms, including early-stage VC Seedcamp (in 2021) and mobility giant Bolt (in 2023). - Expert Team: Welcoming the amazing Omolade (Rachel) A., formerly of Coller Capital, as a principal to lead this initiative. 💡 Investment Strategy: - 65-75% of the fund will buy "LP interest" stakes in VC funds. - 15-25% will be directed towards stakes in companies. - Up to 15% reserved for flexible investment opportunities. 📈 Looking Ahead: We're targeting returns of 2-3x, with significant distributions expected in the next 4-7 years. As one of the few players in this space, we're not just participating in the market—we're driving it forward. Read all about it here: https://lnkd.in/dc7sbC3G #VentureCapital #SecondariesFund #EuropeanVC

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A few weeks ago, Openseed VC, in partnership with Dentons and PKF Littlejohn, hosted a webinar on Launching a First-Time Fund for first time managers - if you missed it 👇🏾 The recording is now available: See link in comments 🔗 I often get lots of messages from people looking to set up their first fund, and there’s been interest not only from first-time fund managers but also principals from potential corporates and family offices. With this in mind, I’ve decided to create a small, intimate community of up to ten people to support in their journey to launching a #FirstFund in 2025. Together, we’ll work out how I can best support your process to a first fund in a way that’s valuable to you—while respecting my bandwidth. If this sounds interesting, share more about yourself - link in comments 👇🏾: You should hear back in the new year. Let’s see where this takes us 🌍 #VentureCapital #FirstTimeFund #Entrepreneurship #FundManagers #Innovation #VC

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Taavet Hinrikus and I made the Financial Times Due Diligence email. https://lnkd.in/ez2AuGQx One 'unintended consequence' is that if there is a 45% tax on carry and CGT (raising £40m per year, remember) it for all intents and purposes closes the door on new VCs in the UK. Especially started by teams from non-traditional backgrounds. To meet the GP commit, you need to be already part of the 'wealthy' as you cannot rely on the value you create - nearly half of it will disappear - to fund it. We have both had extremely successful startups which are few and far between. The smaller number of new VCs will therefore more likely increasingly be for people who have inherited the capital or can draw it from their already rich family. Probably not want they have in mind with this policy.

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Pro rata or not pro rata? That is the question One of my favourite pieces on this, and VC portfolios in general is Moonfire’s research on portfolio construction. 📊 They simulated a series of VC portfolios to try and find the optimal one. I really like this series of articles since it explains, at least in part, why VCs behave the way they behave. 🤓 I’m adding in the comments all links to the research and the simulator. It’s free, kindly provided by Moonfire. Whether you are a #founder or an #investor, you should have a look. Some TLDR but again, go read the whole thing: ⚡️ VC follows the so called “Power Law” meaning that most returns in a portfolio come from a small number of investments. It’s not about being always right, but rather how right you are, when you pick a good company. 👑 Being good at picking winners is the main difference between a good VC and a bad one. If you’re bad at picking winners you can invest in more companies and index the market, increasing the chances of returning 1x and avoid losses. If you want to achieve 2, 3, 5x, you either need to improve your decision quality or invest in fewer companies and hope for the best 💸 Follow-ons tend to be mathematically less profitable than investments in new companies. Yet VCs still do plenty of them for non financial reasons like extending runway, giving confidence to future investors and so on. How conscious are you as an investor of your portfolio construction? I’m curious to know how many VCs/Angels actually discuss this internally and how many founders are aware of their positioning within the portfolio of their existing investors. #VentureCapital #PortfolioConstruction #ProRata #StartupInvestment #PowerLaw

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1st thing I say in every 1st board meeting - you're not selling to me anymore, we're partners 🤝 This can be a hard transition for founders to make But it's crucial to have an effective, useful board You need to do a hard reset Stop telling your investors only the good stuff And start telling them the bad stuff, the difficult things, the challenges, your worries This enables the board to help, and builds a culture of transparency, trust and mutual respect #startups #venturecapital #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #founder #technology #innovation #management #board

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In today's rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape, the importance of defense technology has never been more critical. I'm sharing this article from Sifted, which explores the significant advancements and investments in dual-use tech that can bolster both civilian and military applications. Understanding these trends is essential for staying informed about the future of defense and technology. Thanks, Daria Dmytrenko, for pushing this topic! 👏

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Maternity in VC in the spotlight. Well done Rachel Drapper, Sophie Winwood & the WVC:E team on getting this important report out there. In VC we’re dealing often with small firms, network & event heavy schedules and FOMO of being left behind if we take time out (I refuse to use the word off as anyone who’s had a child knows that’s the furthest from how it feels). If you’re thinking about having a child or in the throes of the early-stages, navigating how to even try and get some semblance or balance, then hopefully this report can provide some useful tips. Most importantly showcasing that you’re not alone.

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For all female founders raising capital. I’m publishing the raw data from my pitching process with Deployed – over 420 VC firms, 143 meetings; 196 “no” and raised ~$5M over the pre-seed and seed rounds. I am a meticulous note keeper and data junky. As I have moved on from Deployed as CEO, this now gives me the opportunity to talk more about funders and founders. Here is my data on my first round of the process to get meetings from an original list of 4,000 in a Sankey diagram. ✂️ I shortlisted 420 funders 📣 I reached out to 342 funders ❌ I got 196 first nos 🙋🏼‍♀️ I met with 143 A couple got lost along the way. I will be digging into this data over the coming weeks and I will update with more insight based on my *meticulous notes* 😁 Future topics I will cover: - What the numbers mean: how many meetings, how much prep, how much time and duration-stats. - Choosing the right market - European fundraising in context: Sitting next to the biggest pile of money, Europe is not it. - Down-selecting: How I selected who we emailed for meetings and pitched to from 4000 potential funders. - Warm Leads - the No’s and the Yes’s: How a warm lead is most definitely a better strategy than cold outreach (what my data suggests). - Wrong questions, wrong time: the importance of asking, and being asked, the right questions for the stage and thesis. - Preparation: I used DocSend, and here are the numbers of when VCs would go into the document, and where they would spend their time. This is eye opening 👀 - First and last pitch analysis: Of the 143 pitches that I made, further analysis of the process to reach the final lead and follow on investors. You gossip junkies - I won’t be calling anyone out, and I’ll reflect on what I wish I knew from the start. The material will be written for both funders and founders as balanced as I can possibly be. Share in the comments below any other topics you want me to cover. #vc #startup #femalefounder #fundraising #womenintech #womeninenterprise #venturecapital #data Thanks Francois Mazoudier & Marcela Donatello. Elizabeth Stokoe Dana Kanze Ladi Greenstreet Sally Guyer Angel Academe - increasing female investment HERMESA Amrock Ventures Ltd M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund Navjot Virk Mayfield Fund Portfolio Ventures Karina Vazirova Jessica Lin Marla Shapiro Sarah Turner Amy Lewin https://lnkd.in/esE3Ee7j

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2024 has been 📈📉🤝💰👶🍼🍌🛥✈ 🌴 🥱🔥 It's been tough again But our founders smashed it, raising $176m across 6 rounds We made 5 new investments across Europe, the same pace as last year - hello NetFabric.ai & Recurse ML (🤫 x 3) Andrew Sheffield was promoted to Principal, Clare Zhang to Associate and Head of FFOH, and we welcomed Matt Gill, CFA as CFO I became a Dad for the first time in May (🐣👼🦞❤) Our Founders' Dinners were the best yet, deepening relationships and collaboration across so many companies FFOH Editions 11 & 12 saw 600+ founders meet 300+ investors for 2,300+ one-on-one meetings And we were in person at Slush for the 3rd time and WVC:E and LTST for the 1st time We started asking founders what they really think about us and the results were good - 4.7/5 We grew our angel community, brought angels into every new investment we made and held some awesome events at Warner Yard It's been an incredible year For the full top 10 highlights, check out the link in the comments below 👇 A huge thank you to our founders, my team and everybody who supported us, especially Federico Pirzio-Biroli 🙏 Looking forward to doing it all over again in 2025...after a good rest... 😴 #venturecapital #startups #technology #innovation #future #economy #markets #fundraising #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #founders

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The best founders I've ever met love the start-up process more than the outcome🚶🏼 My friend Peter shared this interesting data yesterday on the time (in years) from the day of incorporation to various funding milestones for software start-ups and it got me thinking. 👉🏼 Growth rates and execution speed are everything for VC-backed start-ups. You'll rarely find a VC investor who says "take your time, figure things out and we'll go from there" which reinforces the need for founders to do as much validation as possible before raising external capital. 👉🏼 It's more common that I see 'exit potential' slides in pitch decks instead of slides evidencing how gritty a founder is or how the team they've assembled will go all the way over the years. These points are key to understand if you're building a VC-backed start-up as both impact the way you'll grow the company. The chart below shows the time to primary round (no funny business with bridges or extensions) and is filtered to just software companies (hardware/biotech plays at different timescales). 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗱 (𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝗱𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝘀 & 𝗦𝗔𝗙𝗘𝘀 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 $𝟮𝗠) • Median of 1.8 years from incorporation recently • Up 15% or so from 2019 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗔 • Median: 3.1 years from incorporation • Up 10% from 2019 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗕 • Median: 4.7 years from incorporation • 16% higher than 2019 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗖 • Median: 6 years from incorporation 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗗  • Median pushed to 8.1 years from incorporation #founders #vc #startup #growth

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I often talk about ‘building something offline, before raising money’. This is the perfect example of what I mean👇 One of our portfolio companies Tradeaze UK LTD (it’s a biassed example, I’ll admit), identified a pain point: Co-founder, Jack, is an electrician by trade and saw first-hand the amount of time wasted by tradespeople when picking up tools and parts needed for a job.   To solve this pain point: ↳ Jack set up a Tradeaze iPhone, approached tradespeople on the street, handed out flyers and reached out on Facebook groups to his target audience. ↳ Tradies would text the number, asking for a part or tool. ↳ Jack would then jump on his bike to pick up the part and deliver it back to the customer directly. ↳ After a while, Jack started working directly with merchants providing them with a tablet in kiosk mode, with which the merchant would fill in a really simple form and Jack would receive the order email. ↳ Again, Jack or one of the delivery riders would take the part direct to the tradesperson in need. ↳ Jack continued this way until he got to breaking point and couldn’t handle any more daily deliveries. ↳ This is when he expanded his team to bring in even more experience with his co-founders Joe Blair and Ruben Engel. Since they have raised investment from us and other investors. They were able to prove their pain and solution offline, saving them money and time and proving traction to bring on investors ! Raising too soon, before proving you have the right solution is a huge risk. This is a fantastic way to build a business without needing to raise investment right away. Build offline first ! #businesstips #entrepreneurship #startups

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Over the last 4 weeks I’ve had the privilege of interviewing some of the best Founder’s Associates (FAs) out there, from some of Europe’s fastest growing startups. 🎤 The Founder’s Associate role is still a bit of a mystery to many. I believe it’s one of the best early-career opportunities and incredibly valuable for founders themselves. Despite this, I’ve encountered only a handful FAs here in the Netherlands… So to shed light on this role, I wanted to give the stage to exceptional FAs who share their story: 🤖 Ege Yaygin from Beyond Presence: Incredibly insightful preparation on getting the role. And I’m 100% sure you go on to founding a great company one day. 💜 Charlotte Küppers from HER ONE: Loved the conversation, going from authenticity to radical candor - they’re lucky to have you! 🐺 Amaury Hellebuyck from TechWolf: The Belgian Souschef. All the best scaling TechWolf from your new NYC office! 🍋 Malte Schmäing from lemon.markets: Always friendly, always helpful. And valuable insights about culture building (“No failure, only feedback”). Keep on eye on these people - they’re bound for great things. 🔮 Do you want to get a FA role? Follow baby vc and InnovatorsRoom Community room to stay up to date with FA vacancies. 📲 And help me continue this interview series. If you are or know (i) an entrepreneur in residence, (ii) a chief of staff, or (iii) a founder working with a FA, reach out to me! Finally, keep an eye on James Taker and what he has cooking with the Founder Associate Forum. More updates on that coming soon. 👀

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We've been running a #deeptech forum at Community VC for the last month as a sector centric group chat and will allow founders within a sector to ask sector relevant questions to aligned supporters who’ve opted in to hear from founders. We’ve hand selected 21 specific investors and advisors in Deeptech to participate and work with 5 founders. Each founder has been asking an AMA once a and the insights, depth, engagement and value has been insane. Off the back of the success, we're looking to scale up the Deeptech forum and also add #ESG, #Medtech / #Healthtech and #Fintech to our network. If you or anyone else have deep interest, expertise or knowledge as a founder, investor or advisor - we'd love to get you involved, please fill in the form in the comments! We're building up the waitlist and launching the new forums this month! Our endeavour is to curate the best possible aligned early relationships possible between our founders and supporters. #startups #community #angelinvesting Danin Kahn Makenzie Thomas Claire Aristides Andrew E Scott GAICD Pippa Smith Will Rosewarne Fahim Newaz Nathan Challen Gavin Preston Charlotte Connell Benjamin Wolba Aleksei Zolotarev Jo Chaturvedi- Durant John McGiffin Jason Ming Jordan Duffy Claude MICHEL

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UK Start-Up Funding Hits Six-Year Low The Times highlights alarming stats from VenturePath and Beauhurst, with insights from Michael Moore (BVCA) and Julian David (techUK): Series A funding down 44% year-on-year. Q3 2024 saw a 57% drop from Q2. 90% of seed-funded startups can’t secure Series A funding. Only 32 UK companies accessed Series A funding in Q3, a six-year low. £500 million less in Series A funding compared to two years ago. The UK is losing ground in startup and scaleup support, now ranking 13th globally (OECD). Despite some reports showing positive trends in private investment, our focused research reveals a stark decline in Series A funding. The UK ScaleUp Investment Mission aims to address this by uniting the scaleup ecosystem and £7bn in funding. We’ve engaged with the new Government, seeking immediate action to reverse this trend and ensure equitable access to capital for UK scaleups. Follow JayaSankar Subburaj for daily insights on Startups and Venture Capital. #VentureCapital #Startups #Funding #Investment #AngelInvestor

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LOOKING FOR INVESTMENT? 💰👀 Fuel Ventures 🚀 is one of the most active early stage tech investors in the UK. We back disruptive & ambitious founders at all the early stages: 👉 Concept/Pre-Seed 👉 Seed & Seed+ 👉 Series A stages 170 Investments and counting… 🚀 We look for/focus on fast growth digital/tech businesses. We like software, platforms fintech, e-commerce, B2B and B2C with super ambitious hard working founder/s or founding teams, companies that have large global growth potential with multibillion market opportunities. We really want to see companies that have the potential to deliver x100 potential growth, mostly meaning £1billion+ future market cap potential. 📈🚀 We have funds that can invest from Concept/Pre-Seed, Early Seed, Seed, Pre-A and A stages, so if your at any of these stages we are keen to hear from you. The best way for us to take a look at you business if you are looking for investment is to submit the business to our web form for me and our investment team of 8 people all get it directly into their inbox to review within our process, we review weekly in our investment meetings and will come back to you if we spot something of interest that gets us excited. So be punchy, ambitious and bold! Please do highlight why your business is special, the market size and opportunity and any traction or progress achieved. Please submit the business here: https://lnkd.in/d6AK2rjy

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Incredible to see Mosaic in the Financial Times this morning in this excellent piece by Sujeet Indap on tech innovation in private equity. Sujeet's research into the historical evolution of Wall Street's analytical horsepower was particularly fascinating. Though I wasn't around for the shift from pen-and-paper to VisiCalc, I can only imagine the step-function productivity increase it unlocked. Anders' assertion that the advent of the spreadsheet in part drove the LBO boom of the late '80s is also intriguing (although I'm sure the <10% min. equity helped, too). Though the spreadsheet was a great advancement in the '80s, it always baffled me that ~30 years later (when I began my PE career) we were still underwriting billion-dollar buyouts using a generic productivity tool and not an industry-focused application. That's precisely why I started Mosaic. With dedicated platforms like Mosaic and Blackstone's Atlas now powering new deal underwriting - could the industry benefit from a similar step-function productivity increase? Also - an open question to anyone who was working as an investment professional in the 1980s/1990s: was the spreadsheet initially met with hesitation / skepticism by a subset of old-school investors who thought there was value in grinding it out until 3am with only pencil and abacus in hand? We're fortunate at Mosaic to work with some of the world's most forward-thinking investors who readily embrace change - but this sentiment does comes up once in a while. What happens to the holdouts? And curious how the innovators - whose shoulders we stand on - navigated it before us. Read the full story here: https://on.ft.com/4dXEvth

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Great to speak at Alma College: Lessons on Due Diligence today alongside the fantastic Rupa Ganatra Popat of Arāya Ventures. This is one of a series of events run by Alma Angels to help angel investors who want to learn more about investing. If you are an angel investor interested in supporting female founders, please check out Alma. Link in comments shortly. #founders #startups #venturecapital #buildinginpublic #investinginpublic More at unbundled dot vc.

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Early-stage Founders. When it comes to hiring - where you're not investing time, you're wasting money. Across my career, I’ve seen consistent themes resulting in hiring going wrong. One of the most prevalent of these is not enough time being invested in setting hiring up for success from the start. When the stakes are so high to get it right, investing even just a couple of hours into planning in these areas upfront, will pay dividends later on. Create unmistakable clarity over what you're hiring for: Invest time crafting your role, and ideal candidate profiles. Don’t waste time interviewing without a clear view of the traits, experience and skills you need. Define the desired outputs and goals this hire will achieve, work backwards, and ensure the entire interviewing panel knows exactly what they’re looking for too. Translate this into the job description: Underestimating the impact of a good JD is a rookie error. If you’re not investing time in writing a good JD because you think people don’t read them - imagine how many you’ll miss that’ll read it and won’t apply at all. Talk to your ideal candidate. Tell them who you are, what they’ll do here, and how much impact this role will have. This is the beginning of your employer brand and often a candidate’s first experience interacting with your company. Be proud you’re hiring, entice top talent, and excite them enough to apply. Design, define and assign: From whose posting the ad, to sending the offer. Know who in your team owns what tasks. De-disk dropping the ball, a messy candidate experience and candidate dropouts. Invest time in designing an interview plan that will only build the excitement of joining your company. Define what needs to be assessed at each stage, and assign the best in your team to assess exactly that. Create a magical experience from offer to onboard: I once pulled out of an offer I’d already accepted because of a terrible post-offer experience. Onboarding starts from the moment they’ve accepted the offer and ends once they’ve passed their probation - and even arguably, well beyond that. Invest time in your new hires, check in with them often before they start, set them up for success in their first few weeks with assigned hands-on support to welcome them into your team. Mis-hiring is expensive, loosing new hires before they’ve even started is expensive. You’re bound to make mistakes along the way, but investing your time in setting up hiring for success de-risks your journey, and will save you more than the costs associated with starting again!

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