This Much I Know - The Seedcamp Podcast

This week Carlos is joined, remotely, by Dominic Hallas, Executive Director at The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec), to discuss his work liaising between policymakers and the tech community, and the role Codec is playing in helping startups navigate these uncertain times. After entering local politics at a young age in Leeds, and running a project in Delhi for the Bloomberg Foundation, Dom took the helm at Coadec in 2018, an initiative founded exactly ten years ago by pillars of the tech ecosystem Jeff Lynn, founder of Seedrs and Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch. Right now the government has issued a series of different grant schemes to help businesses overcome Covid-19 related challenges, none of which apply to startups. In this session, Carlos and Dominic discuss the barriers preventing public administration from understanding the needs of the tech ecosystem, both in these specific challenging times and more broadly, and how Coadec’s new project ‘Save Our Startups’, is advocating for new grant schemes tailored to the needs of venture-backed businesses that do not fit the criteria for COVID-19 relief schemes currently provided by the government. Tune in to hear how you can support Coadec right now in advocating for coherent liquidity packages for tech startups and how founders voices can contribute to help Coadec bring specific issues facing the startup ecosystem to the government’s attention. Dominic Hallas - twitter.com/Dom_Hallas Coadec - www.coadec.com; https://twitter.com/Coadec Save Our Startups - www.saveourstartups.co.uk; https://twitter.com/saveourstartups Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - https://seedcamp.com

In this week’s podcast, Carlos is joined by Russ Shaw, Founder of Tech London Advocates, and Asher Ismail, Co-founder of Seedcamp-backed company, Uncapped, Europe’s first revenue-based finance provider, as they discuss the need - now more than ever - alternative financing mechanisms to support founders. If you are currently raising or trying to determine how to navigate this current climate, listen in as Russ and Asher discuss the need to provide capital to founders more efficiently, from both an institutional and a venture capital standpoint, and why alternative forms of investment are democratising and diversifying the investment landscape and becoming increasingly popular among the founders of tomorrow Links: Russ Shaw - twitter.com/RussShaw1 Tech London Advocates - www.techlondonadvocates.org.uk Asher Ismail - twitter.com/asher_ismail Uncapped - www.weareuncapped.com Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com/

As the future sets to become fully digital in the next few months, what are the fundamentals required to enable the offline event market to successfully move online? Joining Carlos to discuss the topic this week is Johnny Boufarhat, founder of our portfolio company Hopin, the first all-in-one live online events platform who recently announced their $6m seed round, led by Accel, and Devin Hunt, our Venture Partner on all things product and design, who recently published ‘The Workshop Survival Guide’ on how to effectively create educational experiences. Together they explore how major events can be transformed from offline to online, without compromising on connection or experience, and how to manifest the learning of ‘The Workshop Survival Guide’ on online platforms, to offer better interactivity and engagement. Tune in to hear more about how to rethink the entire strategy of an event from a digital perspective, how to design sharp and unambiguous content, and how Hopin can help you tackle problems such as audience interactivity and network, sponsor engagement needs and creating premium digital experiences online. Links: Johnny Boufarhat - twitter.com/johnnyboufarhat Hopin - www.hopin.to Devin Hunt - https://twitter.com/hailpixel The Workshop Survival Guide - https://workshopsurvival.com Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - https://seedcamp.com

Recorded live at our Seedcamp People Summit, Marin Jankovski recalls the beginnings of GitLab and how the company grew to become one of the largest distributed workforce, with 67 locations around the world and not a single office space for their 1200 people. In the session, featuring an inspiring introduction by Ben Gateley CEO and cofounder of our portfolio company CharlieHR, Marin explains the two most crucial pillars their team depends on when working remotely: communicating async - “it’s inclusive and it allows people on different times to contribute and not be left out”; and to always be able to individualise the single source of truth. Tune in for practical insight on how to build an efficient remote team, how to convince investors to follow in this mission, and how to include people in important decision-making processes. Links: Marin Jankovski - linkedin.com/in/marin-jankovski GitLab - gitlab.com GitLab Handbook - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ Seedcamp - seedcamp.com CharlieHR - charliehr.com Ben Gateley - http://twitter.com/Gateley

This week Carlos is joined by our brand new lead on all things talent and people, Marina Gorey, who we are incredibly excited to have join us to support our portfolio companies in helping them think about how they shape the most critical part of their organisations: their people. Prior to joining us at Seedcamp, Marina co-founded and was Chief People Officer at pioneering Kidtech company, SuperAwesome. In this podcast, she discusses some of her key learnings on how to actively empower the people in your team, and create communication structures that will prevent teammates from leaving at critical stages. Listen in to learn who and how to hire when scaling your company, the right time to invest in people management and people management tools, and how important it is to document your culture when onboarding new remote teams. Links: Marina Gorey - linkedin.com/in/marinagorey/ Super Awesome - https://www.superawesome.com/ Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - https://seedcamp.com/ Blog Post - https://medium.com/@marinalgorey/startups-scaling-people-operations-what-breaks-as-you-scale-31308179ce2d

This week Carlos is joined by Daniel Burka, Director of Design at Resolve to Save Lives, which he joined nearly two years ago to support the mission of saving 100 million lives from cardiovascular disease and to prevent epidemics. In conversation with Carlos, Daniel walks through his journey from the early age of seventeen when he founded his first company Silverorange which this year celebrated its 20th anniversary. Since then he’s been leading on design across various organisations including Digg, Milk, and Google Ventures. Now he runs product and design in digital product initiatives at Resolve to Save Lives. Listen in as Daniel shares what he’d do differently with hindsight, the importance of testing and sifting through various ideas to spot the good ones, and how to manage the relationship between design and engineering teams. Links: Daniel Burka - https://twitter.com/dburka Resolve to Save Lives - https://www.resolvetosavelives.org/ Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - https://seedcamp.com/

This week Carlos is joined by Simon Beckerman, founder of Depop, the leading app for Gen Z shoppers boasting 16 million users, nearly 20 million items listed on the platform, and around one million active users per day. Depop is where the world's creatives come to buy, sell and discover the most inspiring and unique things. In conversation with Carlos, Simon shares what sparked the business idea and how it became one of the fastest-growing communities. Prior to founding Depop, Simon immersed himself in industrial design and arts but eventually decided to steer towards entrepreneurship. Simon shares with Carlos the advice he would give to his younger self in the early days of Depop. Tune in to discover how Simon overcame the early challenges in community building, when is the right time to hand the stewardship of a community to the community itself, and how and when to move aside as a founder and hire your first CEO. Links: Simon Beckerman - https://twitter.com/simonbeckerman Depop - https://www.depop.com/ Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - https://seedcamp.com/

Last month we launched 'Breakthrough' an interactive event showcasing a cross-section of companies gearing up to raise their Series A in front of a packed room of growth stage investors. As well as hearing from select companies across everything from distributed computing to using advanced scanning technology for early-cancer detection, Carlos also hosted a number of panels to dive deeper into sectors where we’re seeing particularly advanced innovation and where we’re making a high number of investments. HealthTech is an area we’ve been particularly interested in and proactively investing across for many years now. Carlos sat down with a cross-section of founders we’ve backed across the sector including Lina Chan, Co-founder of Adia Health; Hamish Grierson, Co-Founder of Thriva and Diego Cantor, Co-founder of Ezra to discuss everything from proactive versus reactive healthcare, the disconnect between mental and physical health, empowered patients, and the importance of integration with current healthcare systems. Tune in to hear how founders think the evolution of healthcare will look like in two years time. Links: Adia: https://adiahealth.com Thriva: https://thriva.co Ezra: https://ezra.com Breakthrough 2019: https://seedcamp.com/events/breakthrough/ Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - https://seedcamp.com

“Innovation is not a repeatable formula. Innovation is this messy thing that depends on the culture of the organisation; its heritage and its values.” In this week’s podcast, Carlos is joined by David Rowan, Founding Editor-in-chief of WIRED UK as he walks through the professional journey that fueled the creation of his new book: “Non-Bullshit Innovation: Radical Ideas from the World’s Smartest Minds”. From DJ-ing at a pirate radio station to interning at The Times and eventually going on to lead WIRED UK, David has always had an entrepreneurial approach to journalism. Tune in to discover how after eight years at WIRED and angel investing in 58 startups, including Improbable, David followed his curiosity to discover what sets real innovators apart. Links: David Rowan - https://twitter.com/iRowan Buy your copy of Non-Bullshit innovation: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1787631184/ Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - https://seedcamp.com/

Freddy joined HelloFresh as employee number 5 and left as Marketing Director, managing budgets to the tune of £25M. Tune in as Freddy shares the journey with Natasha and dives into the importance of hiring, keeping teams motivated and channel diversification along with key lessons learned and applied to his new business, Wild. Links: Natasha: https://twitter.com/Natashalytton Freddy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/freddy-ward-32074a56/ HelloFresh: https://www.hellofresh.co.uk Wild Cosmetics: https://www.wilddeo.com/