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So let's talk about the kind of ugly side of U.S.

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The ratio of opportunities presented to to White Star, but also to a number of other funds that have said it publicly.

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And the number of deals that will do is 100 to 1. I will say no to an investment 99% of the time.

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So just keep that in mind as you eventually, someday do a pitch to A, B, C, and you get that.

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No, it's not you, it's me. It's just simply it's a I mean, it's a it's a funnel issue, right?

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If you have a thousand companies pitching you every year and you have a capacity to do the deals,

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finding the right one at the right point in this kind of growth cycle where you actually believe in the

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team and you actually believe in the market where you actually don't necessarily already have a conflict.

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Another company in the space where it's the right timing because you're not doing three other deals

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in parallel and your headspace allows you to go focus on that deal and do the due diligence.

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All those things coming together will only happen one in 100 times.

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And this this actually this stat has been reported by a number of funds in the U.S.

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Passion Capital in London. Seedcamp has similar stats.

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So it's not it's not only us, it's in general. That's the gist of it.

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Most of the opportunities that come to us come directly through our website, and we have never invested in a company that came through a website.

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Too much noise. I'm getting too many emails from opportunities for me to actually in a way signal that that email's important.

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It might be that I actually missed a couple of opportunities that way, but is the reality, if anything?

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Another entrepreneur that I know referring a Start-Up, an angel investor that I respect,

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referring a Start-Up is somebody that another investor, they might have done it earlier around saying, Hey, this company is rocking.

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You should look at them for the next round.

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Those are the signals that I need to actually check out that email from the thousands that I got that year and say,

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actually, let me go deeper and look at it. So when you're thinking about approaching because leverage the heck out of LinkedIn,

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figure out which connection path can get you closer to the right person and which firm to have a at least a warm lead.

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And there's plenty of blog VC bloggers will attest to this.

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A cold lead is usually going to lead to an almost immediate no.

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It's just a signal to noise ratio of like how we can interpret the amount of requests coming in and in Europe.

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What is that?

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Even less early stage funding is even more acute because the amount of people trying to raise and number of people that can fund them is even less.

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So let's go inside my head for a sec and share with you the things that are going through my head.

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As you give me your pitch deck and you're massively passionate about your idea, I can see it in your eyes.

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You've been living this idea for the last year and you can't wait.

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Tell me about it. And as you flip the slides, I'm thinking.

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Is a market big enough. There is an example here of a company that that I not my not my speciality no have a pets but there's a

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company in the US called Dog Vacay that that is some friends of ours actually funded at the early stage.

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I don't have a pet. I didn't know.

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There's a so much pain when you go out of town to get somebody to sit your dog and how much money actually gets spent on the dog sitting dog.

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Vickie's doing pretty well. They raised $12 million last year. They've created a fantastic marketplace of pet owners.

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And people are willing to take care of your pet for a couple of dollars and massively undercuts the professional market.

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And it's created a vibrant community actually around around people who want to lend their pets out and people wanted to kill them.

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I didn't think it was big enough. What do I know? Can this team pull it off?

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And this is probably the most critical piece, especially at early stage, right?

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You're as much betting on the team as you're betting on the business.

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Do they have the complementary skills between technical and business across the Cofounding team to actually go pull it off?

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Single founder. Single Founder Start-ups are really hard for me to get comfortable with.

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There's too much risk in one individual, so I usually like to see a business.

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It can be two technical co-founders or business founder in a in a technical co-founder,

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but somebody can at least bounce off each other and scale out the business because

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the guy who's coding is not the guy who's supposed to be selling or fundraising. It doesn't work.

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He's supposed to be coding or she. He had had this scale of business before.

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The answer to this is usually no for for early stage start-ups. Most of them are first time entrepreneurs,

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but that will actually be a very positive signal of actually scale out of business the owner of somebody else's in the past.

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Can they build what they're trying to build? Can they have the technical chops to pull off the vision they have?

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I'm fine with outsourcing development at early stage of finding a design studio

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or some guy in Poland or Ukraine to actually build your minimum viable product.

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But at some point, you need to own the tech inside the stack. You need to actually be able to control the destiny of your product.

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So at least give me guidance as to the path and how you go.

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Hired a technical team once you get funding. Are there other better funded competitors out there?

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Probably the answer will be yes. So help me feel comfortable as to why you have an angle and an edge.

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And then who else can I partner with to do this? Traditionally,

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VCs will actively look to syndicate deals with complementary of VC funds with other people

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that can step in and at different value with angels that might have experience that help out.

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In a way, it's it's a it's one it's a way for us not to be the only one holding the bag when things are not going well.

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And secondly,

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it's a way for us to actually nurture the ecosystem jointly by actually bringing people into one deal who might bring us into another deal later on.

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It's amazing how clubby we all compete for the same deals. And yes, it's very clubby and how we try to collaborate and actually.

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Three of my most recent investments have actually come through through other angels or VCs who brought us into the opportunity.

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So let me quickly walk through a couple of examples of of businesses that I've invested in and how I answer those questions as I was going through it.

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So first, what's called KAEMI. It's based in the US. I think it's brilliant.

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Of course I invested in it. But what you do is you take your phone, they take your key.

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You put your key in a white piece of paper.

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You take a picture of the key with your phone on both sides, and the algorithm will create a digital version of your key.

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It figures out, based on image recognition, the height of the ridges and the length.

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So now it knows what your key looks like, and once it knows what your key looks like,

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you can order a copy with your favourite Chelsea colours and pay 699 for it.

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But more importantly, if you're locked out of your house, it now provides insurance for you to get unlocked.

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You can go to a locksmith and show them a factory locksmith code on the app that tells them how to cut the key.

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Or you can go to a 7-Eleven in New York City and find this little guy here, which is a robotic kiosk.

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The kiosk inside has a magazine full of keys.

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It supports 90% of the US keys and house keys and mailbox keys.

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So you show up with your app, which has a code, your credit card and your fingerprint,

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and you can actually print out your house, give you a locked up. And trust me, you're completely price insensitive at that point.

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And New York average lock lock out service is 250 bucks.

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And these guys charge $30 for the key to get copied. They have the rolling out 100 kiosks across the US and that has to build out thousands of kiosks.

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And the margin on those keys is quite nice.

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But what I love about this is it's a massive market. It's actually lock locksmith, lock out and car keys in the US is $8 billion.

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Yeah. Massively fragmented. Some guy in a corner shop that's taking my key and copying it.

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And no technical disruption. So these guys use image recognition, robotics, price effect.

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They lose price sensitivity analysis based on user to figure out what price they're going to give you.

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So some cool tech to actually make your life more convenient. So use back to my thesis slide the combination of computing power on the cloud for the

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image recognition with this data around the consumer and then just cool robot robots,

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robotic cutters to actually make your key and if there's a quid pro quo and convenience and and money putting hands.

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So as I went through the questions, I actually found them on a blog. To be honest. I was doing research on 3D printing and I came across them.

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Turns out a friend of mine had been an angel investor. He introduced us. We ended up leading the 7 million series that they raised.

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Is it market big enough? Yes, and massively fragmented. Can this team pull it off?

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Well, the CTO is a Ph.D. in robotics, have employees from NASA, from Lockheed Martin,

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from Raytheon, guys with a robotics and data analytics components.

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Yes. How to scale a team before? No, never.

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The CEO is a former financial analyst and the CTO used to be in the lab.

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So that's where hopefully we come in and we can help them scale out. Do they have the technical chops to pull it off?

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Absolutely. Other better funded competitors?

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Yeah. And there's a couple of other VC funded companies doing similar stuff, but with kind of older technology that haven't haven't innovated as much.

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So I'd say it's still a pretty open market. It's pretty darn large.

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So it can be two or three competitors there. And then who do I partner with to de-risk it?

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And I think the one call that convinced me to do this deal was when I called 7-Eleven.

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So 7-Eleven Ventures has a venture arm that invests in companies and 7-Eleven ventures.

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The guy who runs the fund was saying, Yeah, listen, they've been inside 711 shops.

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We love it. It's performing really well. We look at kiosk businesses all the time.

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This is one of the better performing ones we've got. It's really good.

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And by the way, who inside 7-Eleven gets to decide how many you buy and which stores you put them into?

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Because that would be me.

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So the guy who was the side effects of the decision maker for a key partner was also going to pony up a big check to be part of the round.

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The other de-risking was there. The the non-executive member of the board created this kiosk business.

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He had a business called Coinstar where you took your loose change, you put it into the coin,

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starting to give you cash and they kept a couple of cents per transaction.

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Coinstar is now a $2 billion publicly traded company in the US called Outer Wall.

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So the CEO, the founder of COIN Stores on the board with us, he kind of knows the the kiosk business pretty well.

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That was another kind of nudge that it was the right people around the table to go do it.

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It's a hard business. It's difficult. They have to go pay a lot of money to build these kiosks and ship them out.

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But it's really it's really appealing combination of real world kind of physical, nitty gritty, ugly locksmith marketplace with brilliant technology.

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Another one was a seed investment that we just did in London. If you ever go to London, you want to go to a concert, download the app.

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It's called Dice. It's a mobile ticketing app for concerts, and it has a curated set of concerts that you can actually browse through and select.

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And everybody well, most people don't know about you guys. Most people hate Ticketmaster.

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Ticketmaster charge you 12% booking fees just because the artist doesn't see that it hurts the hurts of the fans.

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There's no data shared from Ticketmaster back to the or very little back to the artists.

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They're flying blind effectively. And yet a live nation.

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And Ticketmaster has a $5.4 billion valuation and they control something like 67% of all tickets sold around the world.

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So there's a lot of people trying to disrupt Ticketmaster coming out from different angles.

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What we liked about these guys is that they actually came from the music space.

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Phil, the CEO, used to manage a bunch of electronic acts. He created it because of his own frustration as a manager.

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They launched the app here. It had the biggest TechCrunch write up I've ever seen.

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It was five pages long. You can actually download the app now. You can buy tickets.

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And their vision is to create a more frictionless way for the fans to go to a concert.

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There's no booking fees. There's this kind of convenience services like waiting list.

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The tickets are sold out. Do you want tickets? Yes. Get yourself on the waiting list for two or they're working on some other things in which you

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could have convenience to actually make sure that you get to go to the concert you want to go to.

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And by the way, there's actually a whole bunch of data being captured on you and your music tastes,

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which can be shared with the managers in the back end,

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which actually give them some insight as to who the heck wants to go to the concerts and where so is the target.

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Is a market big enough? Yes, but kind of going up against Ticketmaster as a hard thing.

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Can a team pull it off? The other guys behind this is this studio in London called US, too, which is a design studio.

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They're famous for a game called Monument Valley on iPad,

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which is feature pretty much if you go to the Apple store and you see the iPads with a little game that's Monument Valley.

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It's such a design in London, it's awesome. So they actually took a bunch of their best guys and put it into dice and spun it off.

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So they have a combination of really good tech team.

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The CTO is the only CTO of our Met from Greenland, actually the only tech guy I've ever met from Greenland.

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Phil, who came from music space and the design guy from was to have a skeleton before.

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Absolutely not. The US two guys have, but Phil used to manage the X.

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They had two technical chops to pull it off. Yes, better from the competitors.

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We'll start with Ticketmaster, but there's a number of them in the US, a number of them better.

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Even here we plan to do something similar, but I think they're coming at it from a different angle.

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And then who else do I partner with? The interesting thing is we're the actual only institutional investor in the round.

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It's people from the music industry, the Managers for Arctic Monkeys and Radiohead and Robbie Williams Metropolis,

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which is second largest promoter, which gives them a huge thing in the ticketing space supply to US tickets.

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The hardest thing when you're creating a ticketing Start-Up is to convince the guy who's doing the

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O2 show for Radiohead to give you 100 tickets because he can he has the ability to allocate them,

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but he's going to put them in the channel. The thing's going to sell the fastest.

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So because they're all investors, it also means that their acts are all flowing through the system and some pretty high profile acts.

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Most of the acts on dice, I have no idea. I'm totally apparently unhip now, but apparently they tell me it's really cool.

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So you couldn't find other other places.

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And I'll I'll finish with this one blog loving this one out to challenge me on a couple of the other questions.

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Blog loving star in Sweden by a 24 year old who his wife had a fashion.

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His girlfriend had a fashion blog. As usually happens, geeks try to impress their girlfriends by coding something.

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I actually quoted a website from my now wife at one point she wasn't impressed, so he called it an app to get more traffic for her blog.

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And by the way, it's actually the number one blog on blog loving now. And now I'm married, so it worked.

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But what it does, it aggregates 1.5 million blogs around the world, mainly in fashion and lifestyle,

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and it has a mobile app and a website through which you consume the content a daily basis.

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Instead of having to go to 100 blogs, you get it all kind of there.

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And I call it fashion porn. People spend 30 minutes per day just browsing the fashion updates from their favourite bloggers, and it's huge.

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It's grown from when we invest it to now.

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It's now got 30 million monthly uniques from all over the world who actually literally want to just get their fashion fix.

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They've actually made some bloggers from scratch,

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people that have no traffic that grew because of blog loving and they've spent zero money on user acquisition.

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It's all been organic. So we invested as angels and we saw it scale out.

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At that point, they were a couple of million, million uniques, over 30 million uniques now.

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Can they make money? Absolutely no idea. Nobody really managed to figure out how to make money on blogging.

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I mean, Tumblr made money by selling itself, but it never actually created revenue.

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Blogger. Blogger made money by selling itself to Google but never really made money.

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So I don't know. I mean, there's some ways in which you could think about native advertising, but it's still unclear.

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Can the city pull it off? Well, they started from this kind of passion point, write about the girlfriend and trying to satisfy her needs.

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And from dad's grew into a very vibrant community. Yes.

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And they've actually scale up the team significantly in New York. So we found them in Sweden,

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but we knew their market and their exit when the U.S. so they actually moved the whole team to New York

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Carrasquillo business before not the for 24 year old guys in Sweden but when they moved to New York,

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Matthias, the CEO, said, Listen, I'm the product guy. I want to go build products.

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I don't want to be dealing with you investor guys or doing financial reports. Let me build products.

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So we actually found a fantastic CEO sheet, actually ran North America for Dailymotion,

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had worked at MTV Networks, was an operating partner of the venture capital firm, had worked at AOL.

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She knew how to scale up media businesses, and she came on board. And she was such a very passionate user of the product herself.

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So she scaled up business before, didn't have the technical chops to pull it off.

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Yes. Better funded competitors.

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Depends what you call a competitor. Instagram is well funded by Facebook, Pinterest, Flipboard.

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It depends of where you think your users will be in the consuming media.

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And then who can I partner with to actually pull this off?

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Beta Works, which is a company that we invested in and co-invest with in New York.

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This focus around the kind of the new evolution of media and the North Zone who the Swedish fund that

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was the first backer for Spotify who knows how to build effectively world class global media companies.

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And they came in for the round. They raised $7 million with which we actually doubled up with to the fund.

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And at that point, they'll just continue to scale up.

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So the reason I'm not just showing these deals is go back to the questions that I posed earlier and how I,

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I question myself as I'm going through through your pitch.

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I did not answer yes to every single question and every investment that I made. Actually, in some case, I answered no to a bunch of the questions,

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but enough of the other questions and enough of actually kind of the composition of the deal made me feel comfortable that betting on this,

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taking a risk on this opportunity made sense. So try to figure out what the questions that that individual investor is going

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to have and try to figure out how you make your pitch in a way personalised.

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Right. You should never actually had the same pitch for every investor.

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Angel you're going to go pitch. Everybody has their own angle, do some research, read their blogs, read your tweets,

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talk to other people that actually might have got an investment from them before. Try to figure out if they're the right investor for you.

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Because we see actually taking money from VCs is ridiculous.

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It's actually it's effectively Tinder. For like a 57 year relationship.

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You have three meetings and you kind of talk to each other. You think you like each other.

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He gives you this really big legal document you're supposed to understand and sign in which he says he's going to take 20% of your firm,

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sit on your board, have rights over you, have the ability to fire you, by the way.

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And you're supposed to decide in two weeks whether you want to be married to this person for next seven years.

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Average VC investment takes last longer in the US and the average marriage in the US.

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So and so the fact that we do this like speed dating rate is sometimes scary and it's also an information asymmetry.

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I've done a lot more deals than you have as an entrepreneur, but I do probably one a month.

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You probably will do two or three in your life. So that information asymmetry is actually really hard.

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So A get some good advice, a good lawyer. B, read all the books out there about VC funding.

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Brad Feld has one of the best ones, effectively demystifies the term sheet for for the on behalf of the entrepreneur

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and explains why some things like clawbacks and ratchet are bad words.

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And just before you hit the road,

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kind of be ready to to to to get to tackle that information asymmetry and this kind of this this speed dating model you're about to enter.