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Cool. So when we talked about the the format session, the theme was raising venture capital.

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But I was going to paint it more around my own entrepreneurial voyage creating White Star.

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And even if you don't think we see creating a VC is an entrepreneurial voyage, definitely is.

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It comes with some of the same challenges on fundraising and scraping through.

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Talk a bit about the macro trends that we're looking at in terms of technology and where we invest and why we think that's interesting.

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Talk a bit about DC and why or when you should approach.

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We see but also alternative ways of funding your businesses specifically. I'll talk about bootstrapping today.

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I know you guys talked about Kickstarter in different session and other ways of crowdfunding and then talk about some case

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studies of investments that we've made about how you logically thought through the process of why the investment makes sense.

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And hopefully that demystifies a bit of like what goes through your head as we're thinking about writing half a million, 2 million, $5 million checks.

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Interactive, please, like raise your hand and ask a question if you wish.

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I understand that you guys are shy and don't ask questions, so I might encourage you that at the end.

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I'll be around for a little bit after the session anyways if anybody wants to chat one on one.

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Cool. So it's interesting that in French and Spanish, venture capital is actually called capital raise go or capital risk.

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By definition, the asset class is taking somebody's money and investing into a very early stage business with the

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assumption that that business will scale and have outsized growth and therefore returns to the investors.

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And if you talk to any of the academics who look at the venture capital as an asset class, they'll tell you that's not the case in general.

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Venture capital underperforms the S&P 500. So it doesn't actually make up for the risk you're taking and deploying into the asset class.

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And yet billions of dollars flow into into venture capital from institutions,

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from pension funds, from many of the people that actually created this building.

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Why? Because there's actually that chance that the outliers performed so well that they completely changed the portfolio allocation.

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It's it's a parallel graph. Effectively, the top quartile funds return the majority of the investment.

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Now, when we talk about a venture capital fund to be competitive, you're talking about returning X to your investors.

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So for X returns over a ten year period, which by definition is not where most VCs have actually performed.

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And it's actually been an interesting discussion with us and our own investors about how you think you can go build that that return class.

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You have an assumption about failure rate. 50 to 60% of seed funded companies will fail.

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So how do you account for those? How many write offs do you take?

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You know that one company will likely return the fund and one company will give you the outsized return.

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So even within a fund by fund basis, there's a power law as well. And so how do you allocate your time as an investor between the companies that are

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doing really well and will actually turn the fund and the ones that are struggling?

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And that that's probably the hardest emotional component of investing as a as a VC is spending

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time with the ones that are struggling at that point and hopefully turning them around succeed.

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So what I think about venture capital, it reminds me of this painting that I saw last year at Art Basel.

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I was going to buy it until I saw the price tag, so I just took a picture of it.

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It is by definition a risky asset class, and I think it's a combination.

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It's actually, for me, the fun part of it, it's a combination of funding capability with what I call bills.

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And you translate. And the whole point is when you have conviction in an entrepreneur and an idea back into the level of that ambition,

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if I think there's one reason for the failure of many of the start-ups that I interact with is the fact

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that the entrepreneur has an ambition but is not willing to ask for the level of funding required for it.

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Case in point, I saw an e-commerce company the other day that was raising $300,000 to launch.

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$300,000 should be the marketing budget for that company to be able to acquire the users that it needs to scale.

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Or a company that wanted to scale out its team across to different geographies that were trying to raise €300,000,

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which means that by the time the entrepreneur hired a team, scaled them up, he would have been fundraising almost immediately.

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On average in Europe, comparing Europe to the US, if you look at Seed series and Series B funding.

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The average European company will raise $5 million less and actually have to make that money last for eight months longer.

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So in other words, instead of investing in growth and investing in the team,

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instead of investing in actually competitive positioning in their ecosystem, they have to be fundraising almost immediately.

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As soon as they raise a seed round, they have to make that money last longer.

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And in a way, because there's actually less source of funding across Europe compared to the states will actually raise less.

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So when we went about creating White Star, we had we wanted to bring a bit of this US ethos into the European ecosystem.

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As for background, I'm not a finance guy. By background, I went to a business school and stayed away from most of the finance classes.

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I took entrepreneurship of venture capital as my major.

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I've worked in sci tech companies all my life from a company in the dotcom days that actually went public,

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had a 30 billion market cap, 30 billion with a B, and lost 72% in one day.

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Awesome to then a very large company called Microsoft.

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Then I moved to Europe with Microsoft and join Google early on when we were launching our mobile efforts.

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This is before Google Maps even existed.

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So think about walking around lost in a city without Google Maps on your device before Android was even launched.

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What is now the most prevalent mobile platform around the world? And then I spent the last four and a bit years leading our international

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expansion for Facebook in Europe and what I loved about the Facebook experience.

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So you had all these companies building on top of Facebook using the social graph to to accelerate their growth.

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And it took them two years to create my job, two years in it,

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four in which they had an internal debate about the need to have somebody in Europe supporting the local developer ecosystem.

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They felt that all the start-ups would just come to the valley and they could service them from there.

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So I'm pretty happy that by the time I left Facebook,

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the largest gaming company on top of Facebook income is London based, while technically Dublin based for tax reasons.

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The largest music partners for Facebook are Spotify and Deezer, French and Swedish companies.

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The largest media partnership that we ever did was actually with the BBC for the Olympics,

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bigger than the NBC partnership, despite the fact the US is much, much bigger.

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And all of a sudden the team that was me at the beginning,

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back in oh nine is now about 45 people supporting developers and gaming companies and media companies across the region.

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And Europe actually has proven that it can build world class companies.

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We I was at a panel earlier on today with a couple of other investors. Europe has definitely come of age every single month.

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For the last 12 months, there's been a European company that has raised over $100 million.

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That is definitely something very, very different from five, six, seven years ago.

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Over the last year, you look at the exits at a billion plus valuations like these unicorns that people talk about.

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Criteo kingdom come at 7 billion. Just eat here in London.

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Zoopla here in London. Companies that actually are, if you will, on the top echelon,

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definitely top 10% of global valuations for start up companies that started across the region in the last five, six, seven years.

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And I think that you the acceleration is only continuing as more companies go public, more of you have an aspiration to be entrepreneurs.

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More people like me and my old guys become angel investors than people create funds like ours to support them.

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Those companies go out and have exits and the money flows back and it's a virtuous cycle, or hopefully that's the way that will work.