EUVC

Today we're happy to welcome Agate Freimane, Founding Partner of Norrsken, one of Europe's leading impact venture capital funds born out of Norrsken Foundation, which hosts events, operates co-working spaces, and runs accelerator programmes across the Nordics, Iberia, and Eastern Africa.
Their fund is dedicated to investing in early-stage startups focusing primarily in climate tech and they've led the investments into almost 50 companies, highlights including Northvolt, Einride, 1komma5 and Matsmart.

Jump to the parts that matter to you 🎧
00:00:00 - "Tear down this wall"
00:01:04 - Disclaimer and Introduction
00:03:10 - Journey into venture
00:12:00 - Impact Investing in Europe
00:15:24 - The Decline of Opportunity Funds and LP Appetite
00:17:52 - Shifting Topics in the Impact Space
00:18:27 - LP Appetite & The Challenging Environment
00:22:09 - The Drive for ESG Reporting in Europe
00:24:49 - The Challenge of Impact as a Business Model
00:28:19 - The Importance of Finding the Right Problems
00:31:02 - Agate’s Core Learnings in Life
00:36:12 - Building Team and Culture as a VC Firm
00:38:23 - Assumptions and Feedback in Team Building and Culture
00:39:38 - Capital Deployment and Small Bad Bets
00:40:31 - Ego in VC & Professional Development
00:45:19 - Regrets and Priorities
00:45:35 - Top Tips for Fundraising In Europe

Today we are happy to welcome Niels Fritze, Head of Scale Invest, a young Single Family Office, where he oversees all aspects of the family's financial affairs, including investment management, estate planning, and wealth preservation.Niels utilizes his expertise in financial analysis, risk management, and strategic decision-making to optimize the family's wealth and ensure their long-term financial security.

Jump to the parts that matter to you 🎧 and watch the highlights below 👀
00:00:00 - European VC on Marc Penkala’s Rooftop Terrace
00:02:26 - Transitioning to a Family Wealth Management
00:05:25 - The Black Swan Year and Market Uncertainty
00:07:18 - Diversifying Your Portfolio with Alternative Assets
00:09:13 - The Popularity of Alternative Investments in the US
00:11:18 - Family Offices and VC Investment
00:14:23 - Understanding Family Office Investment Approaches
00:16:54 - The Benefits of Slow and Steady Growth in Startups
00:19:07 - The Importance of Deploying Capital Efficiently
00:22:17 - The Role of Fees in VC Fund Investing
00:23:42 - Assessing the Return on Capital Efficiency in Family Offices
00:28:23 - Commitment to Impact Investments
00:30:00 - Active vs Passive Investment Strategies
00:36:01 - The Importance of Brand Building in the Family Office Space
00:36:57 - Co-investment Opportunities and the LP Perspective
00:40:06 - Family offices vs venture capitalists
00:45:18 - Lessons Learned from LP Investing
00:46:45 - Quickfire Round and Tips for Emerging VCs

🔫 The Quickfire Round 🔫

Q: What advice would you give to your own 10 year younger self?
A: Enjoy your life to the fullest.Try to look left and right all the time. Do something else than just VC, like physically, some sort of handcraft work.

Q: What advice would you give to VCs fundraising?
A: Know how to pitch your VC and get expert help.

Q: What is the most counterintuitive thing you've learned since you've started investing in venture?
A: Sometimes it really pays out way more when you reinvent an old idea which is already in place, than invent something new which has no use.

Watch the full episode on eu.vc

Today, we're happy to welcome you to David de Picciotto, Co-founder & CEO of Pledge, a climate software company helping decarbonise the logistics supply chain through its accredited and integrated platform. Founded in 2021 in the UK, Pledge is backed by venture investors including Zinal Growth, Lowercarbon Capital and Visionaries Club. Before Pledge, David worked for Partners Group, a global private equity firm, where he focused on growth equity investments and previously led International Expansion at Revolut, the UK FinTech. David is also the co-founder of media start-up iRewind, where he exited in 2016. David is also one of the trailblazing Sequoia scouts leading the charge in Europe 🚀 You’re in for a treat 🍦

Today is a special one as we have three guests with us, Joe Schorge and Chloe Dagnell from Isomer Capital (Europe’s hands-down best Fund of Fund — full disclaimer, we’re VP at Isomer! lol) and Benjamin Notlev, COO and CIO at TechBBQ, the leading tech conference in the Nordics - and also (announcement alert!), EUVC’s Country Ambassador in Denmark 🚀.

As anyone would expect, EUVC is a community play and part of that is being super close with the best people in each ecosystem and Benjamin is one of the best around in Denmark, so we were super excited to have Benjamin invest with us and get closer with him (as well as the TechBBQ gang) as we of course share the same passion for connecting the industry.

Today we have Chris Smith with us, a repeat offender here at the EUVC podcast. If you’re a loyal long time listener you may recall Chris from our episode #14. Chris is a Managing Partner at Playfair, a generalist VC fund with a contrarian approach to pre-seed technology investing.

Based in London, Playfair invests across the UK and Europe with an intentionally high conviction, low volume approach: making 6-8 investments a year and preserving time, capital and resource to help companies post-investment. Playfair is investing out of their $70m Fund 3 and has an established portfolio of **100+ companies across two funds including AeroCloud, Thought Machine, Andela, Mapillary, Recycleye and Orca AI.

At Playfair, Chris is focused on pre-seed opportunities in the UK, Europe and Israel. He loves finding companies operating in overlooked sectors that are ripe for disruption and is particularly interested in autonomous transportation, business and industrial automation (especially through AI, ML and computer vision), HealthTech (except diagnostics and therapeutics) and B2B SaaS.

Today, we're happy to welcome David Nothacker, angel investor, CEO & co-founder of Sennder, a digital truck freight forwarding business. Together with his co-founders, David has built up a team of over 1,000 employees across eleven offices in Europe. In the process, they have been supported by strong investors such as Scania, Accel and Project A, and have secured over €300 million in funding. They are quite active angels, particularly in the German ecosystem.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why David considers his investments into Gorillas and Cargo 1 his most memorable angel deals
  
  
• David’s learnings from managing startup boards
  
  
• Why David has two different, yet synergistic, investment strategies: investing early in logistics & supply chain startups and co-investing with VCs in opportunistic deals
  
  
• How LP investing can complement your angel activities when starting to do more international investments
  
  
• How angel investing makes you a better, more experienced business leader

Today we happy to welcome Emma Steele from Ascension VC. Emma is a Partner at Ascension’s Impact Fund a Seed-stage venture fund focused on creating resilient societies by backing impact driven founders that are driving commercial value and, hopefully, on their way to become the next impact dragons.

Ascension has an established portfolio of more than 180 companies and notable investments led by Emma including Wagestream, Credit Kudos and Tembo.

Today we are happy to welcome Ameer Awadiyeh, VP of Investments at AlphaQ Venture Capital, a founder-led VC Fund of Funds. Prior to joining AQVC, Ameer was part of the investment team at Israel-based Vintage Investment Partners, where he developed deep expertise within the global VC fund ecosystem through sourcing, conducting in-depth due diligence, and modeling primary and secondary VC investment opportunities in both established and emerging managers, overseeing the fund of funds pipeline and budget allocation, and establishing a broad network of VCs and VC allocators across the U.S., Europe and Israel.

Alph Q has 9 funds and counting, Whitestart Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Abstract Ventures, Nucleus Capital, Signature Ventures, Pale Blue Dot, Maple Capital, Symbol Ventures. AlphaQ is becoming the European gateway to a diversified venture capital fund portfolio via one single stock.

Today we are happy to welcome Simone Brummelhuis, Founding Partner & Fund Director of Borski Fund, a VC fund investing in technology leaders and diversity. Simone is Supervisory Board Member of Royal Schiphol group, Rabo Amsterdam and Media Huis Nederland. She previously founded The Next Women, providing access to capital, programs, resources and networks for female entrepreneur and is Founding Investor and Director of The Next Women Crowd Fund.

The U.S. SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), which regulates the country's financial markets, just changed the game for private equity, hedge fund, private credit, and venture capital funds registered in the U.S.Yesterday, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler (above) announced the commission Enhances the Regulation of Private Fund Advisers, a set of rules originally proposed in February 2022. And Europe would never be “out-regulated”, so…

Dive in to learn what the meaning and implications of this is!