FounderTech Decoded

Welcome to the FounderTech Decoded podcast. In this Series, each episode acts as a dedicated Briefing with a leading industry voice currently navigating their unique path into a new Deal Diligence™, that is affecting the way forward looking deal flow and funnels might now identify, generate and evaluate new and untapped venture value.

In this Briefing episode we talk to Sami Abou Saab founder and CEO of zigzag - the global innovation platform that empowers entrepreneurs to rapidly evaluate and validate ideas and then to build and launch quickly. 

We explore how the anatomy of a great founder aligns with those founders that can sustain and survive the difficult and emerging early stages of their startup journey when it becomes psychologically hard. 

We discuss how a great founder has that rare ability to listen and cut through the noise of hustle culture and startup hype to be able to focus and hone in on their key ‘element’ of their fundamental insight and core strategic competencies. Navigating this whilst also having the ability to agilely pivot and shift whilst continually delivering and executing at a very high level of operational competency. 

Given this invaluable founder make up and profile, this increasingly means that we are moving away from typical due diligence to be able to consistently identify and assess such a founder. Towards a more consistent psychological and data driven assessment, that can better track, map and evaluate this unique startup founder anatomy.

Connect with Sami further:

> https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabousaab/

> https://zigzag.vc/

Welcome to the FounderTech Decoded podcast. In this Series, each episode acts as a dedicated Briefing with a leading industry voice currently navigating their unique path into a new Deal Diligence™, that is affecting the way forward looking deal flow and funnels might now identify, generate and evaluate new and untapped venture value.

In this Briefing we with talk with Stacy Kehren Idema about her new venture Equati. An intelligent legacy technology for Family Offices which bridges generations through data and technology.

Creating a single source of truth for Family Office investors, we help them align their direct / impact / alternative investment opportunities to their values; while reducing emotional bias, enhancing family communication, and fostering co-investment opportunities.

We explore how a Family offices often struggle with balancing their portfolio thesis with effective investment governance with the need to uphold their legacy - particularly when historical data shows 90% of family offices face wealth erosion by the third generation. 

We discuss how her Deal Diligence™ journey - mirroring many others working and pioneering this new paths into this evolving space - is being driven by a cross section of emerging technologies with an increasing appetite in venture for data colliding with the behavioural shifts in appetite amongst forward thinking investors around the psychology of leveraging the competitive advantages offered by these shifts first and early.

Connect with Stacy:

> LinkedIn here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacykehrenidema/

> https://equati.ai/ 

> Contact and sign up for newsletter here: https://equati.ai/contact/

In this last episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast in 2023, we are fortunate to close this Series 6 by getting talk to AJ, who has recently stepped down as the CEO of the leading invite only entrepreneurial community Foundrs.

We get to hear how its original founders initially conceived of, formed and launched such a successfully a community. Accompanied by the insight of what it was like to have the privilege to be subsequently charged with the responsibility to continue to nurture and support it.

We learn how Foundrs achieves its success via a super active online founder support network and a combination of onsite events and intimate gatherings. To be then further fuelled and underpinned by a combination of common identity, shared sense of ongoing purpose and a consistent evidencing and surfacing of ‘behind closed doors’ member conversations and peer support - when management aren’t even looking or promoting that member interaction.

We discuss how the rise of leading syndicates like Ventures Together and pioneering accelerators like Unrest that are increasingly designed to deploy capital very quickly and diversely are aligning and feeding into the approach and ethos of successful communities.

Intelligent capital that is looking for ‘Default Alive’ lean approaches increasingly fuelled by FounderTech and avoiding the ‘Fatal Pinch’ of being ‘Default Dead’ by now avoiding a formerly encouraged blitz attitude to scaling quickly and early. 

Finally we get a nuanced insight from AJ as to how to distinguish an “Audience” from a community, as its engagement dynamics become more and more important and central to the early stage founder investor conversation. Primarily that the former is when you’re talking and broadcasting directly 1-to-many and the latter is when the communication is amplifying many-to-many interactions. Insights that he is now looking to share and nurture in his current role as a fractional community consultant, here to now support others trying to now launch and nurture a genuine engaged community.

Connect Further

> https://www.linkedin.com/in/aj-foundrs/

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast it was a pleasure to talk to Jem Stein who is the Syndicator at Daring Capital focused on reimagining the social enterprise model - particularly in its early stages.

We discuss how in this social enterprise space, even more than most early stage venture sectors, the asymmetries around networks and access to capital that we often explore on the podcast, really come to the fore and into play - frequently affirming biases around what and where things get founded. 

In his case, how does a really great social entrepreneur, with high founder market fit, trying to navigate and unlock the potential of a niche in which they are trusted and embedded, access that initial tranche of capital that enables them to demonstrate the potential of their approach, show the nuanced skill of their operational delivery and evidence their complex market understanding.

We also touch on how traditional venture models with high 5-10 x (and beyond) models do not align with the potential of this type of social enterprise founder, where a 2-3 x return might be a real strategic result, generating a lot of value and achieving a lot of social impact in the process.

We also talk about how the increasingly popular syndicate model of investors - that is sensitive and open to leveraging agile capital tools alongside aligned FounderTech - is most likely the right model to innovate this social enterprise investment sector and how Daring Capital as such a syndicate based model wishes to take advantage of the market timing and opportunity around these emerging and evolving early stage market shifts.

Explore and connect further:

> https://www.linkedin.com/in/jem-stein-8751959a/

> www.daringcapital.co.uk 

> https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/adebowale-commission-on-social-investment%EF%BF%BC/ 

> https://www.consideredcapital.io/ 

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast, it was a pleasure to talk to Sam Marchant, an early stage founder turned investor with multi-stage asset manager Hambro Perks. A fund relatively distinct in its market positioning in its capability to come in at the initial pre-seed stage but also scale up to a Series C round and beyond.

We get into a deep and nuanced conversation around whether the initial runway for early stage is now becoming flatter and longer. In the sense that with less capital a truly talented exceptional domain expert founder can now achieve more with less. Leveraging increasingly Gen AI and no code Foundertech to test, prove and even monetise the minimum viable assumptions behind their startup quicker.

We explore whether this involves a recalibration - for those exceptional founders who are often unique in their ability to navigate, identify and unlock new value in deep verticals -  of expectations around their ongoing operations, future scale and eventual exit.

Finally we ask whether we just at the beginning of how this emerging conversation and how it will now play? Particularly if this change in early stage founder dynamics has a knock on effect in how venture and their LPs start to reconfigure their early stage founder portfolios and value offerings.

Connect further

> https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-marchant 

In this episode of the FounderTech Decoded podcast, we talk to Sarah King about how her and her Co-Founder Claire Dunn are positioning Obu to find and back female founded UK companies seeking £250,000 to £1,000,000.  

How they’re trying to amplify and leverage the power of inclusive design to try and unlock the potential of these businesses as a force for good. To empower a new wave of  investors to see early stage investing in female driven founders - that currently only receive just 1% of venture capital - as a chance to bring new perspectives to the problems in the world they now want to see tackled and hopefully solved.

We hear how alongside recently successfully securing their first two investments for Moody Month and Proper Plan via the Obu platform, they have also engaged inclusive design principles to successfully lobby the government to increase the eligible SEIS time limit for startups from 2 to 3 years. A very concrete example of how a big win for female founders also then creates a longer SEIS runway and window of opportunity for all entrepreneurs in the ecosystem!

Building on this, we discuss how if a lot of the change that FounderTech wishes to bring about is behavioural rather than technological, is there a better way to frame and tell the stories and engage the tools that help re-engineer current diversification biases simply and fundamentally because they no longer serve and nurture the best economic outcomes?

Finally we touch on how this feeds into and fuels the core of the mission behind and woven into their brand name itself. Obu - Over Being Underfunded!

Connect Further

> https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahlking 

> https://www.obuinvest.com/