Female Founder Office Hours Edition IV: Meet the Investors Part IV (ft.
By: Jeevan Sunner
Tags: Female Founders, Venture Capital, Women In Tech, Office Hours, Diversity In Tech

2. What investments do you enjoy looking at?

Maria Čoko, Insurtech Gateway

Maria Čoko, Head of Portfolio Management at Insurtech Gateway

I am always excited to meet founders who are building highly scalable businesses in emerging markets. I particularly enjoy speaking with founders who are collecting unique data that could give us insights into risk or founders that operate in a business space that could need financial protection.

Magda Posluszny, Speedinvest

Magda Posluszny, Associate at Speedinvest

I’m part of the team focusing on network effects at Speedinvest. I am quite excited about B2B marketplaces and the opportunity to disrupt outdated industries, such as construction or procurement. Recently, I have also spent increasingly more time on the intersection of marketplaces and fintech, and have been closely following trends, such as embedded finance.

Chris Smith, Playfair Capital

Chris Smith, Managing Partner at Playfair Capital

I enjoy looking at any investments where you have genuinely passionate and mission driven entrepreneurs. It is the joy of being an investor that we get to speak to such a diverse range of people building their dreams whilst learning about new markets, pain points and solutions.

More specifically, I tend to favour B2B business models (although my team are doing a great job of showing me that not all B2C is bad!). I guess this comes from having built a B2C telecoms business at university and then being an operator at a B2B telecoms business immediately before joining Playfair. I learned to love many elements of B2B models, not least the security of contracted revenue, generally higher contract values and lower customer service overhead.

I also really love businesses in overlooked and unsexy sectors. We have invested in founders in the shipping, construction, and waste management sectors. All old-fashioned industries with huge potential to use tech to save money or time, open new business lines, or improve safety.

Joe Thornton, Playfair Capital

Joe Thornton, Partner at Playfair Capital

More than anything, I love speaking to founders who are solving problems that I didn’t even know existed or operating in markets that I didn’t realise are painfully underserved by incumbents. This means that when I’m speaking to them, I’m learning, which is what life’s all about.

I also love ideas that, on the face of it, seem totally crazy, where the founder has to take me on an intellectual journey to realise that it’s actually totally feasible. When I used to interview candidates for a role at Playfair, in trying to illustrate the fun of being a generalist investor, I would make up a joke about how “one minute you’re taking a pitch from a founder who wants to lease chickens over the internet and later that day, you might meet a founder who wants to sell subscription ice cream through the post.” Well, it turns out both of those things exist (see here and here)!

Simon Blakey, Playfair Capital

Simon Blakey, Chairman of the Investment Committee at Playfair Capital

After 20 years of investing, what I still enjoy is seeing those rare investment opportunities where the founding team have a real passion for the problem they are attempting to solve, coupled with deep domain expertise and compelling market dynamics. These companies give me a real buzz after a first meeting.