Megan Quinn

Really enjoyed this chat with William as part of his Early Rounds series. ☕ We covered a lot, from ThatRound and using AI in fundraising, to lessons from CROSSIP, building syndicates, and a few tougher chapters along the way. A lot of what we’re building was born out of that lived experience. Have a read if you want to know more about how ThatRound came to be!

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I'm not investing in this company. But I wish more founders cold-pitched me like this. Last Thursday, a message landed in my LinkedIn inbox from Waseeq Ali. First line: UCL alum, previously exited founder, building B2B SaaS AI workflow for UK GPs, raising an angel round, SEIS-eligible, £XXk ARR in LOIs already signed. That was it the whole thing. No preamble.   Then he did three structured follow-ups over the next few days. First: context on their moat. Second: pitch deck and data room, unprompted. Third, four days later: "just to update you that I have a committed investor." So what made this good? Social proof first: His credentials are in the opening sentence, not buried in slide four. I receive 20+ inbound LI messages a day so I have to pattern-matching quickly. Give me the signals early. Don’t make me search for them. Showed traction: LOIs with a specific number. Not wishy-washy "strong pipeline" or similar. A figure = definitive evidence of traction. Scheme confirmation upfront: SEIS in the first message. Although it should never drive an investment decision for fellow UK angels, it’s worthwhile telling them. Every follow-up had new information vs repetition: No "just checking in". He made the most of every touch point; Momentum, materials, then a commitment signal. That's a sequence vs just spam. Most cold inbound I receive either opens with flattery or buries the key info in three paragraphs of market context. This did neither. If you're a founder preparing to raise I would study this structure, as the principles apply regardless of sector: Lead with credentials. Show evidence over assertion. Follow up with momentum rather than noise. Unfortunately can't invest in Waseeq's business because of a portfolio conflict, but I received his permission to share the above. Founders who pitch this well deserve to close quickly. I hope he does!

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I think one of the hardest things about the venture space is keeping tracking of who's who. Despite the fact that I've been in the industry for awhile I'm always learning about who the key founding players at the big funds and tech companies were and are and I feel like there are new ones every day. For example, could you name a few of the founding or current partners at Sequoia, Bessemer, GC, and Tiger? Could you name the main 2-3 founders of Uber, HubSpot, Canva, Reddit, Robinhood, Figma, others? I feel like with the sheer number of funds and companies it becomes increasingly difficult to know who's important. I may start a video series breaking down who's who and how to find the people that are most relevant for founders and other investors.

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Pleased to be featured in Pathfounders on the growing Seed to Series A funding gap in the UK. Only ~4–5% of seed-backed startups now reach Series A (down from ~12% in 2020) - as capital becomes more selective and expectations continue to shift. One area worth exploring further is the role of seed extension rounds, giving founders the runway to reach meaningful milestones before raising their next round. Read the full article here: https://bit.ly/4mQBiB7

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30+ VCs Backing Marketplace Startups Below is a cross-stage, cross-sector mix of firms that back marketplace and platform companies early and support them as they grow. Consumer and platform investors Upfront Ventures 1752vc (Formerly Pegasus) BAM Ventures Forerunner Brand Foundry Ventures Maveron BoxGroup Greycroft Alumni Ventures Marketplace natives and network effects specialists FJ Labs NFX Great Oaks Venture Capital RiverPark Ventures Left Lane Capital First Round Capital Lerer Hippeau Precursor Ventures Seed partners building two-sided platforms early Founder Collective NextView Ventures Uncork Capital Slow Ventures Bling Capital Gaingels Initialized Capital Felicis Multi-stage firms backing marketplace winners at scale Accel Bessemer Venture Partners Lightspeed General Catalyst New Enterprise Associates (NEA) Kleiner Perkins Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) Founders Fund

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The postcode lottery of opportunity is alive and well in tech funding. Less than 2p of every £1 of UK VC funding goes to all-female founding teams. But there's another barrier that's equally persistent: socio-economic background. The path to founding a tech company isn't just about having a brilliant idea. It's about having the financial cushion to work unpaid, the network for warm introductions, and the cultural capital to navigate unwritten rules. This isn't a footnote - it's systemic. The Pipeline vs Power debate gets to the heart of whether this is about not enough founders from diverse backgrounds entering the system, or whether the gatekeepers themselves define opportunity in exclusionary ways. The evidence suggests it's both. Real social mobility in tech means examining not just who gets funded, but who even gets the chance to try. The Tech Debate: Pipeline vs Power - link in comments 👇

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We at Form are delighted to back the Stotles team again in their Series A, alongside Headline, Acton Capital, and Seedcamp. We’re adamant that the team is on the way to building the end-to-end software that companies selling to government can live in. We first met John, Taj and Carsten back in 2022. We’ve worked in and around Government for long enough to understand just how much unnecessary friction there is in the procurement process. It prevents the public sector from fully benefitting from the latest innovation - if at all (!) - and it massively inhibits businesses that could benefit from working with government. A platform that builds a qualified pipeline; finds the right tenders; and qualifies those opportunities, just made sense. But a lot has changed in the market since then. Firstly, the government need for innovation has massively increased. Public debt across the UK, US and several other western economies spiked to over 100% of GDP during covid, and hasn’t returned to its pre-covid level. Radically re-thinking public services is absolutely necessary to bringing it down - that urgency is palpable in Number 10 and across Whitehall. Secondly, the pace of tech advancements means the scope for improving the procurement process has sky-rocketed. Leveraging the rapid advancements in GenAI, Stotles can now create a first draft of a bid response that is tailored to a customer - and the quality of those drafts only improves as the tech advances as Stotles really gets to know their customer. Both these market shifts have massively worked in Stotles’ favour - and the rapid progress they’ve made speaks for itself. Since the seed round, they’ve been serving companies like Amazon Business, Salesforce, Vodafone, NEC Software, Palo Alto Networks, and Snowflake. On average, they’ve generated 4x qualified pipeline growth for their customers, and more than doubled their customers’ public sector contract win rate. They have built a product which both does a lot of the leg work on bid-writing specifically, while also solving many of the smaller problems along the broad workflow. This type of end-to-end product, with embedded GenAI, is exactly where we think sustainable value will be generated in this tech wave. There’s so much more to come from this team, and we’re absolutely delighted, and privileged, to be supporting them on the journey.

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Great post from Catherine Wright - talking about her piece on demystifying #DeepTech and the conditions needed to help it thrive. At Seraphim Space, we see first-hand how capital, capability and market conditions come together to shape the future of breakthrough technologies #SpaceTech is no longer “science fiction.” Thousands of start-ups globally are already building real products and services, generating revenues and attracting significant investment. Catherine captures well why DeepTech matters: it may take longer to reach maturity, but the resilience, strategic importance and long-term impact of these companies is undeniable. 👉 Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eyB8rc_V #DeepTech #VentureCapital #SpaceTech #Innovation #UKTech

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Dan Lifshits at Dwelly says that roughly 200 VCs passed on investing before raising from General Catalyst. Dan even moved to Hull (!) to embed their tech inside the first agency they bought. Dwelly is now one of the hottest roll-ups in Europe. Across the 16,000 founders we've researched at Episode 1, we found that the most predictive signal isn't a stellar CV but in fact deviation from the mean. This isn't about IQ or EQ, this is what we call OQ (Outlier Quotient). We didn't get deep into this with Dan (follow-up episode?), but the founders who can deal with hundreds of rejections and shock changes to their life like moving to a random city, tend to have already paid the social cost of being different, somewhere in their past, long before they ever pitched any VC, and that's how they're able to take it in their stride.

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It's mostly for access to tech talent and optics (make themselves look international, hire some "thought leaders", etc). Anduril has more revenue in the UK than all European defensetech startups and scaleups combined. If you’re all in on chasing after rinky dink £20M Royal Navy contracts (which a bunch of European defensetech companies are doing atm…and probably not going to get), you probably need to rethink some things on the biz dev side. https://lnkd.in/e4kFGhgu ⚔️ 🛡️

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In an age of AI optimisation, creativity has become a form of courage. And necessity. I published a new Substack piece - this time on creativity, and why it matters more than ever. Not as a productivity tool. Not as a side hobby. But as a way of staying human when systems accelerate faster than our capacity to feel. I write about Victor Hugo - not only the author of Les Misérables, but the multidisciplinary force: poet, painter, interior designer, political thinker. About empathy as the true fuel of creation. About sorrow as a source of depth. And about why, as analytics and automation take over so much of our work, what cannot be automated suddenly matters most. It’s also a very concrete piece - about the spaces we inhabit, the colours we choose, courage taken in small steps. And about how creativity shows up differently for everyone: writing, fashion, photography, interior design, or the way we shape relationships and environments. If you’ve been thinking about: - how to stay human in AI-shaped systems - how to create alongside demanding work and fast lives - how to protect sensitivity without becoming fragile you might enjoy this one. 👉 Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eBZ5Wb6R I’ll add a short comment below with one simple practice you can try this week. We sail on. 🌊

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Family Office Insights founder and I discuss a series of core themes we see #singlefamilyoffices and #multifamilyoffices thinking about today. In a series of snippets from my podcast with FOI founder Arthur Andrew Bavelas, I've chosen to share a few that bring pattern recognition around what I am hearing behind closed doors in family office roundtables or 1-1s. First up - Energy, infrastructure and grid issues as relates to #DataCenter investment / expansion. Most of my FOs are active in RE (obviously), and many are in or exploring data centre investment. From nation to nation I see the same core considerations surfaced. #familyoffice #frontiertech #datacenters

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Ahti Heinla is not your average founder. Having being part of the founding team of Skype he is the archetype of a madman inventor engineer - he architected the core p2p network that made all the free video calls possible for hundreds of millions without using a central server. I know him for two decades and have been rooting for the Starship Technologies project from the start. This certainly has not been a painless path, hardware startup with a software innovation is not an easy thing to scale. I chatted with Ahti during Plural founder summit last month and he shared in detail how only now many of their original hypotheses are thoroughly validated. During this path Ahti has had to invent him as a CEO and a business leader as well and seems like that invention is also going well. Europe needs more hardware wins. So I am sure the group now is way bigger who are rooting for Starship's scaling phase to succeed. 🚀

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Fundraising pre-Seed? Data Rooms matter! After 30 years on the investor side of the table, I can tell you: the founders who close fastest aren't always the ones with the best deck. They're the ones who are most prepared when the conversation gets serious. A data room is one of the clearest signals of that preparation. Most pre-seed founders don't have one. Some have a folder with a few documents in it. Very few have a properly structured, access-controlled due diligence package ready to go. This article, fresh on the F101 site today, tells you exactly how to build one. 👇

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👀 Hopefully, you've heard by now that we run free fundraising accelerators for seed founders... 👉 What makes this next programme particularly unique is that we teamed up with 4 other organisations - GC Angels, Stronger Stories, Foundervine and Firstport to deliver a brand new initiative called Venture Forward. It combines our decade of experience of running programmes with partners from across the UK to deliver a new initiative, fully funded by Innovate UK, to support a whopping 160 companies in the next 15 months. 🇬🇧 We will deliver these workshops to companies all over the UK, including London, Birminghman, Manchester, & Edinburgh. 🚀 We will also be focusing on under-represented founders (more details in the application form). The programme will consist of fundraising workshops, 1-on-1 mentoring, regional meet-ups, national investor days, centralised resources and an active alumni community. ✅ Applications are now open via ventureforward.co.uk

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Autonomous optimized media buying is here. Sellforte AI Milestone 2. With today's release, we're transforming Sellforte AI from a guided demo into a fully conversational, model-backed experience that lets marketers ask questions, test forward-looking scenarios, and understand exactly how the AI reaches its conclusions.

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What age did some of the best GP founders start their firms? The data might surprise you. Stable's Project Legends dives into the data ... hear from Founder & CEO Erik Serrano Berntsen (who started Stable well before 33!) on the latest Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. https://lnkd.in/eRQKt-b5

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When we started Evertrace, we had a hypothesis that software could outperform humans at sourcing investment opportunities. We felt that traditional tools fell short. They relied on founders showing up in the usual places, often far too late to create any real edge. By the time a company appeared, the opportunity was already crowded. So we started looking in more unusual places. We kept asking a simple question: what is the very first trace a founder leaves when they start working on something new? We built Evertrace from there. Today, more than 150 funds use Evertrace. Earlier this month, my co-founder Jacob Graubaek Houlberg went on etn. to talk more about our product, our vision, and how we see the early-stage venture game changing fast.

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Being personally involved in several Fashion Tech companies its great to see that with the rise of AI, Silicon Valley is going all in on a new generation of Fashion Tech startups that promise to radically change how products are made and sold. This time, they’re backing founders with real deep expertise and tech chops and are more patient in helping them grow. Investors today are less seduced by charismatic founders selling a dream — or fashion brands overselling their minimal tech capabilities. Instead, the companies securing funding have leaders with real industry expertise.

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