Having lived in the UK for a year, I can completely attest to the sentiment. The lack of seed funding appeared largely cultural to me: many of the angels I interacted with were risk-averse and old-fashioned, looking at rubber-stamps and degrees rather than actual merit. It seemed impossible to get funding as a young entrepreneur (under 25), given the heavy emphasis on traditional industry experience. From talking to other entrepreneurs, there was no tolerance for failure as there is in the Valley, and an utter focus on IRR and incremental businesses with short-term returns, rather than more risky bets with longer time-horizons.
Anil is great, he's very smart, has a wide experience of M&A from clean tech to web sector and on top of that is really fun guy to hang out with. Great to have him investing in European startups.
Agree all round; it will be great once his fund is up and running. The key thing about it is that they will be doing seed investing, and that's where the greatest need is (and he would argue, the greatest returns). It sounds like they intend to be quite innovative in terms of how they assess deals as well, presumably the intention is to comb the whole of Europe for the best unfunded startups.
Fantastic news. There is a huge funding gap in the UK that people bridge with grants, government money, and even loans. Early stage investment from someone like Anil will really help.
Good question, but i don't think they have. Partly why Eric Schmidt was over here in July doing an event for VCs and angels, the goal was to build closer relationships
