Getting venture funding can be a daunting and opaque process. To help create some transparency and context, we thought we’d share our selection steps to help you understand what to expect.
- Screening – Once you reach out, we’ll ask for a pitch-deck on your business. We see >400 deals a year and the majority get screened out at this point. This doesn’t mean you won’t get funding, but likely your business isn’t the right fit for our strategy. Your time is precious, and we don’t want you barking up the wrong tree. Reasons you may be screened out include:
- Impact and commercials aren’t explicitly linked (see Emily’s blog on what we look for in impact),
- You don’t fit into one of our four themes (Environmental Sustainability, Mental health and wellbeing, Arts/ Music/ Entertainment, Equality),
- You’re at the wrong stage (still working your idea out or Series B and beyond).
- Your business appears more SME than venture style. You may want to consider revenue-based financing or private equity style investment.
- First meeting – We’ve read your deck and decided your business fits our strategy. You’ll have a 30 min initial meeting with one or two of our team members. We will be discussing your business at our next management meeting and deciding whether to progress into due diligence. Again, most businesses won’t make it past this screen. To pass here you’ll need us to unanimously agree that you’re making a positive impact and have most of us believe this is your life’s work/ you have strong founder market fit, and we need to believe your business can 10x. We’re writing a separate blog on what we look for in early-stage businesses to give you some more transparency here.
- Management meeting – We like what we see! Congrats, you’ve made it most of the way through our process. We’ve invited you to present at our team meeting. You’ll be presenting in front of David Albert, Kirsty Albert, Emily Albert, Ingrid Albert, Glenn Bartlett, and Lisa Fedorenko – you can read more about each of us here. At this point, take your deck as read, we’ve all been thinking and exploring your business. Please prepare for a conversational pitch. We recommend you use the first 5 minutes to present your why and 2-minute pitch. It’s best to reserve 20 minutes for questions and answer briefly to ensure we can go through as much of your business as possible. After this step, we have a team discussion and decide whether to proceed (at which point you’ll be appointed a lead contact from our team) or decline for now. Either way, you’ll get a detailed call with feedback or next steps.
- Investment Committee – Congrats, you’re one of around 20 companies that have made it this far (<6% of ventures make it this far through our process). We’ve asked you to present to our investment committee. This will be a similar meeting to step (3), however, you’ll also be presenting to Andrew Rothery, Kylie Charlton, and Will Richardson. This also means we’ve really looked closely at your business and put together our own internal investment recommendation. We’re believers in your mission and at this point, we put on our black hat to ensure that everything checks out.
- Due diligence – At this point, we will be asking for more information and going deep in our analysis. We may ask you for: a data room, customer calls, your go-to-market strategy, your financial accounts, a financial model, your internal policy documents, your pipeline, your contracts, amongst others.
- Term sheet – Congrats, we’re keen to partner with you. We’re either happy to follow another lead’s terms or have provided you with our own term sheet. We don’t take this step lightly so expect to be welcoming you into our portfolio shortly.
- Legal due diligence/ long forms – At this point, you’ll be talking to Kirsty Albert for all the legal checks. We’re finalizing terms with you, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.
- Cash and onboarding – Everyone’s signed and it’s time to welcome you into our portfolio. You’ll hear from our finance team for account details, we’ll put you on our website, schedule a call to define an impact measurement for your business and be doing our very best to help you succeed in your dream.
