Raising money for a startup is hard. Raising a great VC round requires a combination of the art of storytelling and the science of a rigorous process (to pin down meetings and build fomo amongst investors). The process is very important, but it’s also boring and hard. …

19, 26 and 21. These are the ages at which Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Evan Spiegel (Snapchat) and Steve Jobs (Apple) started their companies, respectively. There’s a common belief that successful founders start their businesses in their twenties. Paul Graham, co-founder of YCombinator (a successful US startup accelerator and investor) said…

Earlier this week we held the tongue-twisting, inaugural, bi-annual, multi-fund office hours, The Seed Stage: a joint effort by six of the best early-stage venture capital funds in the UK, and Wayra — Telefonica’s start-up accelerator. Episode 1 — True — Playfair — Fuel — Ascension — JamJar — Wayra …

People’s response to bad news is usually more extreme than to good news, which provides an opportunity. What this is saying is that people are more upset about a 5% decrease in one-day than they are happy about a 5% increase, causing a partly irrational sell-off. This reflects a kind…

I remember when I first downloaded Uber, it was seen as the poster-child of the startup ecosystem and I was blown away mostly by its user experience. The payment screen was so effortless that I honestly thought I was being scammed — I thought it couldn’t be so easy to…

By Hector Mason An oft-debated topic in VC is that of what software to use to help us manage our portfolio and dealflow, find investments, and generally make our lives easier. So I thought I’d write a short piece on what we use and what we think of it. …

By Hector Mason I spent the week before last (at time of writing) in Croatia on boats with a bunch of European venture capitalists, courtesy of Draper Esprit, Partech and Episode1, who sent me. …

By Hector Mason Webiny is a CMS for serverless development. They are building an opensource platform on which developers can build apps and deploy them to serverless infrastructure, AWS’s fastest-growing division. I first came across Webiny a few months ago and was intrigued by what they were doing so decided…

By Hector Mason What we mean when we say it’s too early Being transparent At Episode1, we make a point of being open with the entrepreneur. Where possible, we will explain why we’re not investing as this will help them hone future pitches. …