Barbara Domayne-Hayman: A Chemist's Journey to Angel Investing and Entrepreneurial Success

Barbara Domayne-Hayman’s career journey is nothing short of inspiring. With a foundation in chemistry from Oxford, she transitioned from lab research to global marketing roles in agrochemicals before discovering her true passion: building and scaling biotech businesses. Now an angel investor, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Francis Crick Institute, and Chair of KQ Labs, Barbara shares how her scientific background, commercial acumen, and love for entrepreneurship have shaped her success in life sciences and health tech. In this interview, she reflects on her path, the importance of people in startup success, and the unique opportunities offered by the Cambridge Angels community.

Can you give a bit of background about yourself?

My initial training was in chemistry at Oxford. But after my doctorate I decided that I was not suited to a career in lab based research, and decided to go into marketing – albeit with a company focused on life sciences. I worked for 11 years at ICI / Zeneca / AstraZeneca in the Agrochemicals division, working internationally in sales and marketing and business strategy, including building the business in Central and Eastern Europe and as Marketing Director in France. I realised that Agrochemicals was entering a period of consolidation and cost cutting, and since I enjoyed building and growing businesses, it was time to leave.

An early mid-life crisis followed, while I figured out what to do next - and during my time at London Business School on the Sloan Fellowship programme, I stumbled on the world of entrepreneurship where in a ‘lightbulb moment’, I realised I could use my scientific background, my commercial experience and build businesses, which is what I love doing, if went into biotech. I have spent the last 20 years+ working in range of biotech companies - therapeutics and platform focused. For the last ten years I have been doing a ‘portfolio career’ – still having an operational role as Chief Business Officer of a biotech company, Autifony Therapeutics, while also working as Entrepreneur-in-residence at the Francis Crick Institute, where I co-founded and now chair KQ Labs, a leading accelerator for data driven health start-ups – we select ten companies per year from across the UK and now have an alumni portfolio of 60 companies, with Cohort #7 about to kick off! I have also been involved with Cambridge Enterprise Ventures as a member of their investment committee for many years, and on LifeArc Ventures investment committee.

How long have you been angel investing? What made you apply to join Cambridge Angels and what do you think makes it different?

I started angel investing when I became Chair of Puridify, a UCL spin-out, back in 2014, and I was very fortunate that this company, which had a brilliant pair of founders, was acquired by GE (now Cytiva) in 2017. I became increasingly interested in these early stage opportunities as I saw them through my role on the Cambridge Enterprise Seed Fund investment committee, and dipped my toes into EIS investments through ParkWalk funds. When I was asked if I would like to join CA in 2019, I jumped at the opportunity, even though living in London and having a very busy portfolio career, I wasn’t sure I would be able to get involved as much as I would like. In fact, during the pandemic, the activities and opportunities for engagement online were very creatively organised (some of which continue online today). and I felt increasingly part of the CA community.

Can you give a couple of examples of Cambridge Angels deals you've invested in that you're currently excited about?

The first investment I led for CA was into MFX (previously Microfluidx), a very exciting company which is accelerating development and manufacture for cell and gene therapies - manufacturability is a major obstacle for these treatments. Another company is Spirea, on whose board I represent CA investors. Spirea is in the super-hot area of antibody drug conjugates, and their next generation linker technology will expand the potential for ADCs, also into areas beyond cancer.

Do you have any sector focus and if you do, why?

Yes, I am very much focused on life sciences and health tech, my areas of personal expertise and the vast majority of my investments are in those areas. However, I have been seduced into investing into one music tech company (music being my other great passion) and also one space tech!

How do you tend to get involved with your investments?

I try to provide as much support as I can with introductions to relevant experts in the sector, or investors for the next funding round, or major pharma corporates where I have a strong network.

What have you learnt about being an Angel investor since you've started?

The knowledge in the CA community is incredible – if one person asks a question, within a couple of hours, there are multiple insightful and supportive answers and comments, and often a fascinating email discussion ensues. CA members are generally very willing to share their experiences, both positive ones and less so. It’s a fantastic network with such depth of experience.

What is an investment exit that you are most proud of?

The investment exit I am most proud of is still Puridify, where I met the founders before they had even incorporated the company. I joined their board as soon as the first serious investment came in, and I was Chair until the acquisition by GE (now Cytiva). But that success was all down to the amazing co-founders, their focus and determination to execute well. It’s always about the people!

Bridging Engineering, Commerce, and Angel Investment: An Interview with John Yeomans

John Yeomans’ journey from engineering to becoming a leading figure in angel investment is nothing short of inspiring. With a foundation in engineering from Cambridge University, John seamlessly transitioned into product sales, marketing, and eventually, investment banking during the dot-com boom. His early entrepreneurial experiences, coupled with a passion for supporting start-ups, laid the groundwork for his impactful role as a Cambridge Angel. In this candid interview, John delves into his multifaceted career, his approach to hands-on investment, and the lessons he’s learned from fostering innovative businesses across diverse sectors.

Can you give a bit of background about yourself?
I studied engineering at Cambridge. I moved from engineering to product sales and marketing before ending in finance, all in the telecom sector. Then I ran a dot com boom telecom investment banking team, taking it from nowhere into bulge bracket deal position. So engineering, commercialisation and finance is what I do.

When I was 24 I was also a cofounder of an office tech company – I did ok from it and had a small exit, but I also realised that there was zero entrepreneurial eco-system in those days. There were only about 4 early-stage VCs in the UK market and they judged by all the wrong criteria (minimal risk) so I vowed to come back to support the eco-system and I did; first through finance raising for growth companies and then, for the last 15 years, as an angel.

What made you apply to join Cambridge Angels?
I originally started investing in London. However my penchant was for deeper tech investing. A Cambridge Angel friend invited me along and I joined the group as I appreciated CA’s philosophy:

• Helping entrepreneurs

• Making returns

• Social aspect (valuable for both knowing the relevant experts to go to and building trust between investors).

CA is a fantastic membership organisation and I did my stint as chair of it between 2013 and 2016.

Can you give a couple of examples of CA deals you've invested in that you're currently excited about?
One of the first was Wazoku, in innovation management. I led the first round; it’s still growing and I’m chair. Most recently I led a round in plinth (formerly Time to Spare). This is an AI SaaS platform for the very uncomputerised but massive (£68bn) charity sector. Although the superficial investor view is that budgets are stretched in not-for-profits, in fact donors are very happy to pay for installing this software as it provides fantastic impact management and administration support and thereby increases the efficacy of their overall funding. It has grown 10x in revenue but only 3x in staffing since I led the seed investment round 18 months ago, and is actually profitable.

Another one is Beam (formerly Rovco), a tech-enabled service business. It uses proprietary AI, imaging, undersea survey and autonomous offshore vehicles in offshore wind farm planning and maintenance, aiming to transform the sector’s gross margins. It expects £30M+ turnover this year, has a forward order book already twice as big, and has grown from a seed round 6 years ago to over 200 employees.

Do you have any sector focus and if you do, why?
I believe that every angel needs to work out not just their sector focus but also their approach to investing, which for me is quite hands-on. My focus is around software/tech and telecoms and I am open to hardware investing. However, I avoid life sciences and extremely deep tech due to their high-risk, arguably more from the big preference waterfalls that come with multiple rounds of investing than from the tech.

As with many investors I seek innovative, game-changing businesses, but not necessarily £1Bn markets.

How do you tend to get involved with your investments?
My background was tech, moving to commercialisation and raising finance. That’s exactly the path that most start-ups progress through, and I try to help them as best I can, often through active board involvement.

I am also unusual as an angel in that I tend to stay on the board of my investments beyond the angel rounds. I think this is important as many VCs don’t have the risk tolerance that fast-growing companies require. Often there are gaps in the management team at the early stages – I can help fill those gaps until they can be recruited for and I also help get the corporate governance right from the start; you’d be surprised how often small mistakes e.g. around share issuance, can really trip up a company later on.

What have you learnt about being an Angel investor since you've started?
DON’T DO IT (unless you are really committed and sure). There are a load of hygiene factors that have to be right such as the pitch deck, plan and business model, but most important is the management team; their adaptability, drive, vision and openness to challenge.

Also as investors we need to recognise that the role of a founder is a lonely one. They are expected within say 5 years to acquire the range of skills that most people struggle to acquire in a lifetime: we need to help them and they need to be open to it.

I therefore look for cohesive teams with complementary skills and a shared history, and realised that the best investments often come when angels are involved and provide active management and coaching.

On the funding side there are still major limitations in UK venture financing from series A onwards, with too much herd instinct, too much short-termism and too little technological understanding. We could do with a few more multistage, mature VC funds of the kind you see in the States. By staying on boards I span the lifecycle, which gives insight into what needs to be put in place in the early stages.

I’ve also learnt never to be surprised, particularly by human nature. On a more positive note, investing and interacting with younger founders has helped me remain positive, and for an increasingly cynical guy in his 60s, that’s so important too.

Openness and transparency: an interview with Peter Cowley

Recently, Peter Cowley, the former Chair of Cambridge Angels, learned that he was entering the final stages of his battle with cancer. Peter, who has been a huge advocate of openness and transparency with his investing, his battles with addiction, loss and now this disease, wanted to have a final conversation with his fellow Cambridge Angel, Simon Blakey.

Peter, thank you for wanting to do this interview given you recent prognosis. Could you give a bit of your background to those who don’t know you?

Of course. I originally did a degree in software and engineering and worked in the software industry. I had always been exposed to the entrepreneurial lifestyle through my parents and I launched my first business in Bavaria in 1981; I have basically been unemployable since then! Over time I have set up a dozen businesses, with varying degrees of success, but the longest-running one is now 41 years old.

I was the financial cofounder of EPT Computing, where we achieved a 17x return in 3 years. After this success I was invited to join Cambridge Angels in 2009.

What has your experience been like with Cambridge Angels?

In short, life changing because there is such a vast amount of experience in the group and the senior people very much taught the then juniors, such as myself. I quickly worked out how to shadow the more experienced angels, such as Paul Anson, on deals, as well as working out which members I wanted to do deals with. Members such as Rajat Malhotra and Robert Sansom (amongst many others) have since become very close friends.

What have been the key drivers for your angel investing?

It has always been about the people…both my co-investors and the people I have invested in. As an angel there is a constant opportunity to learn, absorb fresh insights, and stay energised. Like entrepreneurship itself, you must enjoy the journey, not just the destination. Financial returns were never my main goal; there are far less stressful and less risky ways to make money!

And what have you got wrong or would have done differently?

I think it is worthwhile being aware that Angel investing is a drug…you can get addicted to it and I admit that, at some points I have spent (although a better term may be invested) way too much time (and probably money) on it to the detriment to loved ones.

With hindsight though what I couldn’t have sped up is the learning process; It is easy to put money into a business but the learning cycles are long and you need experience of failures in order to have an understanding of how to be a true value-add investor.

Given my technical background I have always been drawn to understanding core technology and routes to market. I was also prepared to embrace hardware but have realised that high-value hardware is a bit of a no-no for angel investors given the amount of funding that you often require to bring a product to market.

What have you learnt about both exit and failures?

I have served on 40 boards and attended over 1,300 board meetings. Around 85% of my failures have been due to companies struggling to find product-market fit before the investors give up. Down rounds are ok. Likewise, only one of my 20+ exits has been based on an EBITDA multiple; acquisitions mostly happen for strategic reason beyond simple financial metrics. Also, exits take time to prepare for…they don’t just happen.

As an investor you also need to know when to exit yourself. On boards my strength has been at the initial stages until the company has reached 30-40 people - then it is time for others to take over. Likewise, my returns have been massively enhanced by taking secondary sales when offered, allowing me to recycle the cash into other early-stage ventures. I am around 2.5x up cash on cash with a portfolio of unrealised investments but it took me 10.5 years to get to a cash-flow breakeven position. Interestingly, even with these stats, my median Enterprise Value on exit has only been $25-30M i.e. the exits don’t need to be huge to make a return if you get in at the right price.

What are your views on the size of an early-stage portfolio?

To be frank, I believe a portfolio should have at least 25 investments to balance the high-risk nature of early stage ventures . For a new starter this means that you need to do 5 investments per year over 5 years but you also need to be prepared to follow on; on average I have invested 2.26 times into each business I’ve backed. If you think that a £25k investment is the minimum you should invest to get a meaningful exit potential, the overall commitment over a few rounds could exceed £500k.

Finally, what has driven you to be so open when angel investing?

I wanted to be entrepreneurial and build a legacy to help others navigate this, often challenging, space. This drive became even stronger in 2022 with the death of my son Alan. With guidance from people like David Cleevely I decided to share my insights through books (“the Invested Investor”, “Public Success, Private Grief”, “Founder to Founder”) and podcasts (https://www.investedinvestor.com). I have since sold 4,500 books and the podcast has been listened to over 45,000 people to date.

I stopped investing into new businesses in 2020 (my 65th birthday year) and stopped investing completely in 2021 with my stage 4 cancer diagnosis. However, I am so happy that the work I have done has, and can, help educate the next generation of both investors and entrepreneurs.

Banking on Innovation - The Evolution from M&A to Angel Investor

In this piece, learn more about Cambridge Angels member James Viggers who shares his path to angel investing, and some of the lessons he has learned along the way. James is one of leading experts in the Cambridge Angels group on how companies should prepare for exit and has led talks for the Cambridge Angels portfolio companies on this topic.

Can you give a bit of background about yourself?
I’m in the relative minority at Cambridge Angels in that I have a background in finance rather than as an entrepreneur. I had what I tend to describe as a short, lucky career as an M&A banker in London and New York. An exit in 2012 gave me the freedom to take the skills I had learned and go back to my first intellectual passion, which was engineering. I wanted to find a way to work with high quality people on interesting projects in a flexible way – my wife and I love to travel and our old lifestyle of 80+ hour work weeks got in the way rather. Angel investing fit the bill perfectly.

What made you apply to join CA and what do you think makes it different?
I wish I could say that me applying to join CA was deeply strategic and thoughtful, but it wasn’t! Serendipity brought me to the door, then I was basically just hugely impressed by the membership.
There are many things that make CA unique, but at their core angel networks do three things: they find high quality investor members, they find high quality entrepreneurs looking for capital, and they bring them together in supportive, stimulating and hopefully entertaining ways. Other than a small error of judgement in letting me join, Cambridge Angels does all these things extremely well.

Can you give a couple of examples of CA deals you've invested in that you're currently excited about?
Don’t get me started – I could enthuse about my portfolio all day! I hugely enjoy seeing smart teams working with new technologies. On the basis that these are the latest two cheques I am writing:
• Silveray – high sensitivity flexible X-ray detectors built with innovative bismuth oxide nanoparticle technology. A great team headed up by Dan Cathie, looking to disrupt multiple markets and so far executing really well.
• Radiant Matter – very early stage. A blend of fashion and photonics. Mimics natural iridescence (think beetles’ wings) initially to make biodegradable sequins. The plan is to expand into to coatings, cosmetics etc. – anywhere people want shiny without damaging the environment.

Do you have any sector focus and if you do, why?
My personal investing preference is for early stage companies with strong and defensible IP at the more engineering end of technology – robotics, manufacturing, medical devices, materials science. On the positive side, these are areas I feel I understand fairly well with my engineering background. I believe it’s important when investing to stick to what you know (or think you know!). On the negative side, this does point me at relatively capital-intensive businesses. Raising large amounts of capital in cyclical markets with large investors taking preference shares is not without risks for an early stage angel investor!

How do you tend to get involved with your investments?
It very much depends. With Heartfelt Technologies I have taken the Chairman role. With others I send congratulations when I receive shareholder updates. Most are somewhere in between. I probably spend a third of my investing time doing favours for portfolio companies, both mine and others’. One thing I do like to do is help companies think through their long term exit planning – basically I have a wish list of what I would have wanted my old M&A clients to have done well before they hired me. There are a few relatively easy things that can help smooth the path to exit if done a couple of years in advance.

What have you learnt about being an Angel investor since you've started?
Oh, where to start? People have been so generous with their time and advice since I joined Cambridge Angels. I won’t repeat the excellent advice of Andy Phillipps in his interview but there are a couple of additional things to add to the list:
• Pace yourself at the start. It’s tempting to try to outperform at the beginning by reading all the business plans and rushing into all the investments. Really good ones don’t come along every day and even the best investments sometimes require multiple rounds of funding. Plus, you learn so much from watching the portfolio and the management teams develop at every stage, all of which feeds back over the years to make you a (hopefully) better investor.
• Celebrate the successes. The brutal truth of angel investing is that the majority of the companies we invest in are likely to fail. With those numbers in mind, it’s important to celebrate progress and success as much as you rue delay and failure, otherwise this game might make you unhappy!

Is there an investment exit you are most proud of?
I have had one great early exit that returned the portfolio and more, but it was a special situation and not really a classic angel investment so to me it didn’t prove the model.
So, an actual early stage start up that I invested in that has positively exited within the eight years that I have been doing this? Not one. I think there is a lesson here: I personally believe that as an angel you should be prepared to invest for 10 years before maybe seeing some returns. It is critical to invest with enough patience and hold back enough capital to do this. Otherwise you can time yourself out – bad for the individual and for the group as all that investing experience can be lost.
In the interim, everything is looking very strong on paper. However, a lesson I learned in my M&A days is that until the cash is in the bank it isn’t real. Let’s wait and see!

From antibodies to angel investments - the entrepreneur to investor path of Cambridge Angel, Jim Warwick

Jim Warwick, an active Cambridge Angels investor, shared his path from Computer Science grad to technology investor, via a successful career at Abcam. Read more about Jim's journey in this interview.

Can you give a bit of background about yourself?
I’m originally from the South Coast near Portsmouth, and came to Cambridge to do a Computer Science degree in 1983 when that was still a novelty for the University (not viewed as a “proper” subject back then). After graduating, I spent the initial part of my career in a telecoms consultancy before getting involved in a start-up that was sourcing and selling antibodies for life sciences research. That company, Abcam, did very well and I exited it at the end of 2016 to get back to working with smaller companies, ultimately as an angel investor.
I’m married - I met my wife at university and she is now an academic at the Institute of Criminology here in Cambridge where we have lived for the past 30 years, and we have two grown up “kids”.

How long have you been angel investing? What made you apply to join CA and what do you think makes it different?
I joined Cambridge Angels in early 2018, which is when I became serious about making angel investments. It was always the start-up phases of companies that I found exciting; the journey of transforming a (hopefully) brilliant idea into a (hopefully) world-beating business is fascinating. Cambridge Angels is great, being a relatively small group of investors (which helps, because you can realistically know each angel individually) but having a large proportion of exited entrepreneurs who’ve been along this path before and are able to offer more than just seed capital to a start-up business.

Can you give a couple of examples of CA deals you've invested in that you're currently excited about?
Because of my Abcam background, I’ve stayed involved in the life sciences research sector; the complexities of the processes that go on at a cellular level to enable us all to stay alive never ceases to amaze me. One of my current investments is Qkine – which works on creating growth factor proteins. All the cells within our body contain a complete genome for expressing any tissue type or cellular function and come originally from what is termed (pluri-potent) stem cells. The process by which stem cells develop is controlled by a cocktail of signalling proteins (growth factors) which, depending on order and timing, govern this process. Being able to control this in the lab, enables us to grow samples of tissue and indeed mini-organs (organoids) which are a window into disease development and treatment. It’s also a cornerstone for new industries such as cultivated meat. It’s an extraordinary thing!

Another business I’m invested in and excited about is Nova Pangaea which has a process that converts woody/agricultural plant waste into sustainable biochemicals and potentially biofuels – they’re now part of a project with British Airways to scale up their process for sustainable aviation fuel production; aviation being a high-profile area we need to address for the climate emergency. They’re not the whole solution here, but nor is anything else. I believe the answer here has to come from many projects like this all making their contribution; it’s important stuff.

Do you have any sector focus and if you do, why?
Because of my background I’m pretty sector agnostic and I remain a sucker for really neat pieces of technology, which is not always a good indicator of what will make a good business (!). Recently I’ve been more interested in climate change and net-zero oriented investments. That’s partly because it’s a really important problem that we need to solve, and partly because it is an area ripe for innovation and disruption – ideal for the right start-ups. There are issues with the sector, not the least because of the capital intensive nature of some of the endeavours, but these are being addressed and in the meantime there are some really exciting technologies being developed.

How do you tend to get involved with your investments?
Mostly I’m a hands-off investor after the due diligence stages, but I do sit on the boards of two of my start-up investments. Part of the Cambridge Angels ethos is to help and advise entrepreneurs, so hopefully some of that informal feedback via CA helps here.

What have you learnt about being an Angel investor since you've started?
It takes longer than you think to get an exit.

Is there an investment exit you are most proud of and/or an investment horror story you would be prepared to share?
Actually not too many horror stories, mostly the companies that have failed I feel sad about – the founders have generally remained engaged and enthusiastic up until the end and it’s a painful experience for them to realise their company is doomed. I’ve only had one deal where the directors were (in my opinion) crooks - bleeding funds from the company to line their own pockets, whilst re-assigning the company IP to other companies they owned. This was an investment that was made more at arms-length; I now take much more care over where the company has come from and who knows the founders. This is another important benefit of working with a group like Cambridge Angels.

A Ford between Oxford and Cambridge. An interview with David Ford...

In this interview, Oxford-based angel investor David Ford speaks about his biochemistry background, his path to angel investing and the importance of functional management teams as a key criterion for success.

Can you give a bit of background about yourself?

I’m Oxford-based, as my Cambridge-based fellow members never let me forget, and an active private investor. I studied biochemistry at university before starting in the City, initially as a public equities analyst covering pan-European biotech stocks, before moving into the private capital space (via a stint in San Francisco in the early 2000s). I spent the majority of my career with Intermediate Capital Group where I headed up their investment research group as well as looking at strategic growth opportunities, including expanding into the US and Australia. I started dabbling in angel investing, in a small way, but I found it incredibly rewarding and I met so many good people along the way. This gave me the confidence to take a leap and focus full time on early-stage investing.

How long have you been angel investing? What made you apply to join CA and what do you think makes it different?

I have been an active angel investor since 2015, with a full-time focus from 2017. I joined CA in 2018 having previously attended a dinner as a guest of Andy Richards. The one thing that struck me in the first dinner discussion was the level of knowledge and experience across the room, all of which was focused on making good investment decisions and helping companies to succeed. This focus, coupled with the entrepreneurial background of the majority of the members (not me sadly!), really does differentiate CA as an angel group. Taking in money from investors is actually the easy bit – making a success of your venture is far harder still and having experienced investors behind you can definitely help.

Can you give a couple of examples of CA deals you've invested in that you're currently excited about?

I’m currently Chair of ViaNautis Bio (formerly SomaServe), which raised capital from CA in 2019, 2021 and again in 2023, where a good number of members participated in their larger Series A financing. I originally lead their 2019 financing round when they were spun out of UCL. The company has a proprietary nanoparticle delivery technology for delivery of genetic medicines, specifically across the blood brain barrier. This platform tech and an internal pipeline of drug programmes enabled them to attract the interest of blue-chip VCs and we raised $25m in 2023, in what was a tough fundraising environment. The whole area of RNA delivery is exciting and gaining a lot of attention across the industry.

Do you have any sector focus and if you do, why?

I’m solely focused on the life sciences / healthcare sector. Given my biochemistry background it’s an obvious area of intellectual interest for me, but it’s also a sector with very attractive investment fundamentals driven by acute societal need and new technologies developing at breakneck speed. It really does feel like a privilege to be able to interact with smart entrepreneurs looking to do something genuinely innovative and exciting.

How do you tend to get involved with your investments?

I’ve made around 25 investments to-date and I’m on the Board of a small number. I tend to get involved with my investments if I think I can add some value, usually around putting in place a governance framework, helping with investor discussions, etc. I don’t feel the need for a formal role, but I do always want to stay close to my investments, at least initially – partially because I’m interested in what they’re doing, but more importantly because there will likely be future financing needs or strategic questions that need to be answered. I want to help wherever I can, although there is also a balance to be struck where you need to give the founder(s) time and space to develop themselves and their ideas.

What have you learnt about being an Angel investor since you've started?

This one’s quite easy to answer – it takes far longer, and probably costs more, than I originally thought to see evidence of progress in my portfolio! Diversification is also very important and I think it’s important to spread your capital across a decent number of investments.

Is there an investment exit you are most proud of and/or an investment horror story you would be prepared to share?

I’ll focus on the failures as I strongly believe this is where you learn the most as an investor…..rather than one specific horror story, of which there are some(!), the unifying theme of my most disappointing investments to-date has been management team dysfunctionality. This has largely been due to personality clashes, unwillingness to be coached, etc, and is very definitely the reason I spend a lot of time during due diligence before completing an investment getting to know the management team and their respective personalities. The most frustrating thing of all is seeing an investment fail not because the idea or technology didn’t work, but because of poor execution. That’s a failure of management and disappoints me far more than if an idea fails because the science doesn’t work (that’s the kind of risk as angel investors we do take).

Tracing the path of a founder turned investor - An interview with Anna Kissin

It may seem that not a lot could link Manchester United, the world of publishing, digital marketing, and advanced fuels, but that’s only because you might not yet have met Cambridge Angels member, Anna Kissin.  In this brief interview with Anna, she talks about her own entrepreneurial journey, how she found her way into angel investing, and her excitement about Cambridge Angels portfolio company, Nova Pangaea

Could you give us a bit about your background?

My initial career path was a traditional one of Wharton MBA followed by consultancy at Oliver Wyman in New York. However, I was itching for a change so in 1993 my husband and I started a publishing company, where I was responsible for finance and operations. Initially we won the contract to do the Manchester United Magazine (as no other traditional publisher would take it on) which became a huge success. This catapulted us into other publishing opportunities for the likes of Chelsea football club and even the Spice Girls as well as more traditional book publishing. When Manchester United won the treble in 1999 I knew this was the ideal time to sell and we exited just a couple of months later to Future Publishing.

After this sale we then set up a digital marketing business, Zone, when digital marketing was still very much in its infancy. In retrospect we were probably about six years too early! We definitely lived hand-to-mouth at times but over 17 years grew the business organically and through several national and international acquisitions, helped by private equity cash, to a company employing 250 people and over £25M turnover – at the time the largest digital marketing consultancy in the UK – before we sold to Cognizant in 2017.

Tell us about your angel investing?

I started angel investing about 15 years ago, but I didn’t have a lot of cash back then and my focus was really on Zone. Initial investment successes included Moonpig.com. I then started to spend more time on angel investing once we exited back in 2017, which is also when I joined CA. I now have a portfolio of 15-odd companies and some, such as ScreenCloud, are doing very well, but it all takes time!

I don’t have a particular focus in my angel investing. I tend to avoid biotech because I am completely unqualified to judge the technology but am open to just about everything else. I do have a particular soft spot for unsexy industrial sectors overlooked by other investors.

How do you get involved with your investments?

Like many of my fellow CA members, during my career I’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge useful to start-ups. I tend to get involved with investee companies where I have previously worked with the founders. In such cases, I like to get my hands dirty and take on quasi-operational roles, sometime for periods of a few years, but I am clear that I now never want to go into an office on a day-to-day basis.

What do you like about CA?

Most obviously, the potential deal flow; I have been extremely impressed with the range, quality and number of the pitches that comes into the CA network and reviewing each one is a learning experience in itself.

Closely following this is the benefit I gain from the combined experience that other angels bring to bear during the informal and formal pitch sessions; the breadth of knowledge shown in the Q&As at these sessions can be quite a thing to behold! And of course, other angels are a fantastic and generous source of advice if it’s ever needed.

Which of your CA portfolio companies particularly excites you at the moment?

My personal favourite is Nova Pangaea Technologies, which has been going from strength to strength, most recently winning a huge £9 million in funding from the government’s Advanced Fuels Fund in partnership with British Airways and LanzaJet. I met the company at my introductory informal pitch with CA six years ago and was so impressed with the experience of the team and the product offering that I committed on the spot. They haven’t disappointed and I expect great things from them in the future.

The path to a Double Dragon - an interview with John Snyder

We are delighted to publish a short interview with John Snyder. John is an original founding member of Cambridge Angels and a 2x exited entrepreneur, the latter being a ‘double dragon’ for its backer IQ Capital.

Can you give us a bit about your background?

I have spent my whole career in the field of information retrieval and search keyword technology. My first company was Muscat, a Cambridge University spin out, which was in the initial wave of search engine technology and which I sold in 1997 aged 31 to MAID plc. This made my sole VC investor a 10x return, and angel investor Hermann Hauser 3x within six months. MAID was London & Nasdaq listed, and I used Muscat to build a new internet search engine (twice the size of Alta Vista and at the same time as newco Google was just starting out). Despite arranging $35m to spin out the business unit, the CEO blocked the deal, so I then had my first and only ‘proper job’ employed by Cambridge University, my former alma mater. Here I helped the Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre from 2001 to 2003 in preparing University spinout entrepreneurs by surrounding deeply technical founders with experienced mentors, such as Robert Sansom, Andy Richards, Sherry Coutu and more. Several of these eventually became founder members of Cambridge Angels back in 2001.

David Cummings, Martin Bloom and I worked on raising a new venture fund with an accelerator, but I also itched to get back to being an entrepreneur again and my second company was Grapeshot, a contextual intelligence platform, which we sold to Oracle Corporation in 2018 and which created a ‘double dragon’ return for our backer, IQ Capital, with an average x15 return for all our investors. Both companies were founded with Dr Martin Porter, one of the most cited academics in IR search algorithms.

What do you see as one of your key skills in the business creation process?

Martin Porter was definitely the academic brains in both companies. My studies had been in Maths, Physics and Geography before studying Anthropology and from this I see my role as taking a piece of deep, core, technology and finding its place in the market. Rather than try to sell to many companies and deliver high revenues early, which lots of VCs encourage because of fund dynamics; with both start-ups I deliberately selected one or two multinational organizations and then went deep with them, often with minimal revenues to begin with, to really understand how they worked, their decision-making processes and their common pain points and to then craft our product around this. Reuters was the guineapig for Muscat and IBM played this role for Grapeshot. Both Reuters and IBM eventually became key early accounts for us, providing brand credibility and giving us what I call the “peacock effect” (looking bigger and more attractive than we might have been).

It sounds as though you deliberately went slow in finding product-market fit but how did this then fit with obtaining external funding?

Grapeshot raised a total of $22M but actually raised this in little $1-2m chunks, and often, but only when required. For us capital efficiency (and accurate forecasting) was key. Often entrepreneurs are advised to ‘raise as much as you can’ but there is a lot of vanity attached to a large raise with little point in having money sitting around, unused, in the bank. We raised when we needed to off the back of a positive growth story, and this gave us flexibility; we were able to turn down one $10M investment offer and another from Reid Hoffman when the terms were not right. It was tough though, as when we started

Grapeshot I took out a huge mortgage to fund it and then borrowed more to enable me to lead a further funding round. Here it really helped having some supporting/contributing fellow Cambridge Angels around me at the outset, so we could be the ‘term makers’ rather than the ‘term takers’ in one of the early rounds. Cambridge Angels who invested early in Grapeshot include David Cummings, John Taysom and Sherry Coutu.

You regularly talk about the importance of a corporate culture. Can you expand on this?

I was once in a very high-powered dinner with the Dean of Cambridge University’s MBA Judge Business School with the co-founders of ARM, Abcam and other notable Cambridge entrepreneurs around the table. The Dean professed that the ‘numbers’ were more important than ‘culture’ in their business MBA case-studies, and he was immediately rounded upon by all the dinner participants for being absolutely wrong! Your culture is the backbone on which a business is built and inspires employees to believe in its mission. When we were building Grapeshot we did an early internal staff and external customers audit and the three things that came back were ‘Simplicity’ (i.e. no acronyms), ‘Transparency’ (i.e. say when doing well, or badly) and ‘Faith in People (i.e. go and make mistakes, we trust you). Culture became a particular focus as we rapidly scaled Grapeshot from a 100 to 200-person company; every new hire had to spend a week in Cambridge and when we opened an office in a new geography we initially prioritized exporting home-grown talent who understood our business and culture into those locations, alongside hiring local experience. In New York our initial team was plucked from our most junior ranks of London staff, prior to hiring a US Sales Director, and scaling with that culture transposed. Some young staff in New York would later swap with London staff, not just their job location, but also their apartment digs. I believe that this focus on one culture was fundamental in contributing to our growth success.

Your learnings from the last 20 years of angel investing with Cambridge Angels are worthy of another post, but could you give us a couple of companies currently in you CA portfolio that you are particularly excited about and why?

A ‘standard’ CA deal is where entrepreneurs come in and pitch their company to a group of angel investors who then go away and discuss it as a group, often over a dinner at one of the Cambridge colleges. There are plenty of rigorous questions from the array of angels who are exited entrepreneurs with deep operational experience, but we like to be a bit more considerate than seen on Dragon’s Den! One of my CA portfolio deals is Qureight who curate large volumes of medical data alongside AI-powered decision making, with a focus on lung and heart disease. I like the CEO and his team and have been very impressed with the commercial traction they have already had. It is a race to get the best data and the best algorithms at work to fast-track key decisions at pharmaceutical companies, contract research organisations and hospitals and they are currently raising their Series A.

A Cambridge Angels ‘Halo’ deal is where two or more Cambridge Angels invest in a company which might not even reach a formal pitch. I became the first investor into Vitrue Health which provides a tech-driven, fully managed service to reduce musculoskeletal problems like back and neck pain in desk workers. All while making you DSE compliant for remote, office and hybrid teams. Vitrue has subsequently raised institutional funds and growing rapidly. Why I like it? Health and safety at work, including home workers, is highly regulated now. A compliance agenda coupled with making sure your staff are not absent off work due to pain and ancillary conditions or illness, becomes a double benefit to employers, who are already obliged to comply each year with health audits, support for staff and compliance paperwork.

5 questions...An interview with Cambridge Angels member, Andy Phillipps

What does the founder of ActiveBooking.com (that eventually became Booking.com) and Chair of Toptable.com (that became Opentable Europe) have to say about angel investing?

In this amazingly insightful interview, Cambridge Angel member, Andy Phillipps, talks about the lessons he has learnt from 80+ early-stage investments along with why he’s excited about ThoughtMachine, Paragaf and Nyobott – 3 companies in his Cambridge Angels portfolio.

Can you give a bit of a background about yourself?

I did my undergrad and PhD in Materials Science at Cambridge and then worked in industrial research in the semi-conductor, steel and ceramics industries in the US and Europe, before (slightly incongruously) co-founding a hotel booking company; ActiveBooking.com. We grew that to become the largest online hotel booking company in Europe before sale to Priceline and a subsequent merger with Bookings.org to form what is now Booking.com. After leaving as CEO, I joined Toptable.com as chairman. We also sold that to Priceline (and it became the basis for Opentable Europe). Since then I’ve split my time between teaching (LBS, INSEAD and guest lecturer at Stanford), angel investing and working with high growth businesses. I have made approx. 80 early-stage investments with a focus on market places, deep tech and clean tech.

What made you apply to join CA and what do you think makes it different?

John Bates, an LBS professor and angel investor, once described a successful angel investor as “someone who hasn’t quite lost all their money before they’ve learned how it works”. And with investments often taking over a decade to exit (positively or negatively) it can be very hard to learn from your own experience, meaning it makes a lot of sense to find experienced fellow angels. Members of Cambridge Angels have made well over a thousand angel deals in total, meaning there’s an incredible depth of expertise. It particularly appealed because of the preponderance of exited entrepreneurs and their work to help the UK tech ecosystem more broadly.

Can you give a couple of examples of deals you’ve invested in that you’re particularly excited about at the moment?

In the context of Cambridge Angels, Thought Machine, Paragraf and Nyobolt spring to mind. Thought Machine was founded by a former member of Cambridge Angels, Paul Taylor. It provides core banking and payments technology built natively for the cloud, with a wealth of tier 1 banking clients around the world. Paul’s vision for the company is incredibly ambitious and exciting. Paragraf is one of the first companies in the world to produce graphene electronic devices at scale, with the ultimate vision to realise order of magnitude improvements in transistor processing speeds. Nyobolt has developed ultra-rapid charging technology. They recently demonstrated a sports car based on the Lotus Elise which can fully charge in just 6 minutes. Whilst there’s a long way to go, all of them have the potential to be significant UK success stories (and have also been backed by iQ Capital, a corporate member of Cambridge Angels).

What have you learnt about being an Angel investor since you’ve started?

Rather depressingly, I’ve re-discovered most of the stuff I was told in the first place. It would have saved me a lot of money to listen more carefully. I’ve repeated them below in case I can save someone else some money:

Teams: Everyone says that they invest in fantastic teams (and it certainly seems better than the alternative of investing in crap teams?). Being a bit more specific about it, I look for evidence that the individuals have achieved exceptional things previously, that they have a high clock speed and that they have the intellectual horsepower to learn and adapt.

Long tail and Babe Ruth effect: this is documented to death but it took me a long time to even begin to understand it (thanks Simon Murdoch and John Taysom). Unlike the bell curve distribution in public markets, early-stage investments have a very long tail, which means that nearly all your portfolio value is often accounted for by a very few investments. For example, from over 2500 Y-Combinator investments, over 50% of the value was in 3 companies (according to work by Jared Heyman in 2021). Good investors often don’t have fewer losses, but do have bigger winners. It means that unless you’re exceptionally selfconfident(?!), you need to build a portfolio, plus you’re looking for companies that can generate out-sized returns.

Thinking in bets: (with thanks to Annie Duke). There’s a very human instinct to look at investments (bets) that go right and wrong and conclude that it was good or bad investment. However, if I bet on the ace of spades being the next card and win, that doesn’t mean it was a sensible long-term strategy. It needs many data points to work that out, which most individual angels don’t have on their own. For me, that means I have to proactively engage with many people who have relevant experience to fleece them for advice and knowledge. Or be very, very lucky.

Follow ons: Most VCs will advise that you should “back your winners” (and it certainly sounds better than “back your losers”?). As an angel, I can have trouble doing this. Winners are often not clear, and if they are, they get great term sheets, are over-subscribed and the original investors can often be squeezed out. This means that as an angel, my share of a successful company is mainly determined by my share in the first round. If I can subsequently invest significantly, it may be a sign that it’s not a winner. I have early data that my follow-on investments are significantly less successful (my returns drop significantly after the second round) and my tentative conclusion is that I should commit more of my capital early on, but would be very keen to learn from others here.

5 questions… An Interview with the current chair of Cambridge Angels, Pam Garside

Our wonderful Chair, Pam Garside has been a member of Cambridge Angels for 6 years and took on the chair role in 2021. In this brief interview, we asked Pam 5 questions to learn a bit more about her and her angel investing journey.

Q. Can you give a bit of a background about yourself?

A. I originally did a Zoology degree at Durham and then joined the NHS graduate training Scheme, and after working at St Thomas’s went to graduate school in the US. I became a management consultant in the health sector and this is where my whole career has focused;  helping private sector companies understand the UK and US health systems and also to ‘sell’ into them. I fell into angel investing after a couple of companies started paying me in equity about 15 years ago when digital health was really taking off. I have taught at the Judge Business School for 25 years and am on the Cambridge Enterprise Seed Funds Investment Committee. I also co-chair the Cambridge Health Network (Senior people in Health in the UK), and sit on a variety of boards.  

Q. What made you apply to join CA and what do you think makes it different?

A. This is an interesting one! I didn’t apply but was actively sought out by Simon Thorpe (former Cambridge Angels chair) back in 2016 who realised the membership was too male/pale/stale and needed to be reinvigorated to stay relevant. I took a bit of persuading as I am not an exited entrepreneur which most Angels are, but am now so pleased that I did. One of my goals as chair is to continue to reinvigorate and diversify our membership.

As far as the Cambridge Angels’ difference goes, I am very clear on this. Three quarters of members are exited entrepreneurs and so the depth of experience start up founders can call on is second to none. Also, because the group is small (60 max) and we hold multiple types of events, we tend to get to know and trust each other, share deal flow and be quite collegiate in respect of due diligence, which is great as otherwise angel investing can be quite a lonely business. 

Q. Can you give a couple of examples of deals you’ve invested in that you’re particularly excited about at the moment

A. Of course. Unlikely AI is one of them, founded by another Cambridge Angel member William Tunstall-Pedoe (who built and launched Amazon’s Alexa) and has since raised a $18M series A. Unlikely AI is still in stealth and I don’t claim to understand the details, but it provides a very credible alternative to current LLMs. Here Cambridge Angels membership gave me access to a deal I would have otherwise not have had a chance to either look at or understand.

Another one is Kalium Health which is closer to my medtech experience as it is creating a simple test of kidney function via measurement of blood electrolyte levels, so patients don’t have to visit hospital as they do currently. It has great social worth and potentially very valuable to the health system.

Q. What have you learnt about being an Angel investor since you’ve started?

A. So much. Alongside the ‘regular’ things such as Term Sheets and deal structuring, talking to fellow Angels has reinforced that I should go with my gut about the founder’s ability being one of the most important predictors of success. I have also learnt from painful experience that choosing the right co-investors can be critical and to ensure that all investors are all on the same page on the plans for the company…

Q. What is the one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring heathtech founder?

A. Make sure you are solving a big problem, that your solution is scalable and that you really do understand the health market you are selling into!