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.

1.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.

2. 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.

 3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. Investment exit you are most proud of and/or an investment horror story you would be prepared to share (anonymous if necessary)

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!