Eighteen months ago, I waved goodbye to San Francisco and moved my life over to the rain-sodden streets of London. My husband’s British – that’s love for you.
I wasn’t just changing cities, but also careers. Leaving Twitter, I had just joined Chapter One, an early-stage venture capital fund founded by Jeff Morris, the former VP of Product and Monetization at Tinder who had been integral to Tinder’s rise from a small app to a headline-breaking IPO. Jeff knew how to spot and turn product-market-fit into enormous scale, and I was excited to work with him.
The day before my flight, I started to have second thoughts – powerful ones. I had bounced around from city to city in my twenties: New York to London, back to New York, a stint in Los Angeles, and eventually, San Francisco. I hadn’t felt hesitant about any of those moves – why was this time different?
The biggest part of venture capital is people, not money. You need to know the actual humans behind the companies, technologies, markets, and funds. That’s how you source deals, make sense of the industry, and ultimately help your portfolio companies as best as you can. Knowing people is the lifeblood of a VC.
The problem was that I was moving away from what I saw to be the greatest concentration of the people I needed to know. The gravitational pull of the Valley is undeniable, where access to capital drags in amazing talent from around the world, who in turn create the companies that capital wants to be around. It’s an old story, but that doesn’t make it any less important.
This post is about why I no longer have concerns about being “left behind.” Living in London, I’ve learned being here can bring huge benefits to the fund. And the reason for that is the Valley has created one type of concentration of people, London offers other types of concentrations, ones I only learned the importance of when I moved here.
Concentrations of academic brilliance. Venture starts with good ideas and brilliant people. While Stanford was the catalyst for the ecosystem, London has one of the greatest concentrations of academic institutions with Imperial, UCL, Kings, SOAS, London Business School at its doorstep, and Cambridge and Oxford only an hour away.
Concentrations of regulatory thought and action: For the past half-decade, Europe has taken a leading role in regulating the technologies that we use: the internet, social media, and now AI and crypto. It has implemented a suite of legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR), the UK Online Safety Bill, The AI Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the approval of the UK’s Financial Services and Markets Bill. These laws serve a broad range of objectives but widely aim to protect users from online harm, establish risk classifications, ensure a higher degree of competition within the digital market, and recognize crypto as a regulated activity. Being in London provides a unique opportunity and insight into this new era of digital regulation, one which, most likely, the rest of the world will follow suit.
Concentrations of different cultures and diversity. Every city has a unique history, and the communities that call London home, are not the same as those who say the same of San Francisco or any US-based location. Centuries of migration have shaped London’s linguistic and cultural landscape to be one of the most diverse and varied in the world with over 30% of residents born outside of the UK. Concentrations of very different people living and working together matter in lots of ways, of course, far beyond venture capital. But it matters for this field too – not just for the people I get to know, but for all the founders, technologies, companies, and ideas that come out of different cultural backgrounds.
Diversity in distribution and concentrations allow VCs to have different forms of information inflows, human links, and networks. Our job is to merge and make sense of it all; gain insights and make decisions on both a local and global scale. The value-add may be finding new networks in London, or it might be taking what you learn from a new city and applying it to companies in the Valley.
Chapter One’s home base is Los Angeles with an office in Santa Monica, but our investment team is remote – and we see this as an advantage. We span across Los Angeles, New York, Austin, and London, and know that exceptional talent and companies can be created anywhere.
And with human networks in mind – I’d love to connect! Whether that be to grab a coffee in London or jump on a Zoom call from wherever that may be.
I invest in AI, ML, data, and infrastructure early-stage startups across all verticals. You can find me on Twitter @seidtweets or LinkedIn.
Spot-on observations about both the differences between the SF/Silicon Valley ecosystem and ethos, and those of the London/UK/EU. Each brings something important, materially and philosophically, to the game, and ultimately the "truth" of what should work optimally is somewhere in the middle - a mix of both. I made the same move (SF to UK/London) several months ago after spending my university time and most of my career in the Silicon Valley and SF business arenas. (Although I have made a slight shift from the VC world into combination of advisory and investing.)
One thing you didn't mention that is worthy of note is the difference in attitudes to risk between the two sides of the pond (both taking risk as well as recognizing and managing/mitigating it). What sometimes seems like risk aversion over here is sometimes more a case of wanting to understand the risks and address them, in order to improve the odds of success. UK/EU business cultures have historically not looked fondly upon failed businesses, whereas the Silicon Valley startup view is that failure is a badge of honor and experience. Contrast that with the SV "move fast and break things, damn the torpedoes" approach.
Failure is certainly educational (often more so than success), but success is till the goal, which is why I believe recognizing and seizing opportunity (like most VCs aim to do) while also identifying and mitigating risk (like main-line private equity managers do) is the happy medium that can result when the thinking from both sides of the pond are brought together.