Eileen Burbidge MBE - From early Skype employee to becoming the Queen of British VC

founders, leaders, you have to surround yourself with really good people. You cannot do it alone. Welcome back to 40-minute mentor, the podcast on a mission to raise aspirations and inspire the next generation of category-defining founders. From purpose-led entrepreneurs to world-class investors and Olympians, you'll learn first hand from today's successful leaders on what it takes to be brilliant, all in just 40 minutes. Today we're bringing back our popular VC feature series and I'm joined by Eileen Burbage MBE, Founding Partner at Passion Capital, the pre-eminent early-stage tech VC firm based in London. Eileen is also a director at Fertifa, the UK and Europe's leading reproductive benefits provider. Eileen has been described by Fertzy magazine as the Queen of British VC, which is no surprise given her extensive experience and stellar track record, having backed some of the UK's most successful businesses, including Monzo, Gokardless, Marshmallow and many more. Outside of Passion and Fertifa, Eileen has also served as the UK's Treasurer's Special Envoy for FinTech for eight years, was tech ambassador for the Mayor of London's office, and she previously served on the UK Government's Business Advisory Group. There is so much ground to cover with Eileen, so I am so honored that she's joined us today on 40-minute men talk to dive deeper into her career story. So a huge welcome Eileen, it's a real privilege to have you on the podcast. How are you? I'm really well, thank you. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being on here. Oh no, the pleasure is all mine. Well, we're going to warm you up, Eileen, as we always do with our guests with some quick fire questions. So if you don't mind, can you finish the following sentences after me? Number one, the deal I am most proud of is. Okay, first of all, I'm already killing this fire because I know these are supposed to be rapid fire, but I feel like I have to put a disclaimer, and if you don't like this qualifier, you can edit it out later. No, that's cool. But I think the rapid fire is really tough because all of these deserve context, but the first one and the reason why I pause and have to do that. Yeah, the context on this one is I think there's lots of reasons people would expect me to say or won't be surprised to hear me say that the deal I'm most proud of is Monzo Bank. But I want to qualify that it's not just because of the sort of financial success that has become or the value that it started to already develop and that it has as an enterprise value. I've said from the beginning, I do know there will be Monzo not so people who work at Monzo or who did work their years and years ago. I had said as far back as 2016, 2017, 2018 long before it was worth, you know, anywhere near where it's worth now, that I was really proud to have backed that team because it's always lived and delivered value in line with its values. And that was something that I feel was a privilege to watch and be a part of in the early days, even before we necessarily knew that it was going to be, you know, an objective success as well. So sorry, not very rapid for a rapid fire answer. No, no, no, it's a great answer though. And having worked with some of the startups that come off the back of X Monzo employees, you know, it's just an incredible success story and so many great entrepreneurs are coming off the back of it as well. And I'm also a happy customer, so thank you. I wish I would have invested in wise or what was then transfer wise. But there's another one too, probably on Fido at the time. Those are probably my two biggest sort of anti-proper little companies. And wise is a good one because we actually knew Christo and Tophit really early on. They actually started in our offices. So on some lists, or by some accounts, we get record, we get credit. We're investing in it. Actually, people still contact us in case we're willing to sell secondary things like that. So in some lists or some databases, we are down as an investor because they started in our office and we knew the team so well and so early on, I had the pleasure of working with Tophit at Skype in the early days, but we did not make that investment. And we almost saw it too early or a big lesson learned. We gave feedback on the model which they ultimately ended up incorporating. We should have just backed the team anyway. Wow. Oh, interesting. I guess all investors have the ones that got away and those are two pretty big ones, but you've more than made up for it with all the successes you've had. Question three, a myth I'd like to bust about VC is. There are so many. I think one of them is that anyone who is a VC is already independently wealthy. Another one would be that anyone in VC is necessarily clever, right? Good. High quality. Those are probably maybe the top two. Okay. Thank you for sharing. The hardest part of being in VC is. I really thought about this question a lot because I don't know that I'm willing to say anything is particularly hard in speech marks. I feel like it's a real, real privilege to be an investor of any variety, but a venture capital investor. I don't think anything is, again, in speech marks hard compared to what founders go through and other people that are involved in our day to day work. So I really don't think there's anything that's hard or difficult about being a VC. And I guess that also reflects that I think of it as a labor of love, like everything that I do with it. I really enjoy doing it. And I think one has to enjoy doing all of it. You know, I thought about what other people say and answer this question. I've heard them say, you know, the hardest part is saying no, the hardest part is sifting through all the deal flow. The hardest part might be fundraising from LPs. The hardest part is getting distributions. The hardest part, you know, any of those things. Again, I feel like those are very much first world problems and it's part of, again, the privilege of being an investor. So I really don't have an answer to that. Really like the answer because it shows how much you still love what you do. Given all the success you've had and the experience you've had, it's great that you still have that. It is still that labor of love. That's a really inspiring thing to share. And hopefully gives me hope because I still love what I've been doing. I'm 11 years into JPM, but you know, I certainly have lots of energy to keep going. Final quick part question, Eileen. The one thing I'd like to change about VC is. Oh, there's lots of things I'd like to change. Certainly the number of unpleasant people, I'd say. Obviously not everybody. Not all VC's, not everyone that I've worked with. But I do think it is a sector or it's a job title or it's an area that has so far been kind of self-selecting or even not self-selecting, but selecting of certain types of personalities and people of certain fature, accomplishment or achievement or certain backgrounds. That's really necessarily lined up with being the most pleasant, likeable, high integrity nice to work with people. So put another way. I think there are a lot of jerks. We'll see that change. Yeah, definitely. You know, I think in the scheme of things it's been really interesting to see the different types of characters within it. And thankfully we've been very lucky to work with lots of lovely people, but there are definitely. There are some jerks that's been in that way. Like there are a lot of industries and hopefully that'll change over time. And I guess we'll come on to talk a bit about diversity and inclusion later on in the conversation, but I think that's where having a broader cross-section of society, writing checks, I think could hopefully help some of that. Amazing. Well, Eileen, thank you. Already you've shared some fascinating insights into how you think of things and your love of VC is clear, but we'd love to take you back in time now before we talk more about passion capital. And I'd love to learn a bit more about your upbringing in early career. So do you mind sharing a bit more about what a younger Eileen was like, what your upbringing was like in perhaps a little bit more about your early careers and operator? And how did that shape you to be the person you are today? Yeah, of course. So probably I think a bit is a quite important foreign story, but you know, I was born and raised in the Midwestern part of the state. So in the suburbs of Chicago, which is largely Caucasian, white community, but as the daughter of first generation immigrants that both my parents had come across to America separately to pursue higher education and then had my brother and myself. And so we lived in the Chicago area suburbs. So I was one of, you know, not very many East Asian people at my school or in the community, certainly my parents, you know, had a community or friends of people that were Chinese, but it was sort of almost very separate to I guess day to day life and sort of where my parents worked and also where we went to school. I mentioned that I spent so much time on that because I do think that shaped me a lot in that, you know, when we talk about, and you really just think we'll talk about later more diversity equity inclusion, I obviously get asked a lot about sort of gender balance and gender inclusion. And for me for so much of my life until I was really an adult in the workplace, I only thought about sort of ethnic inclusion or ethnic diversity and sort of othering in speech marks in that I really thought it was a sort of a big challenge for me being non-cocasian in a really sort of white dominated society. And I really thought there was no issues necessarily or no systemic challenges or certainly far fewer to being a girl while growing up than to being a Chinese girl. And so for me, I think a lot of what I've done sort of early on was to make sure that I could assert that I could speak English that maybe I was going to other things other than maps, by the way, I'm not good at maps in my head, that I was, you know, not what the Asian stereotype was and that I was as good as maybe say a white colleague or a white contributor. So I was brought up in that way and I guess very stereotypically was told how important education was and we still believe that of course tried to impart that upon my kids. So school was really important. I think I was they used to use these terms, they don't use them now, but you know, academically described as a high achiever and so I would do well on standardized tests and with grades and marks, but it got to the point where once I got to uni, I completely wasn't really welling against it, but I decided to just not work as hard or felt like, oh, I could continue to coach pretty because I don't know that I felt I worked necessarily that hard through high school or any part of schooling and did almost fail out of uni actually. So it was a good lesson learned, it was a sort of a reality check and I feel really lucky because I got a computer science degree from the University of Illinois, but actually at the time that I was there, there were two computer science programs. One was in the math college and one was in the engineering college and I was in the engineering college but had applied to general engineering, which was the time probably one of the easier programs to get into and then I transferred into computer science while there because I think that would be even easier than hard for engineering. But coming out of university, then with a computer science degree, I was working in sort of kind of engineering roles, but I went to a telecoms company first and it was probably most, akin to say, product management where I did a little bit of coding, but then most of it was interpreting sort of technical requirements, either two sales marketing people or vice versa, and then kind of transitioning to more market development business development roles and that telecoms company actually transferred me out on a rotational assignment to the San Francisco Bay area where I then just absolutely fell in love with the tech sector realizing that there was so much more to being in the tech sector than say just programming and that you had obviously all these sort of cross-functional roles or these other functional roles that we now know about. And so then that's when I took a job at Apple as a market development manager what they titled an evangelist at the time for what's the predecessor to the iPhone but was the new personal digital assistant. This is Black Berry Days. This is before the poem pilot and so to stayed and fell in love with the tech sector from there. So I was in the Bay Area for 10 years for all of the.com boom and a couple of years of the bust. And I think I learned more in the last couple of years when things weren't going so well or weren't just easy picking for everybody that I did for most of the.com boom. And I did think I was going to stay in the Bay Area forever just kind of rotating through marketing business development, market development roles or product management and actually came to London in 2004 to work at Skype and thought that it would be really valuable for my CV for staying in the Bay Area just to knock up some international experience for what I thought would be a year or two. And so 20 years on I'm still here and I'm now a British citizen so dual national and have given birth to four British citizens as well. And so I'm here now and really invested both literally and figuratively in the British ecosystem in Europe and in a lot of I think non-US opportunities really because part of coming around in the first place was a thought process that Silicon Valley was probably a bit too insular and maybe not thinking globally enough or about opportunities that lied outside of the Bay Area or even the United States. Incredible. What an interesting background. Thank you so much for sharing. I find it really interesting just the way you described you know being a bit different at school. It reminds me of something that my father told me when he moved he was an immigrant from India and one of the things he said was he was so different to everybody in his school that it really kind of spurred him on to make sure he spoke English quicker that he was excelled academically in a sporting context. So that really resonated with the conversation I had with him. Well as you mentioned you came to the UK and thank you for coming to I've sounded like that wasn't going to be a long term move but thank goodness you did because look at all you achieved. You came and you were hired as Skype's first product person which is you know I'd imagine at the time maybe you didn't realise how impactful that was going to be but I'd love to learn a bit more about what it was like to join Skype before it went on to become such an iconic brand. Were there any like massive learnings that you took from your time there? Be awesome to share that with our audience. Oh gosh there are so many learnings but I also think there's learning and sort of everything that we do. Do you know what I mean? You can always take a lesson from any kind of experience but yeah of course Skype was amazing but so many things I mean even from you know you were just very generous there about how it worked out and how yeah maybe if that wasn't anticipated I mean that wasn't anticipated all and one thing that was really interesting for me looking back on it now is because I had a short term mentality which is going to sound really ironic but because I was thinking so short term i.e. I just was looking for a role for a year maybe it's you at most. I wasn't actually necessarily fixated on is this going to be a really sustainable company brand is this going to be a winner is this the end all be all will it define my career anything like that and I actually took the leap just based on totally different criteria literally what was going to be most feeling gratifying or valuable for me for the next year or two seeing it as a stepping stone to candidly going back to the barriers what I thought I was going to do and so one thing that's interesting looking back on it now is I had was really lucky actually I got a job offer from not only Skype but also Shazam which at the time was a completely different company this is three years before the iPhone so it's before Shazam really pivoted but on paper I think and actually venture capital and that sort of said the same because Shazam had raised much more from these D at that point when Skype had done and you would look at on paper Shazam being a quote unquote safer bet than Skype because it had a patent portfolio it certainly didn't have company founders that were under indictment in the US you know it didn't have sort of the risk I guess that Skype did and it seemed like it was going to be a much safer bet and it also had teams that were based in the US as well so UK so you know I traveled back and forth and potentially use that to kind of rotate back around and all these things but I ended up thinking about how amazing it would be for me given where my experiences had been to date getting exposure to a development team that was based in Estonia getting exposure to you know a team that was being led by people who had done Kaza before that which had really fundamentally changed internet usage broadband usage how people were sharing content and things like that and so it was also smaller there were only five people in London at the time and I just sort of thought okay for the next year or so this is actually going to be much more interesting than Shazam which is probably more sort of typical of what I guess other tech companies were at the time again it was pre-iPhone so I didn't anticipate obviously what Shazam would go through and it's going for it following the iPhone and becoming a mobile app but nonetheless my criteria was fully different so other lessons from Skype other than you know thinking about what you want to get out of a particular experience and how you can personally benefit from working with people who will have unique experiences because that's what I ended up indexing for and that's what served me really well you know where that's a big one that I like to part even with companies that I work with today is you don't need to be a success in the US to be a global success and I think this is one that still is really hard and really tempting for people just to follow I guess the established path of moving to the US or launching in the US in order to try and establish dominance in Skype I think was a really great example of how you didn't need that and it wasn't out of any kind of strategic you know genius or even trying to prove that initially it was just a function of reality and practicality which is you know Nick and Sinyon is cannot travel to the US so it didn't make sense to have an office there it didn't make sense to curry favor with US consumers it just made a lot of sense to focus on the opportunity outside the US clearly the home market here in the UK and all of Europe and then actually to look further afield to Asia which is really where I think Skype saw a lot of the hockey stick kind of traction initially so that's one of the biggest lessons another lesson that was learned which I think has been well proven now or sort of at least better proven than that first lesson would be you know that remote teams can work and so are distributed workforce can work so the development team was always based in talent and the business or commercial teams were always based in London but that worked really well for us I think it requires an enormous sense of discipline and I don't think it's for all teams or all personality types but it worked really well for Skype another lesson was just push as hard as possible and just keep testing things and not to necessarily be worried about you know competition so one of the things that I wrestled with when I took the role or thought about joining the company was because I was such a geek or in tech already I was mindful that there was already voice over IP product offering so you could already do voice calling of a certain kind AOL messenger or an aim or an MSN messenger or an Yahoo messenger and basically all the messaging apps you could do voice calling but it was terrible right the quality was awful and Skype's first sort of tagline was that it just works and it wasn't working on the other platform so for someone like me that was thinking about it as a job opportunity it was like well how's it gonna be different how's it gonna be better and clearly it could have been better AOL would have done it or Yahoo would have done it or all these companies with massive resources you know Microsoft MSN would have done it but being able to be confident in one's own innovation in the IP that they had in the learnings that they'd had from scaling you know and how they worked with nodes and how they worked with voice processing and what they had done with music sharing or music file sharing you know just don't worry about the competition don't look around you don't look behind you execute on your plan execute on your vision and if something that does work if it's something that there is value for consumers it will end up becoming an enduring lasting proposition great so many fascinating lessons there thank you Eileen you obviously reported you reported to Nicholas Zenschrim where you were there who's obviously had a you know a stellar career by this guy but then obviously it as an investor so what was that dynamic like and and what were your big learnings from working closely with him oh I mean I have mad respect for Nicholas obviously I have a huge affection right for my whole time there I really feel like it was the experience in a lifetime so there's nothing that I would speak ill of or nothing that that I don't look back on with great great fondness and just think that was so amazing and I was so lucky to have every part of that experience I think that's one thing Nicholas did do extremely well was to hire I guess I'm like I'm flattering myself actually I don't think I was one of those but his technical team was second to none and I think anyone who ever had anything to do with Skype would have tested that as well so that technical team based in talent was amazing and I think the sort of founding CTO team was actually made a team for and I had the again great privilege to continue working with them even after I left Skype because they set up a small private fund and that's actually how I got into investing but that founding team was just unbelievable and kind of the most vocal of the four was you know John Lennon Tuyvo who is an effect the CTO and he was just phenomenal so I've not had the chance to meet or work with anyone who is quite of his caliber since then but Nicholas knew to defer to him knew to give him rain and knew that he would frankly be able to get it done so a lot of what I think we did as a product team was mostly just act as a conduit between that development team and I guess the business and the commercial teams and the marketing teams and the requirements in London but Nicholas was exceptional at working with or channeling and getting the best out of that development team with Tuyvo's help and Tuyvo's leadership he was also really great at thinking strategically in terms of where things could go I also had another lesson learned from Nicholas directly which you know and I've talked about this Skype lately I don't have any qualms about this or any bitterness about this as well but you know I was fired from Skype and I get that and then understand that and that of course is Nicholas is prerogative as the founder and as the company CEO and that is something I continue to impart on founders today as well when I work with them as an investor if something's not working for you for the team for you as a leader you've got to make that change and I respect that it's a great lesson for me and it's something that I think all leaders probably wrestle with I'm not suggesting that Nicholas necessarily wrestles with the decision of a re but you know the first time you do it it feels like it's going to be so difficult that it's going to end up costing a lot of time or overhead or energy or you know it's just too difficult to do but obviously you've got to do what's right for the business and for you as a leader. Yeah absolutely well thank you for sharing I mean you turning that into such an important lesson which was I'd imagine at the time a very difficult moment is a great lesson for us all and I think for me as a founder it's always been the hardest part of the job and the worst part of the job but you sometimes realize if you she don't make those necessarily calls it is much worse than the long run isn't it if you don't make the change. Actually slightly alluded to my next question it's a good segue about how you ended up in VC in 2011. Do you mind sharing a bit more about why you decided VC was the right next step for you at that point in your career and a bit about how you found that transition from going from an operator to a VC. Yeah sure although I don't know that I have too much advice for it because I think I got I just got really lucky and again I feel really really privileged to be investing today or even have had the chance to do it back then so the way it happened for me was you know I'd been working at Skype I left Skype after I was fired and then joined Yahoo here in London I was then pregnant with my eldest and so was staying here in London with my friend partner and so I was working at Yahoo but then on maternity leave in that sort of intervening period the business obviously was sold to eBay and I mentioned the four founding engineers they had 5% of the companies equity when it was sold so they had enough resource then or had enough from their sort of upside just that a private fund it was 50 million euro and they want to start investing sort of more as organized angels but you know collectively as a group out of what they named ASI or ambient town investments out of talent and so when I was on maternity leave from Yahoo initially it just started with them asking me if I could look over a business plan because you know we've worked so closely together at the time that I was at Skype and we had delivered so much and obviously collaborative and so much so I had such a great working relationship with rapport and I think huge friendships with all the talent team so they sort of asked me just as a friend you know you've been on the product side you've been on this dev take a look at this could you take a look at this business plan and tell us frankly if you just think it's bullshit or if you think it makes sense and do you think that there's something here or not or might have been then listen there's a founder that we think is working on something interesting but they're based somewhere and they might be traveling through London or they might be based in the UK but you know we're not going to necessarily ask them to fly out to talent for us to meet them so could you take a meeting and tell us what you think about them having met them face to face so I was initially just sort of vetting business plan product road maps or even just a founder doing founder references for them and we didn't even use the vocabulary or anything but was effectively doing helping them with their due diligence so I started doing that in the summer of 2006 and did that for about a year and a half actually I carried on just supporting them while it's also working at Yahoo and just helping them make investments because it just seemed like a lot of fun to help people you know it's you know someone's thinking about investing in something and they say what do you think does that make sense to you and I was just offering my random completely unqualified opinion but you know in some cases they took it in other cases they didn't and then over that sort of two-year period they ended up making four investments in London and I would then carry on being sort of their word observer representative or you know their investor representative with those teams here in London and it was a lot of fun it was absolutely amazing and even considered wow I'd love to do this on a full time basis but probably not going to move to Tallinn and want to stay in London absolutely recognized by the way that I didn't think I was going to be able to get a job out of EC so this is why I say I don't know that I have any good advice for anyone who would want to make that transition I didn't have an MBA I had a computer science degree I don't know any macros still today in Excel I'm not you know that kind of person or or just a you know investment type I had only operational experience and an understanding for technical concepts so I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten hired as an associate at index or bolder tenor excel which were you know three big ones at the time and didn't want to move to Tallinn but through the course of the four companies that they invested in the UK and that I started working with I met my then what eventually became my founding partners a passion and so we started working together really in 2009 in terms of thinking about fundraising and what we wanted to do and then yeah started investing out of passion capital fund one in 2011 wow what a story it was there a original or existing or continuous investment thesis that you had I know you're obviously an early stage investor I'd love to know why early stage and you know what you think makes a great early stage investor so I think for me early stage always made the most sense because I had had that experience at Skype and I knew what we went through when we were five people in London and then I think at the time that I left it was about 50 and then I think you know the Tallinn team was I don't know between 10 15 when I joined and into the hundreds by the time that I left you know and I remember that I joined right after Skype had raised from index but then I left right before the sale to eBay so I kind of been through that stage and so it made the most sense for me to apply my experiences to helping other people that might want to go through that similar stage I think the other reason for me early stage makes sense is because of what I said I'm not good at right so I'm not again the excel kind of warrior I don't look at profit margins and how to improve those over time I'm not the one who's going to deep dive into cohort analysis necessarily I'm the one who I think is more looking at how do you build the team how do you establish culture how do you get working dynamics in place how do you set about establishing kind of a cadence and objectives and how do you try and execute on those in the early days so for me it's where I think I could lend the most experience and the best advice but also kind of assess what may or may not work and then I guess tying it all together for me early stage investing really is all about the people I know everybody says that probably about every stage of investing but I do think it's even more true or the most true at the earliest stages because there's nothing else to diligence frankly right you don't have a business model to look at you don't have three years of financials to look at you don't have a profit margin to analyze you don't have inventory not stock you know I haven't I people are falling oh you just have these people who are telling you this is what I want to do this is the reason I want to do it and this is why I think I'll be able to pull it off and that's all you really have to go by whereas for later stage investing you could look at a lot of other things and if there's a model that's already working you could even potentially you know bring in new talents or swap out talents and even optimize it further so for me it is about early stage investing it's what I enjoy doing and it's always been about the people and people are what resonates with me most and we are very similar and that's why I'm ahead on turn I love people and I love the people aspect and that's probably another reason why we really enjoy working with investors I think it's a really unique vantage point you have and clearly based on passion capital success you made over a hundred tech investments and backed billion dollar companies like Monzo Marshmallow etc you're very good at picking winners when it comes to the right leaders and people so I'd love to talk a bit bit about talent in a minute but there are going to be founders listening to this that we'll want to raise from you know funds like passion capital so can you share what you look for when you're assessing those early stage founders and their businesses what is it that kind of really draws you in and on the flip side what are the red flags that we put you off easier to start with the red flags so I think that for us I know it's going to be done obvious but we long sort of considered that in order to really really build a successful business and one that's going to have massive enterprise value that is eventually you know at some point in time going to be a really big team it's going to be one that has a lot of customers whether they're consumers or other businesses and they're ones that are going to have lots of stakeholders so other investors distribution partners channel partners or the like and so for all of those relationships or those touch points the leaders of the business for us the thing that we index the most on is integrity and their ability to basically be compelling to other people and so I really put that as a combination of things because one can be really really compelling but can also just be a con artist right I mean that's what the best con artist are they're really compelling really engaging and they get people to really really go for what they're pitching but for us it's a mix of that with integrity as well and so wanting to build something that's sustainable long lasting and of value to people so it's also got to be somebody that we feel and we can be wrong and there's really no good measure for this I don't have an often like an optimal or an objective test for this or criteria for this but we had to always feel like we could trust them but doesn't mean that we had to trust them so want to do maybe the things that we would want them to do or to have the same judgment as us but meaning that we trusted what they were telling us so they could be a mentally disagree with us and say well no actually I'm going this way or I just think that's not true and I'm going to apply this thesis and I'm going to try this instead but then to explain their rationale they're thinking that our process and to tell us that honestly we needed to be able to trust that thought process and their communications so those are probably the most important pieces and then everything else kind of comes from that so the ability to be really self-aware recognize what their strengths were but then also where the gaps were so that where they need to fill in when other members of the team or eventual hires if not co-founders the ability to communicate again or at least just to have a way to communicate not everyone communicates the same way some are really great in person really charismatic you know magnetic personalities they're like some are really great at written form communication some are really great with their design the UX you just see it in the app or the product but whatever way or shape or it takes they've got to be strong communicators and yeah everything else just flows from there really love it thank you so much for the advice I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people scribbling down notes there for when they next pit the passion throughout your time as an investor you've done something that I've seen not many other vcs do which is step into interim CEO roles in some of your portfolio the likes of Monzo tied in and most recently for Tifa which is an incredible business it is quite a rare thing to do so do you mind just showing a bit about like why you've taken those interim roles when you did and perhaps just a little bit is good opportunities to talk a bit about for Tifa and why you were sort of so keen to make that move at the time you did each of those are are really kind of their specific circumstances for all of them and it was never anything actually that we thought would happen it's not as if we set up shop as an investor and thought oh we're going to be a hybrid with a studio model or we might be hands on or we might actually take up a rational so it was never actually planned and you know as you said we started investing out of passion capital fund one in 2011 my first time doing this was actually tied in 2018 so it was you know some years into the the journey really and I should also qualify that I wasn't in terms CEO at Monzo but I do appreciate yeah the nod to the interim time that I did do there so each of them had their own circumstances with tied it was a again it was really interesting it we had agreed with the company founder at that the business was doing so well it was just before it's serious be that it might be the right time to bring in a scaling CEO and this is something that happens I think often with a lot of tech startups it is a very different sort of skill set and I think a set of characteristics and traits of somebody starting a business and then somebody taking it through to another kind of step change and we've gotten there with tide and you know all the investors were really bullish about promise it has played out and the founder was brilliant but we just sort of thought listen might be time to bring in somebody who is really relic whips or has been through the experience of scaling something to take this to the next level and so we've done that we ran a search with a search firm not yourself sorry but with peers in your sector and we had actually then agreed that package and announced it to the company having all hands did that whole you know where the founder to the great talk about handing over the reins and this was the right time and they were going to stay on the board and you know it was just a a good transition and then unfortunately the weak subsequent that the candidate actually changed their mind and ended up deciding to go do something else which was obviously great for them but a huge nightmare for us and it was a sort of a harsh kind of a brutal kind of change which is okay wait do we now tell the company which is almost 50 people at this time just kidding you know hold that thought or actually the founder is not leaving just yet we're going to wait three more months until we find someone else or it just felt like that was maybe not the best route given what we'd already done to start implementing the transition and so the thought process was then instead of taking a step back let's keep moving forward even if we have to go sort of slightly sideways before we can actually take that leap up that we wanted to and so it was decided that we'd still have the outgoing founder CEO you know step out of the CEO role has had been announced but that somebody would come in as interim while we re-did a search for a new CEO and so that's what I decided to do or I said you know I'd be happy to do that so I'd been spending so much time with the founder you know during the transition and leading up to it and so it felt like okay I can do this I'm not going to have probably implement any drastic strategic changes or anything like that but there are some maybe talent issues to resolve maybe some ongoing performance things that you know needed to take care of maybe some looking at the costs and things like that just to maybe just make sure that things were in a nice place where when we did find the right person and the idea was 99.9% of my time was going to be on the search for the incoming CEO obviously replace out and there's obviously more work to be done as anyone who's been as the war knows or a company founder so I didn't mean to trivialize that but it was yeah so that was the idea and it took four months to bring in Oliver Pearl who's been by all measures a great CEO and taken the company to where we all hoped it could be taken to if not further to go and so that's how that happened and then in 2020 with Monzo it was completely different setup really and Tom Bloomfield has spoken about this quite openly so I don't think I'm being disloyal or sealing a standard or saying anything that he'd be uncomfortable with me saying but for at least a year before he ended up you know before he ultimately left Monzo he had been saying he was ready to go and I think a lot of lessons that I've learned from that whole process because I think we kind of failed him as a board and as you know advisors or as supporters by not recognizing that sooner or at least from a governance point of view by not putting in a really concrete or reliable succession plan in place before he had sort of raised his hand and said listen I'm ready to go so I remember him first saying it to me in about summer August of 2019 I remember him taking a three week Christmas holiday at the end of that year but I also remember talking to him then that Sunday before everyone goes back to work whether it was the third or the fourth or the fifth of January whatever and saying you know how are you feeling and how are you feeling better about things or it's like me more invigorated and he said bluntly and very candidly no I am not I haven't been on sleep the last few nights because I'm dreading going back and I'm just not in the right hand space for this you know obviously Monzo at this point had become a regulated bank it had millions of customers it had millions in deposits it was a very different type of business than the one that he helped to co-found in 2015 and so my first involvement in Monzo was just actually to give him a bit of cover if it were just to have his back and I think he wouldn't mind me paraphrasing this way he got to the point where he said this and I just don't want to deal with the people shit and the regular torcheshit anymore and I just want to focus on product and vision and you know delighting our customers and so I decided I'd go in and we talked about me being involved maybe three days a week to give him some cover on the people stuff on the people's side you know constant demands for headcount constant requests on budget constant answer kind of conflicts about resourcing things like that and that I would maybe help with that and also building up a bit of the C-suite around him if not a direct succession plan and that actually at the same time our chair Gary Hoffman that didn't for a few more I think days a week as well to help on the regulatory sort of side so that was the plan and then what happened was I don't know if it was three weeks or five weeks later I kind of forget now but then we had the pandemic and I guess talks at first lockdown because of COVID but that's what really changed it and what started as sort of a three day week oh I'm gonna have Tom's back here and we'll look for a way for him to transition out over the next sort of three to six months became a sort of all-out you know all hands on deck full time or even more than full time gig where it lasted ten months in the end I did help with a lot of the people stuff but unfortunately that ended up being things like closing down the service center in Las Vegas implementing a redundancy program you know talking about salary sacrifice and you know we ultimately ended up taking out 25% of the cost out of the business almost right away or you know three to six months time we also did get a succession planning in place for Tom and obviously he left the business towards the middle of the year but not only did we then bring in T.S. as the CEO we also brought in Sujata as the CEO oh we brought in James as a CEO subsequent to that we brought in you know my kudak as a chief product officer we brought in new general counsel and staff new chief risk officer Ian so basically the entire C-suite in 2020 is overhauled so big job no it was a work of many but I think that one that sort of it's an interesting thing if I look back on it now because I don't know if we hadn't already agreed that I might do a few days a week to support Tom if I would have jumped in to help as much as I'd done you know in COVID hit I'd like to think that I would have done but it certainly made it a lot easier or just the more natural thing because I was already kind of being held to account and sort of attending his kind of weekly stand-ups or even daily stand-ups in C-suite and the like but this one was more about like I guess what every other business leader had to do in 2020 which is just you know react to COVID and a global pandemic and then for us at passion it was an obvious thing because of the portfolio value that Monzo represented to us right so it was what was going to be a potentially existential time for Monzo was then very naturally potentially an existential not existential for the fund but was going to be really material to the fund the funds position and the funds success ultimately and then went for Tifa happened and it's a deal that I co-led with my passion partner Mullin during lockdown in October 2020 we both passionately support reproductive health and believe that it's been classically under-invested really we're looking for something to do in the UK and I had been an angel investor in a US company called Maven Clinic before so I really believed in the for Tifa proposition we had happily backed it in October 2020 it was doing actually really well so this is maybe closer to a tied-like situation than a Monzo but even not even close still you know 10% team in 2021 and one that wasn't quite jelling internally but doing really well commercially so I had signed up the likes of Central Knapp West and Metta as clients as well as investors without gosh they've signed up banquastic logos they're doing what would be usually described as the impossible but they're just having a bit of difficulty like getting going building a culture establishing sort of a well-functioning team but it's only seven ten people at this point in time I will go in is what I thought I do and just bring in a CEO like I had done at Tide but it should be easier because of the smaller team earlier stage and I'll just look for somebody who wants to be a startup founder but maybe doesn't have their perfect idea yet so that was the plan and actually coming off the back of Monzo which took me some months frankly to recover from the burnout I thought we're walking apart right because it's something of the scope or the scale of a Monzo but so I did do that came in January 2022 I spent the first five weeks actually interviewing more than 50 five zero candidates for people that I thought could make great CEOs for Fatifa at the same time I obviously also wanted to continue hiring wanted to help the team gel work through some of the people or the cultural issues or some of the ways of working and so clearly got emotionally invested with the people and the team and also the proposition and the patients we are supporting and people having Fatifa babies and all of that and basically just felt even more in love with the company the proposition the opportunity and what we're doing and so I don't know which comes first or you know if one feeds the other but I couldn't quite get the ideal candidate to come in part of this was not just because I made it an impossible to ask or just sort of selfly agree but it's fine to say oh I'll just look for somebody who wants to be a startup founder but hasn't come up with their perfect idea but it's something else to have a situation where I have a certain amount of options to lend from an option pool to somebody to take on basically you know that much risk as being a startup founder but a fraction of the equity they would have if they were the startup founder so that's where I had a bit of a mismatch and the type of people I was looking for would obviously want and also be able to command the kind of equity that they deserved if they did start their own business and yet I was trying to probably appeal to them with you know a fraction of that so that's why I wasn't able to find the person I think the ideal person at least or the caliber that I wanted and at the same time I was falling more and more in love with it sort of thinking okay somehow I am sort of making more time to focus on this along with everything else that I'm doing so what happens if I kind of try to keep doing it myself and then here I am now two whole years later but I do still love it it's another labor of love it's something it's true that you do make time for the things that you love to do I'm really proud of everything that for Tiva's been able to achieve as a team and the company in the last few years I'm really lucky the team was accepting of me even with all the other things that I also do in addition like with passion and everything else that I still do and I'm also really fortunate that you know we got really supportive investors to also buy into that as well and so you know we we closed a seed round in May last year and you know I'm really excited because we've got some of the best backers you could ever hope for incredible so interesting to hear the context of those different moves and and just how passionate you are about for Tiva it sounds like an amazing business so thank you for the context Eileen before we wrap up the interview Eileen I could talk to you for hours so but I'm gonna distill my last two questions there are gonna be founders listening that are going to need to make executive hired is a hard thing to do and you have been involved in many of these processes so if you got any just a little bit of advice for anyone that may be making their first leadership hire about how they can nail that process any tips or tricks or learnings for them. No let's go just pointing at me because I wish I could say yes but other founders will tell you that I still survey people and ask them what tips and advice they have. I shared some time in an airport lounge with Christo from Wyze a few months ago and I think he thought I was trying to set him up or I don't know what he thought I was doing but he thought I was being really really weird because I asked him how he does this and anything that he's learned from it so I don't have a good answer for this but what I can say is you have to do it so even though there is no rest of people there's no playbook there's no obvious way to do it there's no way to know if you're making the right call or not you have to do it founders leaders you have to surround yourself with really good people you cannot do it alone and actually it'll be a shortcoming if you believe that you can or you decide that you want to do that so it is a show of leadership to trust in other people to show that you can collaborate with other people that you can delegate to them that you can channel that you can develop them that you can take out their strengths and their weaknesses and then also supplement people around them as well the only advice I would give is you're going to spend a lot of time with this person you're going to want to trust them with decisions that you can't or don't have time to take you need to live with that so make sure that that's a person that you feel that you can do that with don't just bring them in because their CV looks great because they were just at your largest competitor because they were you know whatever you think because your VC recommended it it's got to be someone that you're going to feel happy to be beholden to to a certain degree and the other thing I would say is with equity on the one hand don't be too stingy because as we all know creating a bigger pie together makes more sense than trying to be stingy on you know like percentages of a percentage point on the other hand the other thing I would say especially with executive hires is you can always add to an equity grants if it's working out really well so that's one way to think about accommodation maybe it's to break up or to actually think about how you stage the overall equity because obviously a new executive coming in says you know listen when we get to next and I want to own you know I want to have this much of the business at that time that's great then think of a plan of how you work up towards that versus maybe offering that in a package that bests from day one great advice thank you Eileen and before wrap up questions I've got to ask about the you know it's just topic we're both passionate about and there has been advancements but I think we'll all agree that it's still so much work to be done so just to maybe if we could sharpen the minds of any investors or founders listening what do we need to focus on to make some more improvement in the year and years ahead I mean I think the first thing we have to do is stop saying that we try to get deal flow and it's not in the deal flow I guess or that we're just not seeing entrepreneurs so those more diverse entrepreneurs aren't coming to us I think we need more people on wholesale basis to recognize we need to change the way we source our deal flow and the sources for that and it's uncompensed on us as investors to do that the other thing we need to do is really just take a hard look at ourselves and the actions and the behaviors that we do and to see how that might be projecting onto the types of people we want to attract if we genuinely want to attract more diverse people I won't name names but there's a really well-known fund we just concluded an internal investigation about some inappropriate behavior and they've decided that there was nothing inclusive to prevent the original partner from coming back is that going to scream out to people that they are an inclusive place that they recognize what people value if they come from diverse pathways I would say no and so I think as an industry I think we've really got to walk the walk 100% thank you Eileen thank you for saying that we're sadly and then we've got three wrap up questions for you so we're recording this at the start of the year great time for candidates to be reflecting about the future and their plans so what is the best piece of career advice that you can pass on to our listeners gosh I don't know again I don't think I have great advice because I think I've been really lucky I think I've been really fortunate and I still ask others for advice but I do think even just speaking to you I've realized that a lot of what I've described whether it was when I took operational roles whether it was when I moved to London in the first place not to try and answer the question of what if sort of x years out you know not to try and answer what it looks like 20 years 10 years 5 years 3 years out look at what you can assess for yourself pros and cons with the information that you have to hand now and with what you're trying to achieve in the near term so for me it was you know what do I want to achieve out of being in London for a year it was okay what do I want to achieve to help Monzo in the next you know six months as we need succession planning it was you know what do I want to achieve for tide what do I want to achieve for preti file all of the other companies work with and then I think if you do that to the best of your ability and work the information all the data so don't ignore even data that might be contrary or negative you do that to the best of your ability then it puts you in a better position to then make that same decision again when new information arises and then hopefully that's how you get to closer and closer to the longer term outcome as well awesome advice thank you and what are you excited about in 2024 what are you most excited about I mean everything right I'm so excited I got qualms about elections in both the US and the UK but in terms of you know our sector our industry investing founders I mean I'm an investor so I'm an optimist and an eternal optimist I think there are great opportunities to back fantastic people to try and get more attention on things that are undervalued or don't get enough attention to investing areas that have been historically under invested in but also to see some real great companies and founders just really punching through this year I think there'll be so much in so many different sectors I share your optimism it's a great thing to hear and finally this is 40-minute mentor if you could be mentored by anyone that are alive who would it be and why she's very much alive but it would be James Stephanie Shirley so I don't know if people will know her I know she's getting on with it and her history is not quite as recent anymore but I think she's an absolute legend and I would love just to and I don't even know if it's classic mentorship I just love to hear more and more stories what she has overcome what she's achieved maybe the one-liner that a lot of people say but this really trivializes everything that she's come through but you know she had adopted the name she used to in correspondence instead of Stephanie because she found that people responded to her letters and her correspondence more with male name and so everything that she's achieved by building up her IT business when she did what she overcame in her childhood and all of her advocacy she's such inspiration so I would just love to spend more time with her she is a real aspirational guest for me and you're not the first person to name check her a real inspiration and that's a very inspirational place to end it Eileen thank you so much for sharing your story and your mentorship with us always a real privilege really enjoyed their chatting so thank you so much thank you and that is all from us today thank you so much for tuning into this episode we really hope you enjoyed it even half as much as we enjoyed recording it if you're a new listener and haven't left us feedback before we would really appreciate it if you did would love to hear 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