Blog

Can you believe it's already Friday? The EF team and the cohort have charged through the week, with a little help from our friends....

Mat Clayton, co-founder, MixCloud: MixCloud is a startup that's broken all the 'rules' and theories of starting up. Three years on Mixcloud have never taken equity financing, don't have a CEO and have a rapidly growing user base. Mat pushed going fast, even if that means being scrappy. This may mean building up a technical debt, but it's worth it as it's users that count. 

Nick Hungerford, founder nutmeg: Nick's grown nutmeg from a tiny nutmeg to a nutmeg tree, raising £5m in their series A round. A few nuggets (or should i say nutmegs) from his talk:

• - Be very clear on who your target customers are, and remember they may not be the same as your early adopter group
• - Customer testing is key. Nutmeg does a 'monstrous' amount of customer testing, with customers coming into their offices this week.
• - Speed is facilitated with process. If you build scalable processes it allows you to grow productively, making the most of all employees time and resources

Sherry Coutu, Super Angel: Sherry is one of the UK's best known angels and a successful entrepreneur having sold two businesses in the financial services industry. The second was floated in 2000 and was valued at more than $1 billion before being acquired. EF has worked with Sherry on SVC2UK, producing a report based encouraging high growth entrepreneurship. We were delighted to have her at Bootcamp and among other things, she shared her mental checklist that she uses when speaking to entrepreneurs:

• - Are there enough customers?
• - Do they really care?
• - Do you have first mover advantage?
• - Are there competitors?
• - Do I (as an investor) really care about the problem you are trying to solve?