Award winner - Summit | Emerging Manager of the Year 2025: byFounders (represented by Eric Lagier)

0:00And I said, why don't we create a for founders by founders fund, hence the name, right? Let's come together as founders and back the next generation of founders. And let's flip everything we can on its head. Capital is a commodity. Founders today have a choice. So you need to show much more than the capital, the dollars ahead of you. You need to show how you can help them. We love coming in early. We love building relationship. We say to people, we are not an ATM. We are live. We are live. In five. We are live. Four. We are live. Three. We are live. Two. We are live. One.

0:50If we start from the start, to your point, I was sitting in San Francisco. I've been fortunate to have been early at Skype, experiencing that incredible adventure in that I've done my own startup.

1:02Eric Lagier:From the very early days, right? From the very early days, working with Janice and Nicholas here in London, actually. And then I had my own startup that I lived in eight years in the U.S. and sold out to HP. But I was working with so many fellow founders, particularly from Denmark, founders of Sendesk, the.9 back from the beginning, right? Founders of Unity and Sitecore and Tradechiff, Skype and so on. And guess how much money they raised from Danish early stage investors or any investors? Zero. And it was really against all odds. And I didn't have any VC background. I hadn't any type of schooling VC.

1:43I had worked with some of the greatest VCs in the US. And I'd seen what that could be done. And I said, why don't we create a for-founders-by-founders fund, hence the name. let's come together as founders and back the next generation of founders and let's flip everything we can on its head like the first thing we did was we created a term sheet that was actually readable that wasn't in like legal lingo like a YC kind of a and we actually published it on our website to make it available for everyone to basically challenge the existing toxic terms that you often would see in an environment where there was no choice for founders.

2:24And we continued, just wanted to do something that was different. And then I asked all these founders that had battle scars after battle scars of trying to raise money from the Nordics and said, why don't you join this movement of let's create a four founders by founders fund. And we did that and building that community that we continue to leverage. And I think the last point I would just say on that, and then I'll come to Lovable, is that I believe more and more capital is a commodity. Like, founders today have a choice. They can get out there and they can get money from anywhere, which is great.

3:06Though Europe is undercapitalized. We have an issue. That's another topic. But they have a choice today, which is great. so you need to show much more than the capital the dollars ahead of you you need to show how you can help them and to the story of lovable and it could equally be the story of para help or summary or many many other of our great companies out there we love coming in early we love building relationship We hate, we say to people, we are not an ATM. Like, don't come to us. Like when a founder comes to us and say, hey, we are racing and, you know, we all have term sheets and in a week we are signing.

3:50You know what? Happy for you. Then we are not the right one. Because they don't understand that this is not a sprint. It's a marathon. And we work together for a long time. And there will be so many places, even for Lumbable, where it's not just fairy tales. and where you'll be looking at those who actually understand you and genuinely believe in you and can back you. And that's what we have done with Lovable, with Perihel, with so many others, where we backed these founders before anyone else even thought that they could go anywhere. But we actually didn't write a check to Anton. We were actually, to be honest, not the first to write the check because we actually kept on just working and delivering.

4:34and they sat at our office and suddenly he said, I actually wrote a convertible note with Hummingbird. And we were like, what? So you're out fundraising, what? Okay, let's then step in. And then we did the same, right? But it's like for us, much more important to build that relationship, build the value. And that's the power of community. I can assure you it wasn't because, you know, Anton had been out sailing with us on our voyage. he had been engaged in our community activities. But it was also because we had so many founders that reached out. Andreas from Corti pinged Anton and said, you'll be stupid if you don't take a partnership with my founders and getting Magnus and Sarah involved.

5:22Eric Lagier:And I think what's also great with Anton is that he publicly credited that staying in Stockholm rather than relocating to the Bay Area was a scaling advantage. Very relevant to the Nordic Cises. Indeed. And I think that was the second point you had around, like, from the get-go, we saw a region. I used the term New Nordics, which I really appreciate is now being used across. And the New Nordics was because it's the Nordics plus the Baltics. And the Baltics were too often being related to Eastern Europe and I do feel that we have much more in common with the Baltics. Skype was built by a Swede, a Dane, and a ton of really smart people in Estonia, right?

6:11And that's what we saw and we wanted to build and say, this region is punching above its weight.

6:16Eric Lagier:That was also your starting point, right? Those companies were not funded by local early-stage VCs. Right, yeah. So that's great because Lovable does validate the community sees this at individual deal level. But the bigger question is whether this model has compounded. And we're now sitting here after eight years. As I said, you have 200 founders in your network sourcing, mentoring, writing angel checks alongside the fund. Do you really see that as a compounding model? For sure. It's like incredible. like when we are sitting with a new team we just backed and you have uh heinie from vivino the founder of vivino spending a full day of just helping onboarding them and giving them like so many like live stories and helping them on the right path and then we then bring him onto the board and he actually sits on the board together with either me or somebody else from our team but it's like seeing people coming wanting to pay it forward and and really just seeing that we have been able to help some that are now coming back and also helping others right what you're describing is not a playbook that can become or that can be replicated and and here is my question right what actually breaks if someone else another nordic gp puts together a group of very prominent CEOs and I think and many have replicated this model to be honest that they have some great folks around the team so what's the part that doesn't transfer yeah I think the one part that I think really is difficult to transfer is the passion the love and the empathy that we have around founders when we meet them eye to eye one of of the things that we have which is most popular is a coaching program that we offer to all the founders that we have on board like meeting them you know person to person and giving them those type of thing i think a lot of people are like hey tangible advice but we really are are doing it with a heart and i think that's the culture we build it by founders and i emphasize again we because as we as a team with Sarah, Magnus and the rest of the team that's there, wholehearted it is going through fire for any of the founders that we back.

8:50And I think that's if you can replicate that, then I salute you.

8:55Eric Lagier:One of my first ever deal when I was starting as a young associate was a software business based in Finland doing 9 million in revenue. And they did a big round of 4 million euros at 12 million pre. I mean, obviously, those days are gone and things are going much faster. Companies raise more money more rapidly and they also scale more rapidly. I also very agree with what Stefan said. This is probably one of the best times in history to start a software business and perhaps to be also an investor. But valuations are getting crazy. I mean, it's like we're back into this crazy cycle where access is everything.

9:33Eric Lagier:I mean, I was hearing the other day that there is currently a secondary on Anthropic at about 700 billion. I mean, the company raised at 300 billion a few months ago. Loveable is the same story. My question is the following. How do you stay grounded in that kind of environment? Because, you know, you're pitching to your LPs, equity stake, discipline. And obviously, as venture capital investor, our IP is our judgment. our IP is our ability to get it right and success is a magnitude of our rightness but that has to be seen in correlation with being disciplined on entry valuation at a time where things get crazy so how does it work when you're a seed fund?

10:17I think it's all about venture it was also said earlier on both Ricardo and Stefan we are backing around 40 companies in every fund more than ever because of the pace we'll see that so many will unfortunately fold much much faster but a few will go much much faster and breaking you know really through the atmosphere and I think for us we just need to stay true to what everybody is preaching and what Sonalia also was talking about when we meet great founders and they are not treating us as an ATM and where we are able to see that we can be on such a journey together, that's where we should step in and we should do it with that conviction and wanting to be ready to fight.

11:11And that's some of the things like when we are talking with our team and, you know, are you really want to, do you want to join this team? Like, do you want to go through fire or are you just like thinking of this as a great transaction and we should step away if we are not like ready to have that. To have that.

11:28Eric Lagier:Okay, great. And maybe last question, which is actually a question that you didn't answer to. What was your initial exit outcome for Lovable when you wrote that seed paper? And how wrong did you get it? Yeah, no, I'm sure we had it very, very wrong. I remember when Magnus and Sarah called me and said, hey, you know, now this is happening. And it actually happened very, very fast over a weekend. And we wrote a very large check compared to our fund size and so on. But we were so convinced, having worked with Anton for a long time, having helped along the way. So it was like, it's a no-brainer. We didn't have any, like, what is that?

12:09You know, where can this go? Because again, yeah, of course, we could have put in a number. It would never be the one thing. The key is...

12:17Eric Lagier:Yeah, but you didn't know that at the time. You had a real conviction, but it's hard to put numbers behind conviction. Every founder that we partner with, we expect or we dream that they will go all the way. And nowadays, it's not unicorns. It's Degacorn. It's much further than that. That's what we should believe. We need to think bigger in the Nordics. We have not been good at that. And they get there faster as well. Yeah, exactly. How do you think about liquidity for such a company? I think it was actually what I love Romain was his session and like definitely some really good things that I want to pick his brain on.

12:53I think we also I'm very happy Sarah is on my team. She's so structured, much more structured than I am. And she really went research. She maybe also have spoken with Romain as well on like what is the benchmark? What do we do? and we have found a strategy for liquidity on riding a rocket like this and where we basically on every round where we have an opportunity to have a liquidity moment, we sell 10 % to 15 % of our ownership, allowing us to, at the end of the game...

13:23Eric Lagier:So you de-risk and you keep a horse in the race, basically. At the end of the day, we have like 50 % back still left in the park. I think it's interesting because history has taught us that, you know, Sometimes hype doesn't mean returns. And we've seen that with Hopin, for instance, where a lot of investors were doubling down at$5 billion. And that was only a few months after the last round. And I know actually only one investor who is in the room that took his cash. And he told me something interesting. He told me, you always have to remember what success is. And when you're a seed investor investing in a company at that type of seed valuations, and you get to a billion plus, well, that is success.

14:06Eric Lagier:And doubling down is counterintuitive. We are very happy to have Lovable. It's one of many great founders that we are backing. Some will take much longer time to get to where they are, but the problems they are solving are real, and we just need to continue backing them.