Issie James, Cofounder at Onstage

0:00Welcome, Issie. First episode of Scaling Europe. I'm so thrilled to have you. Yeah, very happy to be here. Nice. Why don't you just give me a quick intro, who you are, what you're building OnStage.

0:11Issie James:Yeah, sure. So I'm Issie James. I'm co-founder at OnStage. OnStage is the largest startup demo day in Europe. So twice a year, we run a demo day event with about 350 VC partners. essentially we all go out together promote demo day and it brings in about 2 000 early stage startup applications and then essentially we work with those VC partners to select the top 1 % of applicants and then those applicants actually pitch at our demo days and what's it like organizing the largest demo day in Europe having to get 2 000 companies to apply going through a process to brittle them down and then get all 20 pitching yeah I mean I think people always surprised at how big the team is.

0:58Issie James:I mean, in that respect, we're not very big at all. So it's myself and Joel, who actually work at Onstage full time. And then the two other co-founders of Onstage are actually VCs in full time roles within VC themselves. So one of them is Taos Edmondson, who works at DMG Ventures, which is a consumer VC, and Hector Mason, who works at Episode One Ventures as a GP. So yeah, the team is pretty lean. And I think like what kind of what's enabled us to get to the scale that we're at now is a lot of process automation. We have a lot of our own kind of internal tools that allow us to reach that scale.

1:43Issie James:And And then I suppose on the other side of things is our marketing. And our marketing is basically done by our VC partners, which I would say has been a bit of a hack for us from the beginning. We started about five years ago with six VC partners and we now have about 350. And as I mentioned, they essentially all go out with us during the time of demo day to promote applications. So we're kind of getting this insane reach. I think we get about half a million impressions through these channels each demo day with a very small team. Yeah, I mean, every demo day I see like LinkedIn is flooded with like everyone goes live at the same time.

2:22But like on brand messaging, graphics, like it's a real amazing push out. And like 350 VC partners is insane. how do they help like whittle down the the 2000 to 20 yeah definitely so um yes i mean the way

2:40Issie James:that we've we've built that vc partner list i would suppose is through driving that fomo so as you say um it's hard i suppose if you're a vc in europe it's probably quite hard to avoid hearing about us during those times of demidave because every other vc supposedly is posting about it so that's kind of what's allowed us to um kind of create this feeling of fomo and drive like increasingly better applicants uh better vc partners sorry so uh more recently we've got a16z uh boulder turn local globe um all signed up to to be partners of ours and get that access um and this was the way the way that we essentially whittle it down um is so once we've got the pool of 2 ,000 applicants, we then send those applicants out to all of our VC partners.

3:30Issie James:So you've got hundreds of VCs essentially reviewing this information. And we have access and we can basically see all of this data on our side of things. So we've got our finger completely on the pulse with what VCs are looking at and what they're interested in. And the main metric we essentially uses introduction data so we facilitate introductions between our VC partners and any applicants and we basically take the the top 20 to 25 founders based off those introductions and take them to pitch. Oh interesting so that's that's how the top 20 gets selected it's actually by the the most popular applicants with your VC partners.

4:11Issie James:Yeah exactly I think I think that's kind of what sets us apart from other pitch competitions or demo days is that we've managed to crowdsource what VCs are looking at at this very specific snapshot in time. Super interesting. I didn't realise that was the way that it was whittled down. Are you seeing any trends, things change over time, you know, as we kind of get deeper into this sort of like AI hype bubble? Yeah, I mean, I suppose we're definitely seeing what everyone else is talking about in terms of AI. You know, AI very quickly overtook SaaS, which was the most prevalent sector by far about two years ago now.

4:54Issie James:I think what we're able to see that other people might not be able to is going back to that point on the VC partners and we can see exactly which VCs are requesting introductions to which companies. So we found that there's actually a bit of a difference in the kind of how established a VC is versus how interested they are in the more hypey or trendy sectors. So with VCs and AI, for example, we saw that VCs from more established firms like Balderton, your kind of longer standing firms with larger teams, actually were interested in AI earlier and their interest never really peaked too high. It's always remained relatively steady and even recently has slightly dropped.

5:53Issie James:Whereas if you look at the kind of newer VC funds, they actually were a little bit later on the bandwagon and kind of overcompensated for this by going ham on introductions to AI companies. And that's kind of now starting to taper off. But yeah, it's interesting to see kind of how the different levels of conviction that different VC funds that have in sectors over time. Yeah, super interesting. Do you have like, you know, a lot of the one of the things that a lot of people talk about now is you have leaner teams with higher revenue. Like it's a lot easier to get to revenue and you need fewer people to do it.

6:31Are you able to see that as well?

6:33Issie James:yeah so i think for us we've always with the with the nature of the companies that we've had on we've always had founders that have pretty lean teams anyway um i think what we're seeing now is um vcs being a bit more open to uh founders that are kind of earlier in their revenue stages than they were in the last couple of years i think with um vc kind of cooling off after 2021 vcs definitely wanted to see a bit more traction before they were interested in kind of requesting introductions whereas now we're seeing that level out again a little bit more and they're more open to having conversations with companies that kind of haven't had that kind of as you say like insane headcount and other metrics they would have used previously.

7:21Yeah it makes sense you've been building with on stage out on stage for like a number of years what's been like the most painful part of running like what I what I can imagine is like an incredibly logistical administrative like events you know coordinating hundreds of VC partners thousands of applicants sponsors

7:40Issie James:like what has been the biggest pain point yeah I mean there's definitely been plenty um I I think for for me what I find um is unique about running on stage versus a lot of other like startup companies if you if you want to put it in that in that category is our feedback loop is very slow so we with demo day we run two events a year um and so whereas like most companies are able to like get their product see uh what is and what isn't working and then iterate almost straight away and then and then get that back out to the market we've basically got two shops a year and so it means that we essentially have to put a lot of prep into our like big iterations we're essentially taking like a big gamble each time around on what we think is and isn't going to work and that's our shot for those six months so like from a from a kind of building on stage and product perspective I would say that's kind of one of the the more painful things.

8:44Would you you considered doing four a year or do you think two a year is good for like maintaining quality or like would you would you move to one a quarter like YC have done yeah definitely so I think for

8:54Issie James:us um again linking back to those VC partners there's only there's only so much um there's only so much resource that a VC can give us or give to any program like this each year and so we've kind of refined over the years like what is and what isn't the the uh right ask from the vcs that we work with um and so we've we've kind of pretty solidly landed on two a year um given the amount of involvement that the vcs uh do have for each demo day um you know because we're essentially um we're asking them to post we are asking them to um spend time or allocate time within their teams to reviewing our applicants and twice a year is the sweet spot to make sure that we can kind of maintain that engagement whilst making sure that the VCs are getting the most out of it.

9:50Yeah it makes sense yeah I guess it's it's a lot to yeah 2 ,000 applications is a lot to kind of go through.

9:58Issie James:Sorry probably worth mentioning to any VCs that are watching it you don't actually have to look through all 2 ,000 applications as well we do have um the the onstage team does review all 2000 and um we create a slightly shorter shorter list internally which so we send both you said the short list are the long list out some bcs go through the whole long list well you guys are going to become like very uh quick experts in like pitch pitch decks building a like coherent narrative seeing what works what doesn't work um i saw i saw on your website that you like uh onstage companies have gone on to raise nearly half a billion pounds are you tracking your sort of like your portfolio almost of like your top 20 companies every demo day are you is there any sort of like post demo day role that you play do you track them going forward to see the success do you do you help them with anything else I guess yeah so I guess our main focus with our portfolio companies is with investment and helping them with investment and and getting updates there so um yeah i think that the 480 mil um is is even slightly slightly out of date now um but i think it really highlights the the examples of the great companies that we've had come through so um companies like scan.com we know um who were a finalist a couple of years ago they've gone to raise 60 million um and there's a company called Anterior who went on to raise from Sequoia and then even in our more recent cohorts we're now seeing this kind of success happening a lot faster so last demo day we had a company called Nozomio was founded by a teenager who dropped out of high school in Kazakhstan and then he ended up getting money from LocalGlobe and is now on YC and we're basically having more of these these stories come through so there is a kind of incredibly validating for us in terms of um you know the specific type of founder and finalist that we're having um coming through yeah okay um and what about the on-stage spvs so i've seen that you guys do you know you've run some deals in the past on a sort of ad hoc basis what was like the rationale behind that are you going to keep doing that yeah so i suppose for us um i mean we only started doing those in 2022 um and at the time like it started to feel like a bit of a no-brainer it's like you know we've we're building a network of all of these amazing founders and then we've got these companies kind of landing on our plate at the time when they're fundraising um and then the increased distribution that our demo day was getting was attracting more angel investors um and so we're at the point now we've got a network of about 800 angel investors um kind of in our black book that essentially are ready to to angel invest into startups that we have coming um on our plate so at that point it was feeling like a bit of a no-brainer um and then as time has gone on like we're kind of increasingly getting these great deals landing on our plate both through demo day and outside of it so we can now invest what we've invested recently alongside um gv and creandum and speed invest um co-to recently as well um and so and so yeah the the rationale is essentially we're at the center point of the ecosystem uh we we work with these amazing vcs amazing founders and amazing angel investors so um yeah we we may as well um facilitate those through spvs yeah i guess why not um and you've got a demo day coming up when's that happening so next demo day is the 23rd of October applications open on the 15th of September but we do also have a pre-reg can I can I share a link with you Seb you could you could share and families can basically apply and get early access oh interesting so you're having early access open before 15th of September but then from 15th is that going to be your big you know VC partner push yeah exactly interesting okay so then from September 15th, you then have, you know, what, three or four weeks to whittle everyone down?

14:11Issie James:Yeah, exactly. So the application window is open for about two weeks. And then we give our VCs a kind of smaller window to go through, review, request introductions, and then demo days on the 23rd. But we essentially have to keep things very tight because we've had plenty of instances now where the founder will apply and then they will kind of fill that around. before the demo day actually is so yeah things are things are very tight wow so you've got to like you've got to keep shortening that timeline to as short as possible to make sure that they can still pitch with some sort of allocation 100 yeah interesting i also wanted to talk about your i guess there's like a few things within the on-stage ecosystem so you do your demo days we talked a bit about the spvs you also do this gplp event can you talk a bit about like what it is and why you do that yeah so our gp lp event is called deploy um we run it once a year and it's essentially for any vc fund managers who look to raise from lps um i don't know how much anyone listening to this knows but like fundraising for founders is really hard but a lot of people say that fundraising as a VC is even more difficult.

15:29Issie James:And I suppose from that perspective, with VCs, if you're a founder raising from a venture capital firm, the VC isn't being competed with on the asset class that they want to invest in. And they have a specified deployment period. So they need to basically invest X amount of capital within a certain amount of years. and in general a lot of the startups that land on a VC's table are very differentiated whereas with LPs it's almost the opposite so I mean one of the main problems for fund managers is they don't even know where to find LPs in the first place and then often you know when they do the LP might not be interested in investing in VC at the moment as an asset class because they've got plenty of other options that they can look at so essentially with Deploy we want to bring it's about 50 lps in person all of them are ready to invest into venture as an asset class and we essentially give vc fund managers the platform to pitch in front of them so they can express why they're the best people to invest in their thesis so yeah we we started doing that about two years ago and it's yeah i mean it is it's doing really really well um we uh we originally started it as like an online platform and then moved it to in person for the first time this year and it worked incredibly amazing and what's the what's the value for for you guys i guess yeah so the value for us so it essentially feeds into our um our vision to be this center point within the whole ecosystem so um we have a network now about 15 000 founders vcs angels individuals LPs um and deploy um essentially helps us get access to really great LPs um I think also like it's really important I mentioned like our VC partners work with us for demo day but also like we want to provide additional value for them outside of just giving them deal flow um and I think for a lot of VCs like some of the most valuable uh the valuable the most valuable thing you can offer is access to capital so it puts us in like a really solid position in terms of our relationships with VCs which in turn allows us to get access to great companies that they come across which kind of feeds back through to the SPV point earlier and investments that we make ourselves so there's kind of this like huge flywheel that we've got going on where everything's linked.

18:10Yeah everything sort of connects in and all the different players and parties are kind of all kind of circling on stage you talked about your mission your vision to be at the center of the ecosystem how do you see on stage changing over the next five years yeah so

18:25Issie James:i suppose there's two key things that are happening for us right now so the first one is that we are um kind of moving away from the spv structure and looking to raise our own micro fund um and then And the second thing is that we're actually moving our startup demo day in person for the first time ever. So I think those two factors will be pretty huge for us. I think essentially up until this point, we've remained pretty grassroots. As I said, we've been very lean. Everything essentially has been online based. And allowing and essentially moving in person and having this fund will take us away from that.

19:08Issie James:we do still always want to be like grassroots feel um and we all will always be a small team but it kind of solidifies us more um outside of this uh kind of online project um to like a genuine establishment within within the vc space um so yeah i would say the the fund and uh and demo day And then all of this kind of fits within our thesis, essentially, of wanting to use our network, use our platform to help founders get through the early stage, whether that be a founder of a startup or the founder of a VC fund. Amazing. That's super exciting. And that fund, are you going to be investing exclusively into that sort of like top 1 % of companies that come through you guys?

19:54Issie James:yeah so we'll be essentially leveraging our relationships with our VC partners to invest alongside them so we won't compete and it will basically be a combination of startup companies that we get through our VC partner network so operating very much like a normal VC but then also a large portion of our companies will get through the platform that we've built through Demo Day. Amazing. So it's going to be investing alongside the best VCs through your relationships and then also through the startups that you're sourcing yourself through Demo Day. Super exciting. Can I ask, are you going to be investing soon?

20:35Is that like six months away, nine months away? Are you trying to get everything ready for this Demo Day coming up?

20:41Issie James:Yeah, it will be in the near future. Nice, nice, very political. I always wanted to work at the live event so you're going to do this in person you mentioned you have like 350 vc partners there's going to be 20 teams are you trying to get everybody in the room is that going to be like how many people are going to be coming to this event yeah so i mean it's the first time that we're running this so um essentially our plan was keep it relatively uh small but flawlessly executed um and so so yeah we we the capacity of the the place that we're hiring is on the smaller side um but essentially we just want it to be um like the the best 20 founders that we've had come through on stage so far um and uh like an amazing uh we've got an amazing speaker lined up as well for our for our fireside chat um but but yeah we'll we'll basically be inviting our um our VC partners to to watch uh everything online uh with a kind of smaller room in person yeah i was gonna say that makes a lot of sense because finding 350 vcs in a room is going to be absolutely insane but i guess maybe next year um is our conscious we're out of time thank you so much for for joining me um i love what you guys are doing you know i'm a big fan uh and yeah i'll definitely be be talking about the next demo day and and yeah love to to watch it back as well amazing thanks you so much for having me thanks izzy bye cheers