June Angelides MBE, Founder of the Portfolio Method and Venture Partner at Samos Investments: Building a platform to manage multiple roles and income streams

0:00June Angelides MBE:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show presented by Deal. I'm Seb and today we've got an amazing guest June. June who seems to be one of the busiest people across European tech. You've had an amazing career building, investing, operating. You are a venture partner at Samos and you are now back in the ring with a new company of your own. How are you doing today? Thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me Seb. It's a pleasure to be here. So tell me about it. What are you building and why? So I'm building the portfolio method. And it's simply because over the last 10 years now, I've been living the portfolio career life, ultimately, you know, between Samos, I've been doing public speaking, I've been sitting on boards, and I keep meeting women and men, actually, who come up to me and say, how do you do it all?

0:46You know, and I kept looking around the market, trying to figure out the infrastructure that would help me do that juggle properly. And it's never been done. So I finally decided it's time. I kind of got thrown into the deep end in January and ran a workshop for a group called The Wits End. And off the back of that, a lot of people came to me and said, look, June, you need to formalize this. And I started thinking about what it could look like. And I came up with this idea of we need ultimately to have this decision making engine that allows us to decide what careers to follow, how to build our stack, how to think about pricing and how to manage our energy.

1:27And can you touch a bit on what the real user experience looks like?

1:31June Angelides MBE:What's the real value to the end user? Absolutely. um we're literally for context the idea started in in january and um a couple of months into iterating on what what that ultimately will look like at the end but we've run a workshop and i say we it's me and an incredible lady called alice and um what what that the insight we got out of that was that there's so many people who are struggling with prioritization struggling with pricing. We got them to do a three hour workshop where we kind of went through the money method, the energy method and the visibility method where they kind of had to write down.

2:12I think sometimes it takes you writing down exactly what you're doing to realize just how many things you're trying to juggle in a week. So many people were doing a lot of context switching. So for me, I find it really helpful to kind of have certain jobs on certain days as opposed to trying to mix everything into one day because what you find and the data shows is that you lose sort of two to three hours if you're kind of moving between different types of tasks. So trying to have your container days. So having that exercise and getting them to do that group work, it was this real aha moment. And I think something that really surprised me was the types of people who had portfolio careers.

2:49I think many people be surprised and, you know, we see these people all the time, but maybe you don't realize someone like a Reid Hoffman has a portfolio career, someone like a Bill Gurley, you see them as investors, but they have a lot of side hustles. Andrew Chen, they're authors, they're running podcasts, they've got blogs. These are multiple income streams. So what we wanted to do is help them unpack, first of all, what they were, help them think about, how much energy are you allocating to each role? And what they actually found out out of these sessions was that a lot of the time they were giving a lot of energy to certain jobs and not getting the compensation that they deserved.

3:27So 85 % of people in the room were underpricing. That was pretty wild to hear between swapping nodes, between, you know, us sort of benchmarking. And ultimately, the plan is to have like a glass door for portfolio careers where we can help people see what others are charging, which again, has not been done.

3:49June Angelides MBE:And was there a moment for you when you decided that you were going to get back into build mode, where you said to yourself okay I want to be a founder again and what was that experience like? I think the the moment where I decided okay this is it obviously being a portfolio career I can still carry on investing which is beautiful but I really decided to go full steam ahead probably about five weeks ago when the Huckle Tree opportunity came up when I had the space offered to me and I kind of find myself saying yes before I had a plan and I think it's been just so invigorating I mean we as investors we're lucky we get to meet so many founders on a daily basis but building and going through that process myself of trying to understand my customers trying to understand how to add value to their lives really thinking about what a great MVP would would look like going on Claude.

4:50Claude has been my best friend. I have absolutely loved. Okay. So confession, although I built Mums in Tech all those years ago, I never really got a chance to learn to code because I spent my whole time like focused on building out the program, focused on the customer experience. I didn't have the time. So this is like the first time I'm kind of getting to go back to basics, you know, using Cloud to build out the code, using Netlify to deploy and, you know, test building out super, I'd never use Superbase, but I can now, you know, build all these databases and using Lovable to iterate. So it's been super exciting speaking to the customers on a daily basis.

5:30We now have a beta group off the back of running that workshop four weeks ago on a WhatsApp group where we are just sharing ideas on, you know, what might work, what they like. And we nailed, you know, the money method was the first thing that people wanted as a features to be able to understand what to charge, you know, whether you're a fractional CFO, or you're doing website building for people, or you're a copywriter. You know, there's just so many combination of roles people are stacking. One woman had eight different stacks. And that was just so interesting to see. they were adding roles because they wanted to get to a certain income level meanwhile the roles they had were not being maximized in terms of revenue and we're like well that's where you need to think okay maybe you can remove certain things and that's where we want to get to where the engine will tell you you know how to optimize your stack and how do you see this evolving over

6:24June Angelides MBE:time you know i can almost see a future where you're not just helping people assess their own careers, but maybe find them and connect them with more opportunities. Could it become a big multi-channel social platform where people can connect with each other and help find different jobs? Absolutely. The first inspiration for the portfolio method was actually Strava or Runner. You know, they started with a very simple PDF, you know, helping people improve their runnings. And that's what we've done. We have a very simple audit with which people fill out in five minutes, kind of describing all the different roles you do.

6:57And then we give you a report that tells you a bit more about, you know, what is draining your energy? Where are you spending more time? How can you improve your visibility? And we think off the back of this, you know, we can dive a little bit deeper with them, understand the revenue side. I think there's an opportunity to build, you know, Glassdoor or a pitch book type database where we have a massive data bank of, you know, different roles and what people are charging for them, what the different, you know, the different portfolio stacks look like around the world. I think this is global from day one.

7:29And we're seeing people land on the website from, you know, Nigeria, from the US, from the Philippines. It's been really fascinating to kind of see the data behind who's looking at the audit.

7:41June Angelides MBE:how are you finding these first early users how are they hearing about you know the website and what you felt yes i've obviously leveraged my linkedin channel a lot um but more importantly i think people have been sharing it so we're seeing a lot of organic traffic to the website which again considering this has only been going for three four weeks we've made the website live that's pretty exciting it's resonating i think you know the portfolio career term is not new however nobody's sort of organized a platform or a movement around it yeah look i'm at the website now that's great i definitely need to try this out and check it out myself because i'm constantly struggling with how i should allocate my own time within scaling units one brand one company but it's so multi-channel um so it's always a struggle for me to figure out how i should be prioritizing my time that's exactly what we want to be able to take that mental load off of you where it automatically tells you, Seb, spend more time, get those public speaking gigs.

8:38You know, you need only 10 of those a year. You can have a holiday for two months. You know, that's the kind of insights we want you to be able to have to optimize your work life. Yeah.

8:48June Angelides MBE:And as I'm learning and doing new types of work that I'm getting paid for and things I didn't get paid for a year ago, I'm thinking about, should I be doing more or less? How should I be spending my time? Absolutely. And I think it's important to say that venture partner will mean different things for different firms. So at Samos, what it means, it's probably still a little bit like my previous job. So I've been with Samos for eight years now. I started off as an investment manager and then I became a principal. And then two years ago, I decided I wanted to start exploring this sort of venture partner role.

9:18And I was lucky that the team allowed me to craft what that was going to be for me. So I spent a lot of time, obviously, in the ecosystem, So building out and nurturing relationships with accelerators. We do a lot with EF and Cambridge and Oxford University. But also I'm spending a lot of time with our portfolio companies on strategy, on fundraising, just literally a bit of everything. All the things that I really enjoy doing. I'm probably not doing as much on the sort of post-origination as I was before, before I was doing everything right up to legals. and now it's just a lot more of what I love.

9:58I'm a people person so I think you can sort of class me as a little bit of platform, a little bit of deal side which is brilliant and I'm with the team two days a week.

10:09June Angelides MBE:And I want to get into how you're able to balance it all because you've got a lot going on. You kind of organised and founded lots of different organisations over your time. You're still working. You're still working as a venture partner. Can you just touch on what that role really means because I think it kind of means different things to different firms. Absolutely. I think over the last couple of years, you know, definitely with the help of a coach, I've been able to get better at having my container days. And I think that's definitely what kind of keeps me in check. So I know my SAML stays are Wednesday to Thursday.

10:38And the rest of the time and my evenings, I'm working on the portfolio method, at least in the last couple of weeks. That's been my primary focus. Because as you say, there's a lot to do. I'm really excited by it. And I don't want to lose this momentum because there is so much interest. And I say this all the time, a lot of the things that I say yes to, they feed into each other. So, you know, when I'm doing my SAMOS work, I'm learning. And, you know, whether I'm sitting on a board or I'm advising a founder, a lot of those learnings I can apply when I'm building out the portfolio method and vice versa.

11:12You know, I think it gives me a lot more empathy now that I'm back in founder mode. And again, I get to redefine, you know, how I want my founder experience to be. I've got three kids, you know, 13, 8 and 11 now. So they're keeping me busy. And as you say, I've got the other side projects, which, you know, I've been lucky to build alongside my work at Samos. So in 2022, I decided I wanted to start investing in African startups. And I approached the Samos team and 14 other investors to say, would you like to invest alongside me? This was around the time I was, I just invested in Odin. So it was perfect.

11:53So I was like, I'll be your guinea pig. Let's start investing together. Super easy. And it was a good way for me to not only give back to the African ecosystem, but to show them like just the opportunities that lay there. I'd been to Lagos with Google and just been blown away by the caliber of founders that I'd seen. I felt the timing was right. And we approached it almost like a patient capital approach where we would invest slowly. And as we saw opportunities come up, we had a ticket size up to 100K and decided to invest across e-commerce, fintech, future of work, B2B SaaS. class and we probably we've made about nine investments so far which is super exciting you know three of them are on a tier and I love it it keeps it keeps my my brain super active I love doing lots of different things and then I've also got my grandma's book which we launched two weeks ago and alongside that a CIC which I've set up with my mom and my sister with some of some family members as board advisors so that's been really exciting you know with that We're hoping to feed school children across Nigeria, starting with Lagos, with free school meals, which surprisingly does not exist.

13:13June Angelides MBE:And let's touch a bit on African venture. You know, that's something that you've played a key role in over the last three or four years. Something that you obviously know a lot about and are very close to. How have you seen that ecosystem develop and change? Is it a hub that more investors should be looking at? A hundred percent. I think, you know, especially across Nigeria, the macro climate has improved dramatically. I think a lot of the nervousness around investing in Africa has always been about the politics, the macro. Obviously, nobody wants to invest where inflation is rampant. But, you know, the governments are really doing a lot of work to get things back to a more stable position.

13:49I think investors have been prioritized. The governments want them to feel secure that if they were to put money in, that they can take it out. Because I think that's where the nervousness has been previously. They're doing a lot of work to ensure that the startups have the infrastructure that they need to really get going. When I first started investing, it was tough. Startups here have a lot that they can just kind of get going with. In Nigeria, for example, you have to think about your own electricity. You need to buy a generator. You need to think about logistics. How are you going to get from point A to B, especially with the security crisis?

14:27So things have improved dramatically since 2022. I think, you know, companies like Chowdeck, which is like the delivery for Nigeria, are literally on a tier. They are doing incredible amounts of revenue, essentially becoming a super app, which I think if you'd said two years ago, would they get there? I would have said I'm not sure but you know things have changed so much to make sure that they they're able to not only excel but attract really great talent to join them on their journey.

15:00June Angelides MBE:And how are you how are you balancing it all then because it's a really amazing thing to be back on you really I imagine you want to run full steam ahead but you yourself are managing a portfolio career right and Samus Investments fits in that but you've also got lots of lots of other stuff going going on how do you balance being excited and want to run at full speed with also just balancing the other priorities? Yeah, so at Samos, we've been investing quite heavily, even before my time, we were early backers of Cure Medical, Micrographia. Since I joined, we've made some incredible investments like Level Zero Health.

15:33And I think what excites me is, you know, companies like Level Zero and Lighthearted and Axiom are building in spaces that historically, there haven't been massive data sets in. So I'm really excited from a data perspective, you know, with hormone monitoring, no one has been able to build this continuous hormone monitoring data set, which Level Zero is going after. The founder profile is changing. Super excited for companies like Electric Twin, you know, former chief information officer from, you know, government and ex-military. So I think it's an exciting time to be building. We're We're definitely seeing lots of interesting people starting up businesses.

16:18It's never been easier. But also, I think the regulatory environment is such that, you know, it's much more straightforward for companies to kind of, you know, start thinking about how to build a moat.

16:33June Angelides MBE:I want to ask one final question. You know, going back, you've had an amazing career over the last 10 or 15 years, operating, investing, building, playing a really important role across life, lifting the whole ecosystem up as well. is there a role that you've really loved the most and it can either be founder operator builder community builder or a specific project specific role in a company um i would love to know about a key role that you really loved yes i think that one's very easy um because i think my trajectory changed the moment i decided to build mums in tech i think that was the moment you know leaving a safe job at silicon valley bank going down this path of something which had absolutely never existed no one had ever built a child-friendly coding school and I think what what that really showed me was you know the ecosystem was hungry for some something different you know working with places like Skype and Ministry of Justice and Moo and you know just really reimagining what it means to learn after having children.

17:35June Angelides MBE:Amazing well look June thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for the role that you play across the ecosystem it's been great chatting.

17:44Thank you.