Scaling a VC from 0 to 21 Countries with Magnus Grimeland

0:00If you ask founders, what is the hardest thing to get started with? Number one is co-founders, product market fit. And then after that, you need some capital. The fourth thing is access to talent. And that becomes harder and harder the more you kind of scale. But it's incredibly hard from day one. Day one, you don't even have anything to really pay people. You just have your equity and your vision. If you get the right people in early and you do well as a company, the stickiness in them is there. If you can get those first few people right, it determines so much of your future path.

0:28Alex Chisnall:Magnus Grimeland, founder of Antler, one of the world's most active early stage investors with a presence in over 30 cities worldwide. There's this process where you convince yourself intellectually and then you start feeling that your gut and your heart also feel the same way your brain does. You start waking up in the morning and feeling very excited about it. You think about it when you go to bed, it becomes like all obsessive. And that's when you know that you kind of have that combination of passion and conviction that you're on to something. Welcome to this special bite-sized episode of Screw It, Just Do It from our back catalogue of over 550 past episodes.

1:05Alex Chisnall:If you like what you hear, don't forget to follow the show and grab your free two-day pass to the Festival of Entrepreneurs this October. Just head to festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk to claim yours and don't forget to dive into the back catalogue. Want to surround yourself with 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 entrepreneurs who've already decided to screw it and just do it? The Festival of Entrepreneurs is happening October the 8th and 9th at the NEC Birmingham, and I'm giving away free two-day pass to my listeners. 200-plus speakers, 90-plus sessions, billion-pound entrepreneurs sharing their real stories, not theory, but the actual strategies they use to scale.

1:40Alex Chisnall:Head to festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk right now and claim your free pass, because the best networking happens when you're in the room with people who've already decided to screw it and just did it. When I spoke to you for the first time, we were talking about that community and it was like, that will come at some point. How do we take all the alumni, first of all, and that is a community. And then what do we do with everybody else that went through the process and maybe didn't get funding? And there's all this pool of ideas that still hasn't been mined. And then there's this even bigger pool of people, still quality people.

2:17So how do you approach that?

2:19Alex Chisnall:Because for me, looking from the outside in, that probably takes a lot of man hours to actually get that up and running and keep that community alive. Yes, so I think there are a couple of aspects and a couple of things to unpack with that question. So one is just a community, right? And we have a global, obviously, Slack workspace with all our founders that have gone through. It's a couple of thousand people now. we have our antifusion internal network where people can find each other access perks access access our advisory network and and this just becomes stronger every day as more great people join it and and i think the most powerful part of that is actually not us or the advisors or perks or anything else it's like if you're building a fintech company um or let's say let's say you really like a web 3.0 company in london and um you're thinking about okay what license do i need where do i set up a bank account where do i register this um you know what where do i get access to like blockchain coders all these types of questions like any web 3.0 company that is being built today i have exactly the same questions and the best people to answer that is actually don't call an expert like call other founders who just did it two months ago right so you know we have a sac channel of web3bno founders who can ask each other all those questions you do the same with fintech you do the same with health tech you do the same with climate change you do the same with like it's incredibly powerful that part for people just accessing each other people are doing similar things in other markets are non-competitive you can help each other out and know that okay i'm being helped now and somebody else will help me in the future so it's like um and then i will help you know more people in the future and so it's like it's not a serious game it's just clear kind of network effects that just get stronger every day so that's i think is the most important part and then there's the talent part which you spoke about yeah it's also very tangible where yes unfortunately we can't invest into everyone even the ones that you know end up working with us um because perhaps they didn't find a co-founder in time or i didn't find pro market fit or whatever it is um so you can't invest in everyone what we have created is the talent network where these people we don't invest into might be a great co-founder for an existing portfolio company which is new or they might be a great cxo or they might be a great product so we have now you know this database that keep refreshing is about 700 people there now and it's has an insane effect because if you ask founders what is the hardest thing to get started well you know number one is uh you know the co-founders product market fit and then after that you know they need some capital but the the the fourth thing is um access to talent right and that becomes harder and harder the more you you kind of scale uh but it's incredibly hard from day one because day one you don't even have anything to really pay people you just have your equity and your vision right so so we have this you know group of people a network of people who want to work in really early stage startups and they're super happy to work for a bit of equity because you know they want to be a co-founder on their own yeah and so we have all these portfolio companies there's just a portfolio company now it's like 18 months old or something like that to i just raised that 120 million dollar valuation in southeast asia and they hired their um i think they hired their head of australia their head of indonesia and their head of malaysia so the gms they all come in they get equity and upside um from that network and it's just like you know you you've been through this uh you know before with virgin and so alex you just know how hard it is to get these people right exactly eat that up you can just create so much more momentum so much quicker because they go through that vetting process with with antler um so we believe this is going to be like a key pillar um going forward the whole talent aspect well so far we focus a lot on the co-founder matching the problem market fit and then access to terrible vcs we believe now that this this talent aspect will be a kind of fourth very strong pillar that that will make us a great um uh partner for for good founders if you're enjoying this conversation and thinking, I need to be around more people like this, then I've got the perfect solution for you.

6:56Alex Chisnall:The Festival of Entrepreneurs is where five to 10 ,000 ambitious entrepreneurs come together to learn from the people who've actually done it. It's on October the 8th and 9th at the NEC in Birmingham, and I'm giving my listeners free two-day passes. Real entrepreneurs, real stories, real strategies, exactly like what you're hearing right now, but live and in person. Go to festivalofentrepreneurs.co.uk and get your free two-day pass before they're gone. Great that you can recognize that because literally, I think, without a shadow of a doubt, it's the number one challenge when I interview founders, CEOs, MDs is finding the talent and then it's retaining the talent.

7:37Alex Chisnall:Of course, it becomes the next challenge. Yeah, for sure. The great thing is obviously if you get the right people in early, and you do well as a company the stickiness in them is is there in in because they they hold into kind of what is starting to become quite valuable equity right so yeah yeah you know if you can get those first few people right it determines so much of your future path yeah very true um and interested to know so when it came to you having this idea to launch this business before antler was launched how long was it kicking around in your head or you kicking the idea around amongst your friends and your your partner etc yeah so uh about nine years so so you know i'll tell you like so the first i'll tell you the kind of two kind of denses there's a lot of obviously in between but like i used to work in mckinsey and i used to work with these legacy tech companies.

8:45And you go to a few of them, and they might have 2 ,000, 3 ,000, 4 ,000 engineers working in the company. And some of the stuff they do is just insanely amazing, like leading AI, leading, let's say, mapping technology, leading IoT, leading sensor work, all this amazing technology that is stuck in this kind of larger legacy tech companies. and and it never a lot of it never makes itself it never ends up in in a final product because there's like three four thousand middle managers on top it's like deciding what to do and also obviously the company needs to focus on a few different areas right so i thought wow this is such an untapped potential for the world what if we could do this kind of take this tech out or take these people out and then build new companies with them if you could combine them with like great operators but you know at the time i was like a associate in in in in mckinsey and uh you know i have no idea i really have to i think build a great business and uh probably it wouldn't have been the right time to do it so i i obviously went to to build another business first and then what happened as we were building that business is this incredible thing you see in new ecosystems when you have great companies being built right so we built celora.com some of the the most successful fashion e-commerce companies well it was the most successful but it was one of the first tech successes in southeast asia and we had hired all these people um who were became the experts in performance marketing in the region they became the best product managers they became the best developers they became the best operations people uh just through kind of building this company with and they left to build great companies of their own right so like gojek is now a 15 billion dollar company out of um out of indonesia was built by kevin and dm used to be part of slora um you have shoppy which is like biggest part of c group or green i just recall which is now 100 billion dollar plus company you have uh stash away which is a big robo advisor and you have shopback which is the biggest online marketing platform and like tons of other companies that came out of the Solora mafia per se it's not quite as big as the Facebook mafia but in South Asia it has a tremendous impact and you see that impact in a small ecosystem and then if you go to Stockholm which I was in the world coming from Nordics you see the people leaving Spotify is having a similar effect like Cree for example so when BlackBerry failed in Toronto I was talking to I sit on the advisory board for Waterloo University and I was just talking to a few people there in the startup ecosystem and I said when BlackBerry died seven new unicorns came out of the workforce, right?

11:35Because it was this forcing mechanism for engineers to go out and build new companies. So, you know, so all of that just led me to think that, hey, there's a real opportunity here to tap into kind of tremendous talent. We kind of know a little bit about where they are and how they look like. And we kind of know what the most important parts to not failing is and how to create like a lot of momentum early. let's build a platform purely around backing incredible people and being their best partner over the first few months of their business and and make that kind of the number one thing that we are going to be great at and through that uh you know have a great impact on the world and and so you know i thought about you know i thought about this back and forward for you know nine years as i mentioned i thought about it really seriously for six months after i was done with my management look in the gfg right and and when you when you think about these things and your problems so business models and what you want to spend your time on there's this um process where you can you convince yourself intellectually and then you start feeling that your gut and your heart uh also feel the same way your brain does right and then you start waking up in the morning and feeling very excited about it.

12:56You think about it when you go to bed, it becomes like all obsessive. And that's when you know that you kind of have that combination of kind of passion and conviction that you're onto something that I think, you know, founders who get into this kind of mode of obsession about doing something, get into, right?

13:16Alex Chisnall:Like it was really kind of that type of feeling. That conversation just proves something. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So here's my challenge. Upgrade your network. The Festival of Entrepreneurs is happening October the 8th and 9th, and I'm giving my listeners free two-day passes to get in the room with 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 entrepreneurs who are actually building something. This is where the risk-takers, the game-changers, and the people who've decided to screw it and just do it come for inspiration, education, and connection. Don't just listen to their success stories.

13:50Alex Chisnall:go meet the people living them. Grab your free pass now because the biggest risk isn't taking a chance, it's missing the opportunity entirely. If you enjoyed that Buy Sites episode with me and Magnus, you might be interested in diving into the full episode. We talk about backing founders from day zero, why Antler starts investing before the idea and what that means for the future of entrepreneurship. What makes a world-class founder? Magnus' global insights on the traits that separate good founders from great ones is really worth a listen. And the UK's startup ecosystem were at a crossroads, where he believes the UK needs bolder thinking to compete globally.