Hey everyone! Hope you have enjoyed your Christmas and New Years. It’s been such a crazy time, with the Omicron variant that swirled around and Plan B that smacked us right in the face. This being said, however, 2021 has been a great year for us. Among our achievements:
And now, during this month, here is what we have worked on:
In the meantime, we are continuing to actively scout for more idea stage to pre-seed founders and startups! This year, we are going to heavily emphasise pretotyping (NOT prototyping) as our validation framework of choice, particularly among idea stage founders. At multiple startup events and panel talks, one frustrating point of emphasis was that angel investors and VCs were too vague in their standards and didn’t always give consistent analysis to founders. While there will always be a certain level of ambiguity, we wanted to ensure we had a concrete standard that (particularly) idea stage founders could try to reach with various pretotyping experiments (landing pages, etc.) and stand a higher chance of receiving funding.
In addition to this, we will continue to find unique ways to educate the UK/EU startup ecosystem about the mechanics of the Convertible Future Earnings Agreement. Our model is still extremely new in this region and founders here are not as used to the “Alt-VC” financing dynamics compared to the Bay Area. This being said, our model is very much needed here. Just like in the US pre-2018, entrepreneurs are very much frustrated by the lack of non-blitzscale options for funding sustainable and impact-first businesses. Through various opportunities to host sessions, workshops, be on different podcasts and panels, and in social media, our goal this year is for 80% of the early stage UK startup ecosystem to know who we are, what we do, and to understand that if they have a landing page with skin in the game metrics, they are good enough to apply for our investment.
We are excited to continue to serve you all and back legendary idea-stage founders, and commit to being the earliest cheque that exists in the UK and EU.
Best,
Horizan VC Squad
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