A former startup founder herself, Claire Bristow then spent years in academia before making the switch to Skalata Ventures one year ago.
Here, the senior investment associate fills us in on why founders need to uncomplicate their pitches, the privilege of supporting startups, and the academic skills that stand her in good stead as a VC.
This November 30, Bristow joins the Pitch as a guest judge. Want to get your pitch in front of her and get in the running for $100,000+ in prize value? Enter now.
I once was an early-stage founder, had a company that got a very small amount of non-diluting funding from an accelerator program. So I’ve been through it before. The hardest part is starting.
I feel really privileged and lucky to get to meet these people and back them in the first steps of their journey. I’m not going to call it ‘validation’, because funding isn’t validation, but to have someone believe you and put their precious money into what you’re trying to achieve is a really privileged position to be in.
My favourite part of the job is when we get to do that call and say ‘Yep, we’re investing’.
I’m always wondering about this. There are so many articles that everyone’s posting on LinkedIn, like ‘Here’s how you should pitch’, and ‘Here’s how to put your pitch deck together’. Yet the majority of what we see, I would say, still isn’t as effective as it could be.
People overcomplicate things. They think they have to tell you everything in a deck. In actual fact it’s a teaser. It’s almost the less that they tell us, the better. You want to get enough interest that I’m going to pick up the phone and have a call with you, that is when you can then dive into that stuff.
It can be a mistake to try and put too much on there, to overcomplicate it. Very simply: tell us what the problem is, how you solve it and who’s willing to pay. If I understand that, I’m pretty likely to get on a call.
I was a lecturer in public health. My PhD research was in eating disorders, so not remotely related to what I do now. I didn’t have a PhD in accounting or economics or finance or anything like that.
As I mentioned I had a company that was related to that research, we were an eating disorder awareness and support platform.
I went through the whole journey, through an accelerator, ran for a few years, and then was offered the lecturing position, not knowing what I wanted to do next. It became pretty evident early on that I didn’t want to spend my life in a university, after spending six years teaching the same thing, delivering the same lectures, marking the same assessments. It’s a great job for stability and comfort, but I was at a stage where that was not actually what I wanted, and I’d plateaued in my learning.
I decided to make the jump into the space. I thought I’d work for a startup. I didn’t want to found my own again, I’m a little bit scarred from that journey, so I thought ‘I’ll go work for someone else’s’. Then the investing role came up and I hadn’t thought of it from that perspective. Basically, I still see us as working for startups, but just for a lot of them.
It’s interesting. I really struggled to communicate what the translation is. Not many people saw the relevance, I suppose. It’s not the typical background that VCs come from, at least not in the Australian market.
Essentially what we do is really really similar. If you’re in research, if you’re in academia, essentially you have a hypothesis, you go and collect data and information to test that hypothesis and then you write your findings. It’s very similar to what we do as VCs.
You meet a company, they have a hypothesis, you go and test that through your own due diligence, through your own research, and then you write up your supportive findings if you want to make the investment and back the case as to why.
Obviously, the difference is the data that you’re working with. But it’s the critical analysis skills that you apply to any problem you’re exploring that I think is the most obvious transformation for me.
From our view, we’re in the really early stages of investment, often the first institutional check in the door. For us, slightly, valuations haven’t been hit nearly as hard as series A and later stages. It has been business as usual for us. In fact, it has been even more competitive because everyone has started to look earlier as it’s dried up in the later stages. It’s still super competitive, there are a lot of people looking for deals.
A lot of funds we’re talking to are hitting the fundraising pavement. Everyone’s out there getting dollars from their investors again. We’ve already seen things pick up in the slightly later stages, your late seed, your series A. In my opinion, and I’m no expert on this, but by maybe mid-late next year, it’ll be back to business as usual. We might not see the same valuations but essentially there are a lot of people who are trying to find companies to invest in. And they’re currently going and raising the capital to do so.
I don’t think it’s doom and gloom at all.
On November 30, Bristow joins Rachel Yang, John Kearney and Mitch Hancock as a guest judge at the Pitch. Want them to see your startup idea? Enter now.
Ben Ice is special features editor of SmartCompany.
