Insights Hub

Since I joined Octopus about a year and a half ago, I’m often asked: “How did you get into venture capital?” and “How did you get in without any banking or consulting experience?” I answer that the big reason I got

Earlier this year I joined the Octopus Ventures team as the portfolio talent manager. In short, I’m here to help our portfolio companies scale their teams to build successful businesses. I love early stage startups and beli

Recruitment demands that you know your own business to the core. Your recruitment briefs should be blueprints of your corporate DNA. Know yourself – your values, your mission, your objectives – inside out and you’ll k

By definition, any fast-growing enterprise will effectively be a different company every twelve, if not six months. From an investment point of view, Melissa Taunton of NEA advised our CEOs, “you need to look like a diffe

First the bad news. Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, stated, “most things you can’t control”. “However,” he added, “there’s one thing you can control — how you treat people.”

Jeff’s message w

It’s worth mentioning that every single one of our guest speakers — collectively responsible for creating $200bn of shareholder value — arrived on time. No rushed late entries, no buzzing phones, no bag-carrying fl

I’m optimistic of the timing of entry this year, as it is a more inviting time than ever to make the plunge. Why? There is a recent thawing of US regulatory impediments that stood in the way of Fintechs landing crucial na

Question the Questions is a new report from Octopus Ventures that provides a stress-tested guide to international expansion, powered by insights from over 100 European VC-backed businesses that expanded to the US. It trac

Should you expand abroad? 15: Hello Fresh link: https://www.hellofresh.com Should you enter the US? Is the timing right? 18: Y-Plan Link: https://checkout.timeout.com What milestones and timel

The ultimate pioneer, the inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave us the web thirty years ago- for free. But his original vision was never fully realized. His new company, inrupt, intends to fix that.  Si

A men’s health startup issued a member-get-member referral promotion recently. Despite the serious addressing of issues like erectile dysfunction and hair loss by the company, its promotion was forwarded by many of its audi

Recently our Deep Tech pod hosted an evening at Google’s Startups Campus entitled ‘AI on the edge’. We heard from a prize collection of speakers including Eddie Seymour from NVIDIA, Michael Huth from XAIN, Hoi Lam from

“They say that scaling up is hard to do / Now I know I know that it’s true / Don’t say that this is the end, / Instead of scaling up I wish that we were starting up again…” OK, I’ve corrupted the lyrics from

Alastair, you keep returning to “hiring” as one of the most important ways you’ve addressed your company. Have you been successful in hiring the right talent at each of the company’s stages? If so, why do you think

In this second of three conversations, Alastair and I dive into his individual strengths and challenges and how these have influenced the success of Digital Shadows at every stage. Here, he describes how he balances his own k