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

A change is in the air. Unmanned aerial systems (i.e. drones), typically associated with hobbyists, are now accelerating towards in-house enterprise adoption. The commoditisation of drone hardware has led to widespread adopti

In the Ventures team at Octopus, we think about deep tech as the technology that allows us to transcend the status quo. Current technologies eventually block progress and deep tech is the un-blocker. Existing computer chips,

Pete Daffern has been a CEO three times over, and overseen US and EMEA operations for a handful of multi-billion dollar companies. Here Pete lists the Top 5 pitfalls he sees most CEOs stumble upon at some point in their journ

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

Digital Shadows is the market leader in Digital Risk Protection, providing a suite of products to protect organizations against digital risks across the open, deep, and dark web. Alastair Paterson is the co-founder of D