Insights Hub

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

1. Retain advisers: Above all else, tax and legal advisers should be engaged early on to help you think this through and to understand how to establish and maintain a stock option plan for your US employees. 2. Employee ex

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

Our Future of Industry pod looks for the pioneers who are creating the tools and technologies that will power the next industrial revolution. Unmade is one company that is not just changing the face of fashion, but is redesig

Simon King came to Octopus Ventures for an internship eight years ago, armed with a PhD in organic electronics from Imperial College London. Now a Partner, he is responsible for the new deal origination team at Octopus and si

Tech CEOs face particular challenges. Venture Partner Pete Daffern has been a CEO three times over, and overseen US and EMEA operations for a handful of multi-billion dollar companies. Here, he sets out the 8 Truths that coul

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

In your marketing, on your website, or in front of customers, ‘platform’ is practically a suicidal term until customers have shown that they care about what your product or service and the architecture behind it can do