Balderton Capital

Today is a significant step for Innovate Cambridge as we announce our Innovation Advisory Council and publish our updated Strategy.   Inspired by thriving ecosystems across the world, we have assembled world-class science, tech and innovation leaders to share international perspective and best practice in creating innovation ecosystems and accelerate the social, environmental and economic impact the ecosystem can achieve.   Science Minister and Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor Champion, Lord Vallance said: “Cambridge’s Advisory Council will bring together a genuinely extraordinary group of leaders and experts. Their insight and deep experience will be an important resource for us to draw upon, as we push on with work to unleash the potential of this city, and the entire Oxford-Cambridge Corridor, to improve people’s lives.”   Our Executive Director, Kathryn Chapman said: “Cambridge is the beating heart of UK R&D and we want to turn this into social and economic impact for the whole country. The Advisory Council will help to drive us forward this mission.”   For the full release and list of Council members, please see our press release here - https://bit.ly/41A1hme For the updated strategy see here - http://bit.ly/4iEAmg6 Thank you to our Founders and Partners: Cambridge Innovation Capital, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Enterprise, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge City college, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority, Cambridge Judge Business School

As Open AI wanted to move towards taking control and ownership of its identity stack, it needed more than what most vendors offered in the industry and found Ory Corp Working closely with Ory, they are now managing 400M weekly active users. Ory is open source software that has proven the ability to scale to thousands of logins per second in our own load testing and is now helping to manage 100% of ChatGPT’s web traffic through our enterprise license. If you’re stuck with an inflexible, outage-prone, and outdated identity provider, switch to Ory Corp Aeneas Rekkas tells the story better than I do. Link in the comments

As I first revealed on Monday, Dex's mission is to empower individuals to do meaningful work. By connecting the brightest individuals with opportunities that align with their ambitions and values, we are aiming to redefine how talent and opportunity are united. Today, I want to go a level deeper on that mission. Every career is a journey of a thousand decisions. Which path to take? When to leap? How to grow? Because landing a job to survive is not enough, it's about finding your place to thrive. It's about waking up excited for the day ahead. It's about growing into your potential. At Dex, our aim is to be the champion in your corner. Not just matching skills to roles; but aligning passions with purpose. Dex gets to know you, beyond the CV. What makes your professional heart, beat. What makes the fire in your belly, burn. A key part of this equation to a successful, meaningful and ultimately fulfilling career is inspiration. As human beings, we are naturally attracted to storytelling. So we want to bring the career inspiration to you. Today we are launching the first episode of the official DexFactor Podcast, featuring leading VC Balderton Capital’s Chief Portfolio Talent Officer Leah Sutton Each week we aim to bring you the career story of someone who has inspired us, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to launch the pod by telling Leah’s story.  In this first episode Leah discusses memorable hires that significantly impacted her leadership, the challenges of hiring for product roles, and the importance of learning from hiring mistakes. Leah emphasizes the need for candidates to be intentional in their job search and the significance of negotiation during job offers. I hope you enjoy! And don’t forget to watch the full episode and sign up to get every episode delivered straight to your inbox weekly, link in comments. #hiring #dex #talent

𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐄 𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐃𝐄𝐌𝐘𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐅𝐈𝐄𝐃 4: 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑 𝐕𝐂 Continuing on routes into Investment Teams in Venture (https://lnkd.in/gvWW28eF), last time we talked about Career VCs (https://lnkd.in/gRXHh4CQ), this time: 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘳 𝘝𝘊. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫? “Operator” refers to professionals in engineering, product, sales, marketing, corporate development, etc within tech companies from startups to Big Tech. 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐬 & 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐁𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐕𝐂 ✅Experience: Early-stage companies need specialist knowledge in their sector and experience in ‘company building’. Operator VCs have this from their background and so can help more than equivalent Career VCs. ✅Credibility: The experience an Operator VC brings helps them connect with founders and teams who face similar challenges. This credibility builds strong bonds before and after an investment. ✅Network: Operator VCs already have a network of teams, founders and experts they can lean on for sourcing and diligence. ❌Financial skills: At non-Partner levels, a large part of VC involves financial and company/market analysis. Career VCs develop these skills through banking or consulting, whereas operators can lack this expertise. ❌Compensation: Non-partner roles at VCs can have a lower base comp than senior operator roles in tech. 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐕𝐂 Despite their unique experience, Operators don’t always have an easy path into VC. Unless senior enough to join as a Partner, the lack of analytical and financial skills means some find it hard to get in and, once they are, can struggle with these aspects of the job. To counteract this, I have two suggestions:  1️⃣ Get the training – plug financial/analytical gaps with a fully-fledged MBA or focused education;  2️⃣ Play to your strengths – Use expertise (eg tech if from an engineering background) to supplement rather than compete with Career VCs. 𝐒𝐡𝐢𝐟𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠  The nature and style of work in VC is very different to a tech company:   1️⃣ Fragmented, short duration teams working towards a transaction, rather than a long-term macro goal 2️⃣ Partnership vs CEO organisational structure 3️⃣ Transactional work where, unlike sales, ‘more’ is not necessarily better. As a result, skills that made operators successful in tech don’t always translate well to VC. Some adapt, while others find it difficult and ultimately leave the industry. 𝐓𝐢𝐩𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐕𝐂 𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐞 1️⃣ Showcase experience: What is your operational superpower and how can you highlight it? 2️⃣ Up-skill: learn the basics of financial modelling and corporate analysis so you are at less of a disadvantage. 3️⃣ Investment Interest: Engage with startups and invest time or money. Build a ‘portfolio’, and explain how your operational skills add value to the companies you help.

Thanks to Sifted for the opportunity to share my thoughts on companies to watch in the CFO tech stack. I mentioned Briefcase, Mimo, and Bluebook (YC W25), but there are many more... 👀 I wasn’t allowed to highlight Balderton Capital’s portfolio companies, but great to see that Payflows made the list anyway! cc Tom Matsuda Malin Posern Olga Shikhantsova Paula Blazquez Solano Tom Mendoza Full article below 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ekhFZSc7

📺 On Friday, Writer CEO May Habib capped a busy week fresh from HumanX by joining Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network to discuss Writer’s innovation in LLMs, and how coupling breakthrough technology with a human-centric approach is critical to drive full-scale transformation. 🎤 ”The underpinning of our technology is state-of-the-art models. We’re one of a handful of companies in the U.S. that can build and train powerful models from scratch. So we DeepSeek-ed before DeepSeek, and they really validated our approach: Precision training based on synthetic data.” Watch the full interview at: https://lnkd.in/guSGgM46 

Cleo's 2024 Mission Report: Breaking records, breaking even 💪 Three numbers that showcase our impact: - $185M ARR (2x+ YoY growth) - 74M conversations with Cleo (2.5x+ YoY) - And we're officially breakeven! Every year, I enjoy running the company more and more. The increasing scale, complexity and challenge of running a rapidly growing company is something that gives me a huge amount of energy. It's not a job for the faint-hearted, but it’s a privilege to lead a world-class team at scale, pursuing an ambitious mission. We stand uniquely at the intersection of finance—the largest, most broken market globally—and AI, the defining technology of our era. We want to build a world where you can stress less about money and live a more prosperous life. Cleo can become the ultimate financial companion for over a billion people. Everyone deserves that intelligence in their pocket—working for them, not the banks. 🧵