Something out of left field
After 11 years with Anthemis, I am moving to a Venture Partner role supporting a portfolio of existing investments and will work on new personal projects. This is a new phase of a fantastic adventure that started on 02/05/2011 with an email entitled :
Sean, one of Anthemis's founders who I had met via our respective blogs, asked me if I would be interested in the position of CFO or, more accurately a 1-person finance department at Anthemis that was just getting started. The objective was to bridge to investing once Anthemis had sufficiently grew. To summarise my (lack of ;-) fit at the time.
This was a bet from them on me, I was making a bet on myself, and we both knew it — a genuine early-stage startup opportunity.
Fast forward more than ten years later, and the journey could not have been more impressive:
Anthemis grew from a $15m balance sheet to close to $1.5 billion of AUM across various funds and strategies.
The team went from less than ten people to 56 people, and I had opportunity to work alongside / learn from an incredibly diverse group of talented people.
After helping get the Finance function set up and started, I increasingly worked on investments, leading to me joining as a Partner and helping to deploy capital across two early-stage funds with Anthemis founders Amy and Sean.
I went to work with an amazing investment team across Europe and North America on both these funds and invested in more than 40 early stage companies.
I collaborated with a fantastic set of early- stage entrepreneurs building B2B and B2C fintech companies in verticals ranging from consumer finance to insurtech, capital market to climate tech, and more. I am grateful to them for letting me be a small part of their journey.
I worked alongside a unique group of investors across 10+ boards, and I am lucky I will continue to get an opportunity to learn from them going forward.
I cannot be more thankful to Anthemis and Sean for taking a bet on me early on and for their support with this next phase.
🙇♂️ to my partner in crime Barbara.
On what's next, I am currently working on a few projects going to back to creating something from early on. As always, feel free to reach out if you want to chat about anything. Who knows, something out of left field might materialise > yann@embed.vc
