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About my work

I am a venture capital executive and qualified M&A lawyer with 20+ years of industry experience, including 18 years as part of the team at Octopus Ventures the latter eight as CEO. During this time Octopus grew from a new entrant with no AUM to become one of Europe's largest and most active early-stage investors. My career has been defined by a direct, pragmatic approach in all things, partnering with founders to navigate the realities of scaling with a deep appreciation for how hard it is to start and scale a business. A long time Londoner, I now live and work in the wonderful New York city.

Highlights

Notable projects

Roles held

Experience

CEO

Current

Oakland2026-01-01 – Present

Most software companies don’t ignore small businesses by choice. They ignore them because the economics don’t work. High-touch sales, onboarding, and support models break below a certain ACV. So millions of SMBs run critical workflows on spreadsheets, workarounds, or nothing at all. AI changes that. It collapses the cost of delivery which means software that was never viable for SMBs now is.

I’m building into this gap, starting with workflows where:

*The rules are complex

*The cost of getting it wrong is existential

*And existing solutions are either overbuilt (enterprise) or missing entirely

CEO

Octopus Ventures2017-09-01 – 2025-12-31

Scaled Octopus Ventures from a UK-centric fund into a pan-European platform with £1.7B AUM and £200M+ deployed annually, establishing sector depth across Biotech, SaaS, DeepTech, FinTech and Health, alongside three new fund strategies (Pre-Seed, Growth, Secondaries) and the institutional partnerships to support them.

Beyond capital, I focused on the infrastructure of scale. This included building Europe's first sector-specialist Portfolio Talent function - moving away from generalist support to create the hyper-specific networks needed to hire for DeepTech versus Consumer versus SaaS teams.

The core mission: building a firm capable of out-competing in an increasingly global market. That meant upgrading internal systems, sharpening the investment thesis, and maintaining conviction on long-term bets when market volatility pushed the other way.

Head of the US

Octopus Ventures2016-01-01 – 2017-09-01

Relocated to New York in 2016 to open Octopus Ventures' US office, establishing one of the first permanent, on-the-ground presences for European VC in America.

Worked directly with 100+ founders on the ground-level mechanics of US expansion: scoping the opportunity, building the first US team, and navigating the commercial realities of a new market.

The patterns that emerged became Question the Questions: a structured playbook drawing on the experiences of 50+ VC-backed CEOs that remains one of Octopus Ventures' most widely used portfolio resources.

Notable work

NED

The Invest in Women Taskforce is backed by the Department of Business and Trade. It is focused on creating the largest funding pot in the world, £580m, to invest in female entrepreneurs. It is industry led and government supported.