Fred Destin

In today's piece, I'm exploring how on earth every single venture capital fund we see is 'top quartile'. We have invested in venture funds over the past four years and have rarely seen a fund pitching to us that’s not in the top quartile. By its statistical definition, this shouldn’t be the case. And, it is ridiculous we don’t call this out, and 'being top quartile' still passes as the core performance indicator in our industry. Our desire to measure things often pushes us to use metrics not because they are informative, but because they just allow us to measure things. In the case of venture returns, the quartiles are mainly preferred as robust statistical metrics of the empirical distribution of fund returns. But, in the existence of power laws, robust statistics are not robust, and the empirical distribution is not empirical. I try to outline this in the article.

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👀 Hopefully, you've heard by now that we run free fundraising accelerators for seed founders... 👉 What makes this next programme particularly unique is that we teamed up with 4 other organisations - GC Angels, Stronger Stories, Foundervine and Firstport to deliver a brand new initiative called Venture Forward. It combines our decade of experience of running programmes with partners from across the UK to deliver a new initiative, fully funded by Innovate UK, to support a whopping 160 companies in the next 15 months. 🇬🇧 We will deliver these workshops to companies all over the UK, including London, Birminghman, Manchester, & Edinburgh. 🚀 We will also be focusing on under-represented founders (more details in the application form). The programme will consist of fundraising workshops, 1-on-1 mentoring, regional meet-ups, national investor days, centralised resources and an active alumni community. ✅ Applications are now open via ventureforward.co.uk

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We at Form are delighted to back the Stotles team again in their Series A, alongside Headline, Acton Capital, and Seedcamp. We’re adamant that the team is on the way to building the end-to-end software that companies selling to government can live in. We first met John, Taj and Carsten back in 2022. We’ve worked in and around Government for long enough to understand just how much unnecessary friction there is in the procurement process. It prevents the public sector from fully benefitting from the latest innovation - if at all (!) - and it massively inhibits businesses that could benefit from working with government. A platform that builds a qualified pipeline; finds the right tenders; and qualifies those opportunities, just made sense. But a lot has changed in the market since then. Firstly, the government need for innovation has massively increased. Public debt across the UK, US and several other western economies spiked to over 100% of GDP during covid, and hasn’t returned to its pre-covid level. Radically re-thinking public services is absolutely necessary to bringing it down - that urgency is palpable in Number 10 and across Whitehall. Secondly, the pace of tech advancements means the scope for improving the procurement process has sky-rocketed. Leveraging the rapid advancements in GenAI, Stotles can now create a first draft of a bid response that is tailored to a customer - and the quality of those drafts only improves as the tech advances as Stotles really gets to know their customer. Both these market shifts have massively worked in Stotles’ favour - and the rapid progress they’ve made speaks for itself. Since the seed round, they’ve been serving companies like Amazon Business, Salesforce, Vodafone, NEC Software, Palo Alto Networks, and Snowflake. On average, they’ve generated 4x qualified pipeline growth for their customers, and more than doubled their customers’ public sector contract win rate. They have built a product which both does a lot of the leg work on bid-writing specifically, while also solving many of the smaller problems along the broad workflow. This type of end-to-end product, with embedded GenAI, is exactly where we think sustainable value will be generated in this tech wave. There’s so much more to come from this team, and we’re absolutely delighted, and privileged, to be supporting them on the journey.

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