This is an EPIC conversation between two European Climate Tech fund managers. Hampus shares a TON of insights and opinionated views. You don’t want to miss out!
I thought it’d be a crime reducing the episode to 30min... So I kept all 58min of insights, covering:
- Fundraising for a fund vs fundraising for a startup
- How to do fundraising the right way
- Why smaller funds are better than large ones
- How they run investment decisions internally and invest when they fall in love with the founders
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ABOUT CLIMATE INSIDERS:
Climate Insiders is brought to you by Climentum Capital, a Seed+ and Series A cleantech European venture capital firm focused on funding and scaling climate-positive ventures that cut down on CO2 emissions.
If you are interested in how smarter capitalism combined with mission-driven founders building innovative tech startups can overcome our climate crisis and build a better future, you’ve come to the right place.
Check us out at: https://www.climateinsiders.co and https://www.climentum.com
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ABOUT THE GUEST:
Hampus Jakobsson https://www.linkedin.com/in/hampusjakobsson/ is a General Partner at Pale Blue Dot, a Swedish seed-stage ClimateTech fund investing in startups that reduce and reverse the effects of climate change.
He was previously at BlueYard Capital, before that an angel with 100+ angel investments. And before that, a serial founder.
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SHOW NOTES:
- The reasons why fundraising wasn’t actually that painful for them
- The importance of filtering out the wrong LPs up front
- Why emerging Climate fund managers need to specialize today to raise their fund
- How to steal deals from bigger brands generalist funds
- Why fund managers should actually ‘reverse pitch’ entrepreneurs to convince them they are good investors
- How they’ve designed an entire investment process around PASSION, PRIDE and LOVE
- The surprising simplicity of their investment decision process (with a voting scale: Hell Yes, Yes, No, Hell No) and the absence of Investment Committee
- Great founders have some super power and extreme skills to sell to anybody or build anything that makes it hard to say no
- Why Hampus thinks it’s way nicer to raise for a fund than to raise for a startup
- The gold question to help investors commit: ‘What can I do to help you decide?”
- The #1 tip to raise a fund: start small and show a track record as a fund manager
- The reason why emerging fund managers outperform
- Your fund size is your strategy and it’s important not to balloon your fund size
- Pale Blue’s ideal portfolio construction: 30 deals with 10% shareholding
- How Pale Blue opens up their entire DD process to founders via a Notion Page
- Why they originally intended to do a €40m fund and created two scenarios: €40m or €80m funds to test the market
- WHEN and HOW to do a fund announcement in the media
- Never announce when you’re not ready to absorb inbound (investors, media, job seekers, customers)
- Main advice to emerging fund managers: figure out your unique angles (niche, vertical, geography, belief system) and set up a hyper local or hyper verticalized fund
- Why fund managers should NOT be capital allocators and instead people that care about people and businesses
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ABOUT THE HOST:
Yoann Berno https://www.linkedin.com/in/yberno/ After a career spent building and investing in top tech startups, Yoann is now founding member and General Partner at Climentum Capital focused on investing in game changing technological solutions to our worsening climate crisis.
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