In this episode of The Runway Podcast, we dive into the very much multifaceted journey of Alex Gibb. Alex is an investor, founder, and all-around catalyst for positive change. Known for his ability to wear many hats, Alex has built a remarkable career that spans NGOs, corporate sustainability, and the startup ecosystem, where he now focuses on supporting Triple Top Line businesses—those that champion People, Planet, and Prosperity.
Through the episode, Alex shares stories of early connections to Lithuania and eventual move there, his pivotal role in its EU accession process, and how he transitioned to the startup and investment world. From his co-founding of Tinggly and Paysolut (now part of near-decacorn SumUp) to his quickest-ever exit to a US company, Alex offers a treasure trove of insights on building, investing, and navigating successes and setbacks.
Hope you guys enjoy the episode as much as us!
Transcript:
Mauro Battellini
Welcome to runway everyone today on the pod. I’m thrilled to welcome Alex Gibb, an investor, founder and connector of people with a deep passion for building a better planet. Alex is partner at Katalista Ventures, the first hybrid accelerator and private equity fund in the Baltics, with a focus on Triple top line startups. That means people, planet and prosperity, but he also wears many other hats. Alex is a Brit that has made a name for himself in Lithuania by investing in early stage startups, co-founding and exiting companies and playing an active role in ventures that drive positive impact. Welcome. Alex, how are you?
Alex Gibb
Thanks. Mauro, great to be here. Good to see you.
Mauro Battellini
If you could tell us what it means to be a catalyst and connector, which is always present in your bio?
Alex Gibb
Yeah, I think that was, you know, really part of being a human being, rather than just a human doing and with reflection and time thinking about this. It was clear for me that capitalizing things or making things happen faster and providing a spark, and then also connecting people and bringing people together are two things that I love. I just enjoy doing them. I think I’m not bad at it, and I found it as a way to make a living from it as well. So I think this is one of those perfect moments where you feel that all the bits of the jigsaw kind of fall into one. You might have heard of the concept of ikigai, the Japanese concept. So it’s exactly that. It’s, what are you good at? What do you love doing, and what can actually make you money. So it feels like that is my ikigai, bringing people together, making things happen, all in the startup space, especially in the early stage startup space. So that’s the background on the catalyzing and connecting. If I think back to what got me here, I’ve been lucky to have a lot of good entrepreneurial influences in my life, really, from my mum, I think, first and foremost, from my childhood, and then I’ve had the chance to try and make my own companies, build my own startups, lots of failures on the way, lots of mistakes. And then I think what was unusual is that I’ve spent time in all three different sectors. So I spent time in the nonprofit sector. I’ve spent time in the public sector and then in the private sector as well. And that’s an unusual combination. The reality was that I didn’t have my first salary until I was 28 I did a lot of jobs. I did a lot of kind of wage work, but I didn’t actually have a proper, kind of a real job, in most people’s mind, until I was 28 Yeah. So that was pretty unusual, and that was in banking, so working for a Swedish bank, yeah, you made a good switch there. Yeah, that was a funny story on its own, because a friend of mine, she saw an advert in the newspaper, and they were doing a change management program with McKinsey, and she said, Look, this job’s for you. Please apply. And I thought, I’ll never get it, but I went for the interviews seven interviews later, and I got the job. It was actually a really nice match with what I’d been doing in the NGO sector before that.
Mauro Battellini
Could you give us an overview of what you were doing in the NGO and governmental sectors? What was your outlook? A lot of people study politics or a similar discipline, and they want to start a career like in the European Parliament or in the European Union or in government. But what was your objective?
Alex Gibb
This was all related to Lithuania, so we set up an NGO in the UK in 1996 which makes me sound really old, but there we go. And we were working with an area in the north of Lithuania, and we were doing projects to promote civil society, so environmental projects, cultural exchanges, youth leadership, training and development, a whole different range of things in that area, and I really enjoyed doing that. And this is where I think the skills I actually learned in that area were way more valuable than anything I ever learned in the private sector. And I’ll tell you why. And that really comes down to imagine you’ve got to get 20 people out of bed on a cold, wet November morning to go and pick rubbish in the forest that they didn’t drop. You can’t offer the money. This is not about offering money to do that. This is about, how do you motivate? How do you get people to want, to believe, to make a difference, to have passion to do that. And so I always laugh saying banking was really easy compared to NGO work, because people would be, you know, easily motivated by bonuses. You weren’t going to get any of them to get out of bed on a Saturday morning in a wet, miserable November and get out and clean that forest. So for me, it was as much about learning and exploring and again, connecting with people having these human experiences. That’s what I really enjoyed doing. I. So I did that for 10 years, and then in the European Parliament, I got really lucky, and my boss was the president of European Parliamentary relations with Lithuania. So we actually spent three years negotiating for Lithuania to join the European Union from 2001 to 2004 this was the most interesting time to be doing that. So we were negotiating on the closure of Lina, the nuclear power plant, or the transit issues with Kaliningrad reforms in the economy, spending EU money. And this was a very interesting time. And yeah, met some amazing people during that as well. And it also gave me a very different perspective of Lithuania from the perspective of having lived in small towns and villages and being operating there, and then seeing it at the Supra, Supra national EU level, working with the Lithuanian government, working with the European Commission, and seeing how things were different there. So yeah, amazing experience. Very cool.
Mauro Battellini
Let’s close the Lithuanian story, let’s bring it full circle, because obviously, you’re a Brit and you’re spending most of your time in Lithuania. What brought you to the country, or what caught your attention about Lithuania? Why Lithuania?
Alex Gibb
So it’s a slightly different love story than you expected, and it’s a very good friend of my mom and her grandfather came from Lithuania, and he had this incredible story where he left Lithuania in 1890 and he arrived in Newcastle in England on a boat, and he bought a passport and a name. I’m imagining it’s maybe a little bit harder these days to do that on the at a port in England. He bought a name. He bought a name to hide his name and disguise his name, and he actually kept it a secret that he’d come from Lithuania until his grandchildren were born. So he managed to make a life in England and thrive under this new name and passport. And it was only when he had grandchildren that those grandchildren thought, hey, we’ve got a grandfather from a place called Lithuania. Why don’t we go and check it out? So this friend of ours joy. She came to Lithuania and Latvia in ‘96 met some great people, and she inspired me then to do something with her. And she said, look, let’s set up an NGO. Let’s help these people. It’s newly independent. Everything’s new and different. They’re looking towards the west now, instead of the East, let’s be part of this. And for me, this sounded really exciting, so I said, Sure. I honestly didn’t even know where Lithuania was on the map then, but we started off from there, and then eventually I was encouraged by people at the Lithuanian Embassy in London to come to Lithuania, and amazingly, I had lunch with those people after 27 years last month. We met up last month, and they were diplomats and now friends from Lithuania who were in London in those days. Unusual story, but a pretty exciting one for me.
Mauro Battellini
Let’s take it to startups now. How did you even end up working in the startup world, investing, starting startups like, where did it start?
Alex Gibb
Difficult to know when it really began. I tried to do a couple of sort of small business ventures, but they were not really startups in the sense of being scalable when I was in my teens. So everything from trying to put on special nights in a nightclub, or doing some consulting work, trying to do something like that, but not really making that work. It was probably in 2007 when my friend Linus had launched Lasvalaiko Dovanos, the gifting business that he was thinking about expanding that we’d been working together on some other projects for a few years, and he was looking to expand. I’d just been living in Poland for two years, and I said, look, let’s find a partner in Poland. Let’s build this in Poland. And we co founded a gift business in Warsaw, which has survived and grown from there. And now we’ve got a group of companies over Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, employing a couple of 100 people, if not more than 1000 now, and that’s really grown. I think what’s drawn me to this has always been the sense of freedom, the sense of being able to create, the sense of being able to do good, even from the simple level of providing jobs, even by having a startup that provides jobs, you’re giving people an income. You’re allowing them to do what they want to do, because they would have chosen something else. If not, you’re paying taxes on that, you’re bringing an income. And this is exciting. I think, later on with the gifts business, we spent a lot of time thinking about why we were doing it, and we really understood that this was because we were actually bringing happiness to other people. So when you’re gifting an experience, so it’s your friend, family, partners birthday, and you gift them hot air balloon over Vilnius, that’s an incredible moment when they receive that gift. And this bringing of happiness. This is incredibly fulfilling to do that. So I think we often try and frame that for ourselves around it’s not just about how much you sell, it’s how much happiness you’re actually bringing to the people by doing this. And this feels really good. Yeah,
Mauro Battellini
I have to agree. I’ve done the hot air balloon over viz. That’s a really good one, and I saw that you guys got Yes Theory to do that as well, over Takai, I believe.
Alex Gibb
Yeah. And that was incredible, because it wasn’t a paid sponsorship, it wasn’t a placement, it was actually an initiative from the team that they thought, Look, they’re in town. Let’s go and show up. Let’s try and connect with them. And they stayed, sat in the audience and managed to get on the microphone and said, hey, we’d like to gift you this. Come and do this incredible. Huge credit to the team for doing that, making that work.
Mauro Battellini
The power of “earned”!
Something that really catches my attention or stands out about you is that you seem to have your finger on a lot of pies, and usually for a lot of people, that’s a red flag, or that’s something negative. But for you, you seem to be able to balance each of your projects really well and actually be successful at a wide variety of things. So my question for you is like, how do you do it? How do you make sure that you focus the right amount on the right project, either, you know, kill it at the right time or ramp up the effort, like, how do you do it?
Alex Gibb
So I’m trying to think, if I can distill the secret sauce of that for myself, I think one of the things is, I love variety, and I get really bored really quickly with only doing one thing. So that’s the first thing, understanding what I enjoy and what I like doing, and then understanding that that variety brings me a lot of energy. The second one, and probably the most important one, is having really good teams, having, let’s say, 40 startups. I think it is, at the moment, each of those startups have good teams, or teams that are growing and developing in that area, so I’m not needed operationally. So there’s already somebody who’s responsible for that startup, that project, and able to run with that.
Mauro Battellini
So that’s startups in your investor portfolio. Some of them you’ve co founded. What does the landscape look like, what kinds of startups are there?
Alex Gibb
Exactly? I would need to open the file and check how many it is, but it’s also a mixture of things. Like, I’ve got three new startups that I’m in the process of creating at the moment, so launching three different things. I have a whole range of other stuff going on. I’m going to Australia tomorrow. I’m out to Australia for a week working with one of the startups that’s scaling really fast, so that’s exciting. I’m still coaching once a week, so I’m coaching young talent, let’s say, spending time on that. What else am I doing? I try to learn a new skill every year, and this year, my new skill is creating a board game. So pretty random, but I’m doing that, and we are in the process, getting close to printing the first batch over that. But yeah, these are a lot of different things that are going on, and not all of these are startups, as you can hear. But this keeps me really engaged and excited, constantly creating, constantly doing new things, having this variety, having good teams on that this, for me, is just really exciting. Yeah,
Mauro Battellini
I can see really now how that catalyst and connector thing works?
Alex Gibb
Yeah, no, I had a funny call yesterday with a guy in the UK, an Italian guy, just so happens he has a Lithuanian wife, created a startup got incredible traction in the last six months and trying to build this up. And I think just from being curious and being out there and speaking to different people, I could immediately think of two other people who actually would really doing, if not something similar, but something very complimentary. And for me, that was just, it’s so low effort, just to put a quick email together and introduce them and say, Hey, you guys should speak. Go ahead and see what happens. Yeah, it’s really good fun at the same time. I’ll tell you an example of when it’s gone wrong. I was asked by someone to help an entrepreneur who was launching a new business, and I introduced them at Lipan, which is the Business Angel Network. And I didn’t do enough background checking on this person. I took the other person’s word, and one lady in the audience said, Look, this guy, he owes me money, I would never invest in him again. And I was like, Oh, my God, what have I done? There was nothing in it for me to except just to be nice, to introduce the guy and put him on a platform, and then I ruined my own credibility by promoting him. Yeah, I made a lot of mistakes on the way, and it’s not always plain sailing, but yeah, that was an example of when it goes wrong.
Mauro Battellini
Yeah, sometimes we get those little warnings and reminders to do a bit more due diligence and homework, but it happens to everyone. I want to shift a bit to Katalista Ventures. You started the first hybrid accelerator and private equity fund in the world and it focuses on Triple Top Line startups. So what exactly is a triple top line?
Alex Gibb
So a triple top line startup is a startup that seeks to make money but also has a positive social impact and a positive environmental impact. An example could be that they create jobs, teach financial literacy, make the world a better place through their existence, both on the social side and the environmental side. So we would expect them to be carbon neutral or even carbon positive, that they’re actually removing carbon from the environment, and ideally, that they’re able to shift the needle on climate change. The reason why we got to that point was that we saw a new generation of Lithuanian entrepreneurs, initially, who wanted to make money and build a unicorn great, but also to do something good at the same time. And it was that shift of speaking to people. And it wasn’t just hey, I want to get really rich. It was hey, I want to get rich, but do something good at the same time, and I think this really excited us, and we thought that’s where we can help, that’s what we can actually support, and that’s really worthwhile doing. And then that comes back to having worked in the bank. I had 10 amazing years in the bank, and I knew that the startup life was much more for me. That was going to be much more fulfilling. I was lucky that I could do that and jump out of the bank and jump into startups full time. And there came this sort of realization that, yeah, it’s nice to make money, but to make money and do something good at the same time is just a totally different feeling. This is the motivation, yeah,
Mauro Battellini
and even when you were working at the bank, your role was on the sustainability side, right? So you always had an interest in sustainability, helping the planet and so on, and with tingly as well, right? Giving happiness and not physical presence, exactly.
Alex Gibb
And you could even say that starts back with the NGO work that’s doing stuff for social goods and environmental goods, and that’s not about making money. And I think that was also a shift, that NGO work is great and really valuable, but if you can actually solve the problem in a profit making way, it’s so much more sustainable and self reinforcing from there. So that was a big sort of mindset shift at the end of the NGO time, which, by the way, was my first exit, because we actually started the NGO with a 10 year plan, saying we want to exit this. It actually took us 11 years, not 10, but it was an 11 year exit. And at the end, we handed over the assets to a new local organization which had been created and came through from that. So I always say that was my kind of first real exit from there. But in the bank, I was head of sustainability for the Baltic states, occurring the three countries, really exciting time understanding what customers were doing with sustainability, understanding how employee engagement was shaped by sustainability thinking in the bank, and then processes and things as well. Prior to that, in the bank, had been doing the chief of staff role, and that was a very good way of having to connect through the whole organization. And that’s something I really love, yeah, well, lots of different influences all coming together. And this was the moment to step into startups and have this sense of, you know, let’s make money, but let’s make money by doing something good, and we’re going to feel a lot better by by doing that. So that’s where we are.
Mauro Battellini
I didn’t know you exited an NGO. It feels like no matter what you do, you exit something.
Speaking of you, also co founded and exited a Fintech startup out of Lithuania called Paysolut. It was in the news regionally and also internationally, and it exited in what seems like a record time and to a really respected scale up SumUp. So can you tell us a bit more about that. How did you pull that off?
Alex Gibb
Yeah, but maybe just before I tell that one, that wasn’t the fastest exit we had, but we’ve got another one, and we created it and we sold it in 13 months. So this was a very cool project. It started off in digital marketing, but then we pivoted a couple of times, and we ended up doing, let’s say, enablement for real estate agents in the US, so realtors. And this was an incubation project we did just for fun with a San Francisco based VC, and, yeah, we actually created it, and within 13 months, we had exited and sold to a to a partner in the US. That was a crazy story, so I’m pretty sure that will not be beaten 13 months
Mauro Battellini
from that one for what does enablement mean? So
Alex Gibb
it was essentially a digital platform for realtors in the US, just without going too deep into that, right? So it’s a very different business model in the US. We started off in a totally different, uh. A direction, but we ended up building a platform to help real estate agents to serve their customers, to be able to do things like white labeling for their business, but also cross selling and upselling services on that platform and so on. And yeah, it was a wild ride in that 13 months, literally a couple of weeks beforehand, I would have said chances of this surviving a small and then suddenly we got the perfect partner, and they acquired us. So it was a beautiful story, yeah, but you were asking about pay salute, and this was a great one. We were there were four very different guys with with very different backgrounds, sitting in rocket in Vilnius, the co working space in room 1.4 which we now call it the exit room. I’ve still got photos from that very first brainstorming of us putting stuff on the whiteboard there of us thinking, what could we do here? What kind of new digital bank does the world need? We already saw things like Revolut coming through, and we actually saw a pain point for electronic money institutions who needed a core banking system, so a main platform as a piece of technology which would help them to launch faster and quicker and at low cost, and amazingly, a couple of really good lessons from that. One was we were able to get the first customer to pay before we built a product. A really strong philosophy now for me, is get the customer to pay before you even build something, because far too often we see people build stuff and then nobody buys it. So we try and sell and then build on the back of that sale, even if it’s just that first down payment, that first starting point, and yeah, and things took off, and we landed some up as a customer. And then as the business grew again, we got very lucky on the back of Brexit, a lot of UK based EMIS or electronic money institutions. They then needed a European license because their UK license was no longer valid. So they then were attracted to Lithuania, great regulatory regime in Lithuania, investor friendly. And we were able to then surf the back of that wave. Got a lot of customers coming through and using our services, and then it came to a point where some up said, Look, this has become too important as technology for us, and you’re scaling very nicely on the customer side. Can we buy you? And it was quite funny, because we were actually fundraising at the time, and Omus and I were sitting there and thought, maybe they’ll invest, maybe someone will invest, and then that’ll just make our lives easier for raising. And then they said, No, we don’t want to invest. And then a month later, they came back and said, Yeah, we still don’t want to invest, but we want to buy you. And that was also quite funny, because with Dennis, our partner and CEO, he was on holiday, and it was his first holiday in sort of two years, and it was like the second day of his holiday. And we just thought, if we call the poor guy and tell him this, he’s not going to rest, he’s not going to chill. So by the time he came back, we’d effectively sold the business, and we were already getting into due diligence. And so it was quite funny, because
Mauro Battellini
I hope he was aware that the company was being sold.
Alex Gibb
When he came back, we sat him down and we said, Look, man, we got some news. So you can imagine next time he went on holiday. He said, Okay, guys, last time I went on holiday, you sold the company. Right this time. Can you just take it a bit more easy? Yeah. But great experience, very cool experience I’m still involved with. Sum up, they’re still growing. I think the latest valuation was just under 9 billion, the Euros profitable moving forward very nicely. Just secured a crazy I think it was like one and a half billion in venture debt, which is totally unheard of in our ecosystem here. But they’re going on from strength to strength, and hope that continues.
Mauro Battellini
Yeah. Speaking of all these stories, people are at the center of the stories, and you seem to have a great skill at finding people, for example, the team at Paysolut, but also when you mentioned selling before having, let’s say, the finished product. So how do you go on about finding the right people and at the right time as well? So in both cases, the first clients and also the team, did they know you? Did they come to you with an idea and they knew that you could help make it happen? Did you find them and you suggested, how does this happen?
Alex Gibb
It’s obviously different for different startups. I think the key thing there really is, one is you got to just be lucky with timing. I’ve had too many startups which were too early, too late. We just didn’t get the timing right. And that, I think Google even did a study on this years ago around startups, that it’s the timing, all the other factors you can control, but the timing of the market, it can be, you can be right or wrong, and it’s really hard to make that one talking about the people, I think it’s, again, this sort of natural curiosity of wanting to meet people and interact, and getting energy from being around people that I’m lucky to love by kind of a consequence of. Doing that and bumping into people and hearing what are they up to? What are they looking for, what are they dreaming of, what would they like to do? And then you hear someone else looking for someone that fits that, and it’s just, wow, hang on. Maybe we can put this together, putting these teams together. We’ve got another startup launching this month in the climate tech space, and still in stealth mode. So I can’t say much more about it, but that’s coming very soon. It’s a CTO who has been working for a tech company for a couple of years, but more as an owner of the company, and wanting to get more involved, hands on with a startup. It’s a business development person, and then also a third person who’s a product focused person, someone who’s really passionate about the space, and it’s just thinking, hey on this is the ideal team, and we can get going together here. So this is how it happens. I think it’s almost by accident, but there’s a level of consciousness as well there to bring these people together.
Mauro Battellini
Shows how important it is to be out there and interact with people. How key is it to be networking? Would you recommend to attend lots of events try to do more informal networking?
Alex Gibb
I think again, this is so personal that if someone is not a natural people person or not someone who’s super comfortable at being at events and things, then don’t push yourselves to do it. I think if there’s any advice, it would be more, maybe think less about what’s in it short term for you, and just thinking, how can I put different pieces of jigs all together and then be part of something bigger there? And maybe that’s the approach I I’m not going to take a commission from getting someone a job with someone else, that’s that just doesn’t work. But if you can think about how bringing people together and then creating something bigger together, that’s really interesting, and that’s maybe the angle I would take on that.
Mauro Battellini
Yeah, perfect. And speaking of being out there, there’s also LinkedIn, and you started to post more, so you’re posting more about fails. So I was wondering if you had any memorable stories or lessons from startups about failures.
Alex Gibb
Ah, too many. Not a question. I actually, I’ve had three startups have gone under this year, which is a record. Usually it’s one per year. Is normal. This year, it’s been three. Could talk about each one of those at length, but yeah, I think that the reason for doing that on LinkedIn is more that LinkedIn is there’s so much fluff and promotion and Bs out there. I just thought, come on, there’s got to be a little bit more of a What about all the things that are going wrong? And because for most people, a lot of stuff goes wrong a lot of the time, it’s really more about how do you deal with that failure, and how you bounce back and show resilience and demonstrate resilience for yourself, that that’s the important thing. So that’s why that’s interesting for me. One of the startups, interesting one I co invested with a VC in Lithuania, there was a chance of doing helping banks understanding how green their loan portfolios were, and unfortunately, it was kind of long and complex to sell it to a bank. So the startup just crashed. We pushed them. They had to incorporate in Lithuania in order to get money. Unfortunately, the founder vanished, and it was just clear that it had crashed and it was gone. But it was a shame that that’s happened. I actually saw him pop up on LinkedIn recently that he’d just written a book. Wow, there’s going to be an interesting moment to go back and say, cool to see you writing the book. Maybe we should learn something and do something about the failure. But that’s also part for the course, right? You invest in startups, the average is that you’re going to lose money on seven or eight of those. These are normal statistics. You can’t go into this thinking, I can’t lose one of these. You’ve got to be ready to lose most of them. That’s really the way. So there was another one this year, and then one more again. It’s not yet public, so I can’t talk more about what’s happening there, but they were essentially a zombie company. For the last six to 12 months, they’ve been trying to stay alive, trying to do something, but nothing’s really happened there. And they finally took the decision to close if anything that should have just happened sooner rather than later. And that’s also an important part for, or a factor for the ecosystem, is that we need good people to kill a startup when it needs kills, so that they can move on to the next thing and do something good, and that can really add value. Yeah, that’s another one from that.
Mauro Battellini
Yeah, from what you’re saying, investing at early stage, it’s a lot about the team, right? A lot about the founders. So in terms of your current interests at the moment, like, where do you see the opportunities? Is it a specific sector geography, or is it rather a founder with a certain mindset, and it’s too good to miss out when you find someone like that.
Alex Gibb
So I’ve never seen an early stage startup which ends up doing what they thought they would do. So they come with an idea, and. 99.999% of the time, they’re not going to end up doing that. So what you’re really putting your chips on is saying this is a great team, and they will adapt to whatever way the wind blows and figure out a way. That’s why I invest in teams, and want to create teams and help build teams that can really deal with change. So that’s one really important factor. And then secondly, it’s really not so much about opportunities. I think there are a lot of things that I’ve said no to that I knew would do well and have done well, but I just felt this is just not interesting for me. So there’s a nice guys in Latvia called the Jeff app. I think they’ve raised money in Lithuania as well. They’ve got a couple of angels in Lithuania. And I was just like, this is just not interesting for me. This is not something I want to do. Nice Guys, good team. I think they’ll do well, and I think they have done very well, but it’s just not for me. That’s why it is important to understand what’s your motivation for going in and doing that? There have been other cases where I’ve funded a startup because I really like the founder and just wanted to help them out. I thought, this is not never going to be a unicorn business, but I really like the people the team, and will happily help them to go on an adventure. And if something happens, great and if nothing happens, they’ll have had a great adventure, and I will have too. And that’s also a motivation for me when investing, you’re really thinking, Am I ready to spend the next couple of years of my life being in contact with this person and sharing that journey with them? So this is the kind of thing that’s really worth thinking about, and before you get involved.
Mauro Battellini
Yeah, and in terms of the triple top line, so obviously it’s a must for startups that go through Katalista, but in terms of your other investments and ventures, how strict is it in terms of the triple top lines?
Alex Gibb
Yeah, so that’s right, a lot of this is the starting point of the intention. What is the intention of the founder? Very often it’ll be, look, I want to make money. I don’t give a shit about the environment. That’s not for me, right? That’s just not interesting. I’m not going to go into that. Occasionally, there’s a startup, which is, I think I can help them. I think I can add value. I think they’re a great team. I think they’re solving a real problem. It’s really hard to see the environmental angle. And I’ll sit down with them, and I’ll talk, and we’ll say, Look, is there a way we in which we can be at least carbon neutral with what we’re doing? And if we can find an agreement around that, then I will, I would still go ahead and invest right? It’s never going to move the needle on climate change. It’s never going to have that big impact that I’m looking for, but it’s enough like that I can sleep at night not feel bad about doing that, there’s probably one exception, which is probably what you’re looking for with the question in that I’ve invested in some cybersecurity companies, and that is, given the geopolitical nature of our neighborhood, we live in a neighborhood where we have war going on next door. We have bigger threats from a bigger Eastern neighbor, and even further east, for me, this is one of the things of thinking about sort of future prosperity and security that that I’ve been okay with my conscience to to actually invest in small, relatively small amounts in, yeah,
Mauro Battellini
Speaking of the triple top line, and one of the items there being profitability. So you guys were looking at this before it was cool to be profitable, right? So you were ahead. So nowadays, everyone’s caring a lot more about the potential for a startup to be financially sustainable. Is that something that you’re also looking at? And what else are investors looking at differently when it comes to early stage startup investment.
Alex Gibb
So I think you’re probably being overly generous by giving us too much credit for that. I think with startups, the honest answer is, you never know when they’re going to be profitable. But there’s also probably one of the big differences I’ve seen in the mentality between the US and here is in the US. It’s very much. Let’s put all of our chips on going on this angle. We try and do everything, and we’re ready to burn it all just to go after this, whereas I would rather not take that approach. I’m not just after the sort of winner takes all. Let’s actually build something that’s more sustainable and interesting, even if it means a lower financial return. So that would be another difference there. But I think a couple of years ago, look at the time when Kevin was raising money. These were just crazy times, right? I was getting decks of people raising insane amounts of money just on a small PowerPoint. Obviously, crypto was go, was going nuts at the time. So these days are over. You’ve got to have a real business ID. You’ve got to have a genuine way of executing you ideally want to already be showing how you can go on that path. So this is what people are looking for these days, and this is what’s different.
Mauro Battellini
Yeah, more data driven, perhaps looking at fundamentals and actual revenues or potential revenues.
Alex Gibb
In the early stage there are no revenues or very small revenues, which. Very hard to extrapolate from that. There’s still a lot of which way could this go? And it’s still you got to get lucky to really make it happen.
Mauro Battellini
Yeah, what homework should startups do before speaking with an angel investor?
Alex Gibb
I think the biggest frustration that I have is people reaching out for seeking funding where it is clear they haven’t even read your profile and what you’re interested in. If you’re interested in making plastic widgets to stick on a car bumper, I’m just not going to be interested in that, right? That’s at least read the website. If people don’t even take the time to do that’s really frustrating, then you’ll get other people who will read the website and say, Hey, I’ve got a triple top line business startup. We’re only going to create four new gas fields and oil wells this year. It’s going to be great. It’s going to be triple top line. And then look, either you just really haven’t read it or understood it, or just one of those people who was a like, total non listener. So that’s not a good angle. Yeah, there’s these kind of things that that I come across on a regular basis. Yeah.
Mauro Battellini
So it’s quite basic, actually, and what’s a really good pitch for you?
Alex Gibb
What’s a really good pitch domain expertise, so that people have got real experience of solving that problem. So they could have been working in a bank or working for another startup or doing something else, but they actually really understand the pain and the problem, that they actually have had discussions with the customer to understand and show that pain exists and that the customer is ready to pay for it, and then some credibility and the ability in being able to demonstrate that they can build what they say they’re going to build, and doing that. And these are not incredibly difficult things to find, but it’s just rare. I think that they all come together at the same time. So it’s really nice when they when they do, and you have a team that I understand the problem, I speak to, the customers, I’ve dealt with this. We can build this, we can we can scale this. And this makes it super exciting.
Mauro Battellini
Final question, and flipping it around on the investor side. If someone wants to aspire to become an angel investor, they haven’t really done serious startup investment before, but they want to consider it, where should they start and how should they educate themselves? So we have
Alex Gibb
this situation in LitBAN, in the Business Angel Network, and I think it’s something like 90% of the members have not yet invested into a startup, so only 10% of the angels are actually active, and 90% of them have not yet got there. And let’s start by understanding why that is, and I think a big part of why that is, is that they’ve made money from building their own business, right? So they’ve done something, they’ve maybe built a trading company or a printing house or something else in business. They’ve been successful. They’re sitting on some cash. And the natural bet is, hey, let’s buy some real estate and generate some cash flow from that. Okay, great, but what we really need in the ecosystem is money to be recycled into the ecosystem. So the big challenge now is how to get a role of these business people to then reinvest their money into startups. Now the difficult thing is that these people are often very risk averse, and they don’t want to lose a single euro, so then investing in startups is a really bad way to start for them, right? Because you know you’re going to lose, statistically, 70% of that money you put in the first place. So understand why you want to do it. Understand how much money you’re prepared to lose. Because being prepared to lose money is the best place to actually start from, because as soon as you start losing more money than you’re ready to lose, that’s a nightmare. And then think again, why do I want to be involved? And to what extent do I want to be involved in that startup? Do I just want to be along for the ride? Am I just a passive investor and so on? And I think it’s worth having a lot of real reflection around how that looks for you. But to be honest, the first thing I would say to do is invest in a fund. You know, put minimum ticket 125,000 into a fund, and then let that money be spread over 20 plus startups, because then you’ve just got a much better chance of actually having one that’s really going to do well, and it’s going to offset those losses that you’ve had, and you should make money, and that’s why it’s a risky asset class. That’s how it should look.
Mauro Battellini
So like an ETF. Of startups could be a starting point ETF, but
Alex Gibb
even some of the funds around town, they will take money. We as Katalista Ventures. We don’t take external money, so we don’t take other people’s money, but pretty much all the funds you can name around town. They will take your money, they will invest it in their fund, and then you have access to their startups and their portfolio, and that’s a great place to start if you’re an angel who wants to dip your toe in the water and let’s see what happens there.
Mauro Battellini
Alex, it’s been a super fun and insightful conversation. I’ve learned new things that I had no idea about you. It. How can people follow you to keep up with what you’re doing? Yeah,
Alex Gibb
LinkedIn. Check me out on LinkedIn. Feel free to follow there. And as I said, I’m always curious to meet people. People have an idea for a startup and want to do something that has a positive impact on people in the planet that I’d love to talk and the KV team would like to do that
Mauro Battellini
Cool. And any plugs, anything about Katalista?
Alex Gibb
Oh, there’s so many things happening. I think if anything, the teaser is to watch this space for the board game. This has been the pet project for the year. I’m pretty excited about this. And, yeah, watch this space, perfect.
Mauro Battellini
Thanks so much for being with us, Alex.
Alex Gibb
Thanks for having me.
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