Capital Pilot - Investability Ratings Agency

“My take away from my experience with Capital Pilot was clear, I felt, as a minority founder, listened to, appreciated and respected.” Kene achieved a Capital Pilot Gold Rating…and successfully closed his funding round. GET RATED here - capitalpilot.com

"Only the shitty investors are here." Stick a fork in Web Summit. It's done. Go to Slush instead.

Belfast, Glasgow and Birmingham lead VC investment growth uktech.news/news/industry-… via @uktnofficial

“The service is high quality, informative and generous…Capital Pilot uses their connections to create win-win outcomes” 'Anchored In' achieved a Capital Pilot Gold Standard Rating...and successfully closed his funding round. GET RATED - capitalpilot.com

Save the date for @BBBank Business Finance week event 🎉 📅Thurs 9 Nov ⌚ 12:30-13:00 🔻Virtual CEO of @SlingshotSims, Robert Harwood, will be joining for a live virtual interview on Unlocking Innovation Day 💡 Register now at bit.ly/BFWSlingShot

Sheffield based @FourJawMA has raised £1.8m from NPIF – @Mercia_PLC Equity Finance, Mercia’s EIS fund and private investors 🎉 The IoT firm helps manufacturers maximise productivity. It will use the funding to enhance its machine monitoring platform🌐 📲 npif.co.uk/iot-start-up-f…

Sept/Oct issue is OUT NOW😍 We has interviewed some inspiring women, from a design-first EV charging company to a wearable VR device that uses the power of scent to help train first responders…& our Founder Focus is the one & only Dame Jessica Ennis👏 bit.ly/2OcDfYi

The worst version of a fundraising ask is “we need $3M to give us 24 months of runway”. The best version is “we need $3M to accomplish these 3 critical projects we have planned that will take us from X users/revenue to 5x in 18 months. We need these 4 new positions to pull it off and we already have great candidates for each role that we’re in active discussions with.”

In January 2019, Stella Smith created Pirkx. “Egalitarianism is at the core of the Pirkx proposition and purpose and it's rare, to find a like-minded business in the funding sector. Capital Pilot is a like mind !” Thank you Stella! GET RATED here - capitalpilot.com/my-startup-val…

The Capital Pilot Rating signals the quality of your business to INVESTORS. Our rating delivers a score and 24 pages of analysis that signal the most promising businesses to the INVESTOR community. GET RATED here - capitalpilot.com/my-startup-val…

This is a remarkable statistic…businesses that achieve a Capital Pilot Gold Rating increase their value x 3! Give yourself the best opportunity to raise the funds you deserve and maximise you valuation. GET RATED here - capitalpilot.com/my-startup-val…

Q: What startup category is continually underestimated? In the clip below, Peter Thiel explains why he believes “complex coordination” is a company category that’s continually underestimated. “The question we always focus on is ‘can this company become a monopoly?’” He then lists several things that can make a company a monopoly: Super fast distribution on a very thin product (e.g. Twitter) A technological advantage that is continually built upon: you come up with something new and steadily improve (e.g. enterprise SaaS software) A truly brilliant breakthrough (e.g. Bitcoin) However he argues that complex coordination—where you take a lot of little pieces and coordinate them into something new—is continually overlooked as a way to create a monopoly: “This is the thing that’s maybe 180 degrees antithetical to the Lean Startup ethos. It’s complicated. You have to put all the pieces together in just the right way. I think this is on some level what really drove Apple as an innovative company in the last decade… What was new about the iPhone? There was no single component that was new. It was just that you put all of these things together in just the right way… and once you built it, it was actually super hard for people to replicate. You had an advantage for many years. You could get network lock in—in terms of the app community or the brand.” He also points to Tesla and SpaceX as examples: “There’s no component to the Tesla that’s actually that new. It’s just that you put all of the pieces together. You re-engineered the whole distributor network. It was this complex coordination that made it work. There’s like this lost art of accounting where you figure out how much things cost and add them all together. And Elon has discovered this lost art of accounting which no other people practice.”

This Bristol-focused impact fund just deployed £1M to back early-stage startups with a purpose techfundingnews.com/this-bristol-f… via @TFNBreakingNews

ARTICLE: Tips on asking friends & family for investment. If you're a startup founder how do you approach your nearest and dearest and with what type of investment?' Read here for tips and techniques capitalpilot.com/post/friends-f…

At the end of a call I try to reserve time for founders to ask questions. Common Qs are; "At what stage do you invest?" or "What is your average check size?" There are far better Qs to ask to really understand the VC on the other side of the screen/table. 6Qs to ask:

EMEA’s unicorn hunters: 10 investors shaping growth during tough times techfundingnews.com/emeas-unicorn-… via @TFNBreakingNews

HOW CAN CAPITAL PILOT HELP REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH? "It's a slightly cheap headline which is trying to demonstrate that trillions is being invested in parts of the markets where there is very limited economic growth. The STARTUP community is where GDP lives."

Yes! I completely agree with @nzennstrom - in the early days of Klarna a lot of people would tell us we had to move to Silicon Valley and I think it’s very poor advice. You have so many start-ups chasing the same engineers that I think it's actually harder in many ways to build a company for the long term in Silicon Valley than it is in many other places. Policies like the home PC reform in the late 90s, which helped low-income families like mine gain access to a computer at home, have helped turn Stockholm into a tech hub with Klarna, Spotify and tonnes of other tech start-ups. ft.com/content/104bc3…

Being a startup founder is hard and lonely. One day you're on cloud 9 with everything going great and the next day you're losing your shit over nothing. Shout out to the crazy entrepreneurs that choose this path in life and have learned to enjoy the journey.

🌍 Yesterday, our CEO and Founder, Stella Smith, was invited to give a masterclass at the Women of the Future Summit 2023! #WOF2023 @womenoffuture