At our recent Seedrs Presents event we had the fortune of having a fireside chat with seasoned VC turned entrepreneur, Dharmash Mistry, who is the Former Group MD of EMAP, Partner at Balderton Capital, non-executive director of Hargreaves Lansdown PLC and Dixons Retail PLC, and Board member at Lovefilm, Achica, & Tictail. Currently Dharmash is also a non-executive director at the BBC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQMYLKC0_ss
During the chat, Dharmash talked about his views on the structural shift of major industries in recent years saying, “Structural change number one was media on demand, secondly came products on demand and, most recently, we’re seeing a structural shift in services on demand.” His new venture blow LTD is an on-demand beauty services business, that taps into that trend. blow LTD are currently raising on the Seedrs platform to help support their continued rapid growth.
Dharmash went on to discuss the experience of transitioning from investor to entrepreneur, “You see companies and problems from completely different perspectives when you sit on different sides of the board table” but ultimately, the key determiners of success are about “always learning, being humble, realising you aren’t always right, and also a lot of luck!”
There has been a lot of discussion recently around how venture capital and equity crowdfunding can work together in a funding round. Dharmash voiced his opinion by stating that “not one financing model is right for everyone, I still think that crowdfunding is still very early and we’re only just starting to see exits.” Dharmash also saw a number of additional benefits to crowdfunding saying, “If you have a consumer facing business, and if those consumers become part owners in that business, their advocacy levels structurally change. I think crowdfunding will be used to build on the network effects of marketing.” At Seedrs, we’ve seen this during many crowdfunding campaigns. Award-winning wine maker, Chapel Down, raised nearly £4,000,000 from 1,463 investors, many of whom became brand advocates and customers of the wine brand.
Dharmash also discussed how crowdfunding can be used for early-stage businesses to validate their business model, “if loads of people come on board [with a crowdfunding campaign] then you might just have something”, this is particularly true for very early-stage businesses without an MVP, who can use rewards based crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter to see whether their product has a market who are interested.
His final comments on crowdfunding were on the importance of the Seedrs nominee represented structure, stating that:
“We work with a lot of angels and investors – doing follow on rounds and managing pre emption rights gets challenging. Working with a platform that organises the rights and is a single nominee will be super valuable for lots of companies.”
We couldn’t speak to such a seasoned VC without asking him which industries he thinks will grow over the next few years. His main market predictions included Bitcoin, 3D printing and finally that “virtual intelligence, and especially the use of bots for messaging could be huge. There is a point of view amongst venture circles that users are concerned with the amount of apps they have – the next “platform” will be messaging, you’ll order an Uber just by messaging [instead of using the app]. Many of the large messaging networks are building artificial bots to cope with the demand.”
If you missed out on attending this Seedrs Presents event, keep a close eye on our social media channels to ensure you don’t miss out next time.
