By James Wright, Head of Talent at Seedcamp
Over the past 18 months, I’ve worked at Seedcamp, advising our portfolio on Talent and People topics. These companies range from their inception stage through to fully established startups with international workforces.
Advisory functions within a VC isn’t a new concept, driven by a growing demand from founders seeking value outside of the capital VCs provide. Talent Advisory is one element that adds immediate and tangible value to a business at all stages, making it an obvious choice for VCs that look to develop that value creation offering. It is also a space where founders really struggle to source sound advice that is aligned to their success.
Our team recently shared an article titled The (un)trusted advisor which talks to this broader subject of advice delivery. I believe that verifying advice in the People and Talent domain is especially acute, with bad advice having a shocking impact on the chance of a venture’s success, especially in the early days. As a result, I wanted to share my thoughts around how founders should approach sourcing People and Talent advice, and why your investor is a great place to start.
VCs see plenty of companies rise and fall. Mistakes made, big wins, and the occasional bit of luck thrown in too. This historical insight, pattern recognition and network places their platform in a position to offer learnings and advice based on similar scenarios you’re facing. Most importantly, your interests are directly aligned, with zero monetary costs to the founder and with the VC directly invested in your success. Outside of VC, this is incredibly hard to replicate, with most People and Talent advisors looking for something in return for their recommendations or insights.
To mitigate the risk of receiving and acting on poor advice I suggest you assess prospective advisors thoroughly, regardless of what route they have made their way to you:
As I have done throughout this article, you’ll frequently find People and Talent bucketed into one domain. Ironically they are quite clearly different remits and they continue to grow apart as you scale. I liken it to Sales and Customer Success- whilst they work closely together, the skills needed to perform at the highest levels in these functions are considerably different. So when seeking advice in the People or Talent space, the first thing you need to identify is which bucket would you place this problem in.
I typically see that between Seed to Series A, the advice founders require has a bias towards Talent, with minimal complexity around the People function. But as a startup reaches Series A+ the growing organisation requires far greater attention towards People and it’s quite likely you’ll need someone else to offer guidance at this point. All this is to say, identifying the type of advisor and their specific expertise is very important, but before doing this, evaluating where you are as a company should also inform who you speak with.
Here are a few examples of problems, and where I would generally bucket them:
| People | Talent |
| Onboarding | Sourcing Candidates |
| Culture | Evaluating Candidates |
| Retaining Employees | Building Compelling Offers |
| Redundancy Processes | Candidate Pipeline Process |
| Organisational Design | Job Description & Company Narrative |
On the market, you’ll find a whole host of potential advisors willing to share an opinion, and it can be very hard to distinguish who you should source support from. Additionally, as a time-poor founder, evaluating if you need a traditional advisor, or someone more hands-on who can deliver on the recommendations, can be hard.
My recommendation would be to really spend time defining your problem yourself. It can be all too easy to generalise your issue. For example, a classic Talent related issue I hear is “we can’t find any candidates”. As a founder, you need to go deeper than that, really trying to break down the problem into all the elements that might be the cause:
– Are you advertising the role?
– Have you explained more about your business?
– Are you selling the role well?
– What are the barriers to entry within the process?
If your VC investors have a Talent Advisor in the fund, make sure to spend time with them, they can help with this process and potentially diagnose some quick fixes but also recommend specific experts you can meet. If you don’t go deeper into the problem, you may risk receiving inaccurate advice from someone who knows far less about your business than you.
The next phase is establishing if you only need someone’s wisdom or their execution capabilities as well – this will fully depend on the complexity of your challenge and as an early stage founder, usually wisdom is the need, with you acting on that directly.
If you do require execution support, there are plenty of options available to you, depending on the need – I’ll be sharing more thoughts on this in a separate post breaking down what scenarios warrant different offerings.
Parents worldwide strive to prioritise their children’s early education and better prepare them for an uncertain future dominated by fast-paced technological change. However, they are torn between limiting children’s exposure to noisy media and entertainment environments, and enabling them to learn to use technology from an early age. We believe there must be a viable, in-between solution that also complements what kids are taught in school.
This is why we are excited to partner with Nurture, a startup creating a new way for children aged 4 – 7 to learn foundational skills through immersive play. Father of two young boys, Nurture Co-founder & CEO Roger Egan had an important realization in early 2020 after selling his last startup to Alibaba: for the first time in history, no one knows what skills or jobs will be relevant in 20 years.
In the midst of the pandemic and remote learning, Roger was struck by the major disconnect between how and what children are taught in school and their preparedness for the future, particularly one powered by AI. For him and many other parents, foundational skills such as critical thinking, digital literacy, mindfulness, empathy [and resilience] are key to thriving in today’s rapidly changing world, yet they are missing from traditional education.
He named the problem “the life preparedness gap” and immediately knew his next venture would be focused on closing this gap. Together with co-founders Danny Limanseta, Scott and Julie Stewart, and Sally Doherty, Nurture is bridging the disconnect between how and what their kids are taught in school and their preparedness for the future.
Nurture’s Immersive Learning Media (ILM) platform combines the best aspects of children’s television and gaming to create immersive story-based adventures. Learning themes are introduced in the story and kids apply the skills they learn in interactive games and creative projects.
Roger Egan III, Co-Founder & CEO of Nurture highlights:
“I witnessed first hand how traditional education focuses on teaching kids what to learn, not how to learn. I knew I had to find ways to supplement my boys’ education to help them adapt to a rapidly changing world. With what, though? None of the existing alternatives fully addressed the problem. Homeschooling is too time-consuming, and there are too few alternative schools and they’re unaffordable for most families. Educational TV is heavy on entertainment, light on education, and learning apps don’t hold kids’ attention; plus they focus on academic skills, not critical life skills.”
Nurture’s solution, developed with leading experts in children’s education and entertainment is designed following three major guiding principles:
Manuel Bronstein, Chief Product Officer Roblox and Nurture Advisor, emphasises: “I believe that Nurture’s unique combination of engaging story and fun interactivity is the right approach for preschoolers. The opportunity is huge.”
Besides single device experiences, adventures are enhanced with Nurture’s pioneering dual-screen format (TV + mobile / tablet) – a new form of interactive TV. Interaction between screens creates a magical, immersive experience, where kids help their favorite characters and become the heroes of the story.
Unlike most streaming media channels and children’s games, the Nurture app contains exclusively learning-focused, age-appropriate, interactive adventures – truly guilt-free screen time.
On why we partnered with Nurture, our Co-founder and Managing Partner Reshma Sohoni comments:
“After trying the Nurture app with my 5-year-old, I was convinced that children will find Nurture’s magical experience much more engaging than traditional media. Nurture transforms mindless screen time into an interactive learning adventure.”
We are excited to co-lead Nurture’s $2.8 million pre-seed round alongside Golden Gate Ventures, and Reach Capital. With the new funds, the company will develop its Immersive Learning Media (ILM) platform and establish it as a new category of media called Immersive Learning Media that prepares children for the uncertainty of an AI-driven future.
Nurture has just released their invitation-only Beta, currently available on iOS in the US, Canada, UK, and Singapore. Parents, you can sign up to join Nurture’s community and help them close the Life Preparedness Gap by equipping your children with the skills they need to thrive in the future.
For more information, visit nurture.is.
In Season 4 of The West Wing, Martin Sheen’s Mr President reminds his advisor Josh Lyman to be “the guy that ‘the guy’ counts on”.
Mr President is ‘the guy’ and he is constantly reminding his advisor not to forget that. Advice is the sum of content and delivery and Josh is sometimes bad at both, forgetting his role in the relationship.
Deciding on the right advice and giving it well is hard, but through the course of the West Wing, Josh improves his style. He begins to communicate socratically, ask the right questions and occasionally deliver a friendly boot.
Much like Josh, VCs are not on the field with ‘the guy’ and are guilty of overreaching in their advice. Great investor advice requires empathy and anecdotes that expand a founder’s agency to solve difficult problems. In this piece, we explore how the investor-founder relationship can be grounded in trust, what good advice looks like, and how it can be best delivered.
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The advice problem
Unfortunately for venture capital firms, which are largely service-based businesses (providing money and company-building support in exchange for equity), valuable advice is a non-obvious proposition. It is not sweat equity, but sweat is encouraged.
Value can often be reduced down to key rolodex connections in advisory networks (hiring, customers, etc). Of course, in many cases, strategic advice that expands the founder’s thinking (vs. replacing it) is also valuable to help expand revenue, conserve cash, etc.
In particular, many VCs have a growing commitment to investing in Talent solutions for their portfolio. Building high performing teams is a challenging area to navigate as a founder, and access to high quality advice in this domain is tricky to find and validate. VCs are often in a great position to share best practices across a portfolio, usually through a Head of Talent.
At Seedcamp, we have built a vetted pool of individuals interested in joining our startups. Alongside this pool, our portfolio employs almost 100,000 outstanding operators, many of whom move within the Seedcamp Nation when they are looking for their next journey. We give founders access to this microeconomy, as well as help them source or headhunt select candidates from outside it. Great startup teams all look different but hiring the absolute best operators is mission critical from Day 0.
Advising with trust
Talent aside, a lot of more general company building advice that sounds clever and useful along the previous lines, doesn’t become clever for several years, if at all. In the period of waiting-for-advice-to-prove useful, it can also cause distractions. There is an incredibly long feedback loop on advice in tech and one reason that VCs like Twitter (now X) is that they can actually get real-time feedback.
The “Untrusted Advisor” is, of course, a pun on “The Trusted Advisor”, a seminal book by Robert Galford, Charles Green, and David Maister about the relationship between advisor and advisee. The authors cite five steps to build a resilient relationship, of which the fifth is the most important. It stipulates that an advisor is a partner in your business, not a banker. i.e., although the relationship may be fundamentally transactional, it shouldn’t feel that way.
When VCs and founders collaborate well, it is from a position of familiarity and ideally, trusting fondness. Instead of being transactional, the relationship between founder and VC can be driven by a sense that both parties are authentic at a bare minimum, so that the relationship can blossom to a stage where you leverage the best of both parties.
Paul Graham’s famous Y Combinator dinners have become a parable for techies about the importance of trust. In an early call to arms, Graham even noted that attendance at dinner time would improve the likelihood of investment. He cooked the food himself and encouraged founders to share their projects openly; you could assume that another founder wouldn’t thieve your most compelling ideas. The camaraderie between founders and investors has become legendary.
At Seedcamp we take the view that all advice is given with a view to expand a founder’s toolkit to solve problems. That ranges from the very direct – a talent or customer introduction – to the very specific – how to manage fx and treasury risk – to the very strategic – at what point a GTM lead should be hired in the US and in which city.
These vary in importance at different junctures of the journey, and in our next piece, we will dive into how talent advisory specifically can impact the business.
To anticipate and adapt to the challenges the new AI-Native world brings, enterprise security is undergoing a major paradigm shift. We believe developer-first production security solutions will become integral to a new stack of tooling and frameworks.
We always talk about the power of the Seedcamp Nation and the flywheel effect of our network. No more is that truer than with our relationship with devtools maestro, David Mytton, which dates all the way back to 2009 when we invested in his first startup Server Density. After exiting the company he joined our team as an Expert in Residence supporting our portfolio founders.
David is now back in the founders’ arena and we are excited to partner with him as he is building Arcjet. The company aims to help developers protect their apps in production against a range of security risks.
The company is building a suite of core security components that enable developers to tackle security challenges directly in code.
Protecting an app with Arcjet is as simple as dropping in a few lines of code:
Developers have the full power of code to customize everything.
David Mytton, founder and CEO of Arcject highlights:
Developer-first production security means understanding the context of every request. This requires deep integration with your application, allowing dynamic adjustments based on security signals. Whether you’re getting spam or fraudulent signups, have unwanted AI bots scraping your content, or need to distinguish API traffic between anonymous free users and paying customers, Arcjet helps developers tackle security challenges directly in code.
Rules are evaluated with the request context so they can dynamically adjust parameters at runtime e.g. by billing plan, user role, database attributes, etc. The decision can be more than just deny/allow: developers can customize their application logic with the response e.g. flag an account for review, request re-authorization, limit sensitive actions, etc.
Arcjet’s first SDK for JavaScript has been in alpha for several months as the team refined the API based on developer feedback. They will soon stabilize the API and graduate the JS SDK to beta. They also plan to expand support to other languages, with the Python SDK coming next.
On why we invested in Arcjet, our Managing Partner Carlos Espinal comments:
Few people in the world are as obsessed with devtools as David. As a serial founder and technologist, he has skin in the game of protecting apps in production.
We are incredibly excited to partner again with him and the Arcjet team to turn production security into an integral part of developers’ workflow.
We are delighted to participate in Arcject’s $3.6 million seed funding round led by Zane Lackey at Andreessen Horowitz, previously co-founder of Signal Sciences, and joined by a roster of great angels including Geoff Belknap, Former CISO, LinkedIn, Nicolas Dessaigne, Co-Founder, Algolia, and Sue Odio, COO, Stellate.
Sign up now to start using Arcjet for free.
For more information, visit Arcjet.
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