The secondary sale of shares is gaining in popularity but has challenges, although that has not inhibited the emergence of new specialist secondary funds.  The proposed new PISCES regulatory framework for trading in private companies in the UK has the potential to address pain points and to democra...

Easter Egg Hunt: How Trump’s trade policy has businesses scrambling for loopholes. This article by Howard Yu, professor at IMD, brings things back into perspective. “You don’t exit China, you hide it—like colourful eggs.” That’s what a top executive at a European multinational to...

Insurtech has a significantly different impact in emerging markets, where the focus is on expanding access, compared with developed markets, where the focus is on enhancing existing services. The main driver for these differences is insurance penetration, which is roughly 2-3 higher in developed mar...

Technopreneurs should be aware that up to half of the startup funds that existed at the peak of the investment bubble are now zombie investors, unable to make investments in new startups, and are advised to adapt their capital-raising strategies for the changing VC market structure. What is happenin...

We are increasingly seeing, in our day to day work, VCs exiting through secondary sales, either as an independent transaction, or as part of a capital raising round. This seems to be part of a broader trend, and certainly the case in Silicon Valley. In the not-so-distant past, there was a stigma in...

Being part of the South African global diaspora, and finally landing in the UK, I am personally fascinated by the outsized role that foreign-born technopreneurs play in startup economies all over the world. I  prefer to think of them as global citizens rather than the politically-charged word “im...

Technopreneurs will always find innovative ways of solving problems, but Africa’s Fintechs have to deal with, amongst other  things, a more difficult investment environment, issues with basic infrastructure, government regulation/taxes, and dominant African multi-nationals. We recently had ca...

Having co-founded and built startups in South Africa, Nigeria, Switzerland and Singapore, done business in Silicon Valley and countless  countries, I have decided that what I love most about the tech startup world is its universal language and values, wherever one goes. Now, as an advisor working w...

Insurtech as an industry sector has existed for less than a decade. Although it has dramatically changed in its nature, Insurtech has not fundamentally changed the insurance industry or its business models. This will inevitably happen in time. The first conference that we attended which even mention...

Potential investors see a red flag when the shareholding of the active founders/management is too low. This becomes even more difficult when it is as a result of dead shareholding. Investors will ask a filtering question early on in their evaluation process around the cap table. Their main objective...