20 VC 090: Balderton Capital's General Partner, Suranga Chandratillake on What It Takes To Be A Great CEO
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2015
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Suranga Chandratillake is a General Partner @ Balderton Capital. He was previously an entrepreneur and engineer having founded blinkx, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge in 2004. He then lead the company for eight years as CEO through its journey of moving to San Francisco, building a profitable business and going public in London where it achieved a peak market capitalisation in excess of $1Bn. Before founding blinkx, Suranga was an early employee at Autonomy Corporation - joining as an engineer in the Cambridge R&D team and ultimately serving as the company's US CTO in San Francisco.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Suranga made his way into the wonderful world of VC?
2.) Why are so many technical European CEOs fearful of continuing the position as CEO? What can we do to improve it?
3.) What does Suranga think makes a great CEO? Which CEO Suranga respects the most and why?
4.) How have Suranga's years as an entrepreneur affected his investing style? Does Suranga have a consistent investing style or does he look to iterate a lot?
5.) Balderton is an Equal Partnership VC, what does that really entail? Why does Suranga think this model is the most efficient? Looking at the new appointment of Lars, how do the GPs assess new candidates for the treasured GP position?
6.) What sectors is Suranga most excited by and why? Does Suranga think there is further to go in the consumerisation of Enterprise Software? Does the announcement of Emergence moving from the sector signal a turning tide?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Suranga's Fave Book: The Old Man And The Sea
Suranga's Most Recent Investment: Cloud Nine
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Suranga on Twitter here!
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
I would like to say a huge thank you to our sponsor for today's show: LoyaltyBay. Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, signup or referral? If so, you need Loyalty Bay. With their saas conversion optimizer tool they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalised rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media through to startups and have increased conversions on average by over 100%. Free 30 day trial at www.loyaltybay.co.uk
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the 20 minute VC with your host Harry Sebbings. Now today really is a special day for the 20 minute VC for three reasons. |
| 0:09.4 | Firstly, it is with extreme pride that I announced the partnership of the 20 minute VC and Mattermark, for which we will be using all of their incredible data and analysis in our interviews with the world's greatest VCs. |
| 0:21.6 | And I'd like to say a huge thank you to Nick Frost at Mattermark for making that happen, |
| 0:26.6 | and you can find him on Twitter at Thinker. |
| 0:29.6 | Next, I'm so excited to bring you this incredible feature week we have for you. |
| 0:34.6 | We're covering one of Europe's most prestigious and best performing funds. |
| 0:39.0 | It is, of course, Balderson Capital, and joining us from Balderson today is general partner, |
| 0:44.1 | Suranga Chandra Tilake. He was previously an entrepreneur and engineer, having founded Blinks, |
| 0:50.6 | the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge. |
| 0:55.0 | He then led the company for eight years as CEO through its journey of moving to San Francisco, |
| 1:00.0 | building a profitable business and then going public in London, |
| 1:04.0 | where it achieved a peak market cap in excess of $1 billion. |
| 1:08.0 | Before founding Blinks, Scherangar was an early employee at Autonomy Corporation, |
| 1:13.8 | joining as an engineer in the Cambridge R&D team, and then ultimately serving as the company's |
| 1:18.7 | USCTO in San Francisco. And if that wasn't enough, Seranga was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy |
| 1:25.3 | of Engineering in 2012 and was chosen as one of the |
| 1:29.1 | World Economic Forum's young global leaders in 2009. But finally, before we dive into the |
| 1:35.5 | episode with Sjranger, the final piece of exciting news is our new sponsor, Loyalty Bay. |
| 1:40.9 | Have you ever wished more of your website visitors would convert into a sale, |
| 1:45.6 | sign up or referral? If so, you need loyalty bay. With their SaaS conversion optimiser tool, |
| 1:52.1 | they increase any conversion metric by offering potential customers a choice of personalized |
| 1:57.2 | rewards to get them to convert. They work with large enterprises like Virgin Media |
... |
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