Ep.10 Everything You Need To Know About Raising Investment From Top Investor Jason Mahendran (Soho House, Rapha, Honest Burgers)
Working Hard with Grace Beverley
sophie@grace-beverley.com
4.2 • 904 Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2022
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jason Mahendran is a Senior Investor at Active Partners, one of the UK’s leading investment firms committed to the search for the next prosperous unicorn brand. Through his venture capital and investing experience, Jason has helped to build several outstanding consumer-based, founder-led brands including the reputable LEON, Honest Burgers and Rapha. Active Partners have also recently invested in my own brand TALA in our $5.7m seed round, Jason himself joining the board.
While getting your head around investment may seem like a minefield, obtaining funding could be the difference between making one's business a success, or having it never take off the ground. Investors like Jason offer so much more than just funding - they also provide founders with business advice, industry contacts and innovation, riding all the highs and lows along the way.
Today I get the inside scoop on entrepreneurship from an investor's standpoint, including the process of securing investments, marshalling resources and utilising opportunities to achieve the unicorn.
Topics:
• Early years in the retail sector at the Woolworths Group
• Investible businesses and their equally investible founders
• Should I seek funding for my business?
• 'The reality of pitching is NOT Dragons Den'
• Investment in TALA (I get roasted)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the first customer of the day. |
| 0:02.0 | The unexpected 20% tip and the 100% boost to your confidence. |
| 0:07.0 | Business is a numbers game and sum up has the tools you need to stay ahead. |
| 0:12.0 | With tap to pay, you can accept contactless payments using just your smartphone. |
| 0:17.0 | And with our free business account, you can manage all things money with zero hassle all in one place. |
| 0:24.4 | Make it count with SumUp. Download the app or find out more at sumup.com.uk. |
| 0:31.9 | There is so much confusion about investment. |
| 0:35.4 | Jason Mahendron is a senior investor at Active Partners, one of the UK's leading investment |
| 0:40.3 | firms backing high growth brands. |
| 0:41.3 | This impression may be partly driven by social media and other forms of media of needing |
| 0:47.3 | to really project this image of success. |
| 0:50.3 | You play the role of the successful entrepreneur and you walk in and that's what you think people need to see. |
| 0:57.0 | I always advise that people need to think about how open they are to external input. |
| 1:02.0 | Do you have to have your own idea and clarity of thought about what you're trying to achieve? |
| 1:07.0 | But alongside that, you do also need to be open to input. You might have an amazing product, but actually how believable is it that that's going to become a sufficiently large business |
| 1:15.6 | that's going to attract future investment and future capital and interest from buyers. Welcome back to working hard, hardly working. |
| 1:36.3 | Today we have one of my favourite episodes I've actually ever recorded. |
| 1:39.5 | And I really, really, really wanted to do this episode as soon as I decided that I was restarting the podcast. |
| 1:49.6 | Because there is so little accessible information out there about like investment and whether you should get investment and what type of investment you should get and what the |
| 1:54.0 | world of investment and funding is like if you're not interested in it at all and you're not |
| 1:57.8 | an entrepreneur and this isn't kind of the world you're in. And I remember when I first started my last funding round, I say that as if I've done like 23 |
| 2:05.6 | funding rounds, I've done one funding round, and I kind of started and I would be like |
... |
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