How to pivot, change and create new opportunities
Mark Beaumont spent 15 years taking on expeditions to 130 nations and territories, with the common theme of firsts and fastest, including cycling around the World twice for the Guinness World Record.
“I love being an athlete; I love pushing myself, and having that public profile is hugely useful with the rest of my work which is investing in early-stage innovation.”
Creating leaps in performance is not business jargon when it comes to Mark Beaumont’s track record. He has been consistently disruptive, building performance teams, fundraising and creating media projects.
“We’ve got 13 companies in the portfolio, and we typically invest one to two million and stay with them through to Series A. But I’m not here to talk about investing, although I know that will be of interest to some people, I’m here to bring you into the record-breaking worlds because it’s amazing the commonality between the two.”
After a vibrant talk where Mark took our members on a journey around the world – you can catch up here, we got to know both sides of him; “For somebody who has a career in finance, it might be odd to then flip to the other side, I spend half my life in a suit and half my life and lycra. People only know about half of my life”
Our members asked Mark;
What advice do you have for startups and founders who are seeking investment?
“Making sure that you understand the *IP landscape and knowing what’s unique about what they’ve got and that it’s profitable is number one!” Mark adds that understanding the start-up’s history is integral; “The founders that we back rarely have the commercial awareness. Even though they may have had previous successful businesses.”
What do you do if the startup has no financial track record?
“You’re backing people; fundamentally, it’s like a marriage. You’ve got to believe in the people. You’ve got to fill in the gaps, and there are always gaps. I only want to get involved in stuff that makes the world a better place. The purpose and profit piece go hand in hand. Unless you’re financially viable, you’re never going to create the impact you want to, whether that’s cleaning up the world’s oceans or saving lives. It’s how you then put the right people behind the inventors or the creators and go on to build that commercial team, a business’s competitive position, and then scale them into global markets. That’s the exciting bit!”
You can connect with Mark here to follow his journey.
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*IP Landscaping identifies the intellectual property (IP) position of a business, or a specific area of technology, in any given country. A good understanding of the competitive position of a business, or a specific area of technology, is an important part of the development of the investment.
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