The Angular Ventures Team
Introducing our core full-time team in London and New York.
With the launch of Angular Ventures I at $41M, we thought it would be a good time to properly introduce the full Angular Ventures team.
I am absolutely delighted that Andrew Poesaste and Anne Blum have agreed to join the firm and help build it into the leading early-enterprise tech venture firm for European and Israeli startups.
I continue to split my team between London, Tel Aviv, and points between — but we have added Andrew Poesaste to the investment team in London to help cover Europe and Israel and Anne Blum as Head of Platform in New York to help our early-stage portfolio scale, especially in the US.
Meet us in Paris, Munich, or Berlin! We’ll be taking the whole crew (Anne, Andrew, and myself) to Paris, Munich, and Berlin in January for a marathon of startup founder meetings. If you’ve got a startup and would like to meet us (all three of us at once!), please let us know by clicking here!
Anne Blum, Head of Platform (NYC)
To support our portfolio companies as they grow and scale into the US market and beyond, we are delighted to announce that we have brought on Anne Blum as our Head of Platform. Anne will be based in New York, providing Angular with reach into the US market to help companies on the ground there in meaningful and tangible ways. Anne is a native New Yorker, a dual citizen of the US and France, and a passionate supporter of entrepreneurs breaking into new markets. We are proud to be one of the very few truly early-stage funds operating in Europe & Israel with a full-time presence on the ground in the US market.
Anne brings a wealth of platform experience to Angular. Most recently, she ran two NYC-based accelerators (simultaneously!) — both of them focused on helping international startups succeed and scale in the US market. The German Accelerator is a unique program, sponsored by the German government, which helps German startups expand internationally. Anne ran and grew the New York branch of this operation into a very successful one, and a model for many of the other branches in the German Accelerator network. Commensurate with that, Anne helped set up an accelerator called Ellis which provides a similar set of services to startups from around the world seeking to establish operations in New York City. Across both Ellis and the German Accelerator, Anne set up an impressive network of mentors and a comprehensive set of service and product offerings design to help startups accelerate their journey into the US market. Prior to that, she ran mobile developer outreach at Facebook and held a tech HR role at Goldman Sachs. When I first met her in New York and began to understand the scope of her activities, I immediately began attempting to recruit her.
Over the next few months, Anne and I will be working to define and implement a comprehensive set of services and platform offerings designed specifically for enterprise and deep tech startups that are breaking into the US market. Angular’s mission is to identify companies like this, invest in them early, and support them as they grow — and what Anne is building on the platform side is an essential part of that effort. If you are an early-stage enterprise tech founder trying to break into the US market, I’d encourage you to contact Anne by email, follow her on Twitter, or reach out for a coffee next time you are in New York.
Andrew Poesaste, Associate (London)
Sometimes good fortune just walks in the door or — in this case — appears miraculously on Twitter. About two years ago, long before the fund was closed and before I had any ability to pay any actual money for anything, I posted a tweet saying I was looking for an unpaid intern just to help me crunch some data for the annual reports on European & Israeli venture I was putting out at the time. Only one person responded — and he was massively over-qualified for this role, something I immediately told him. Nevertheless, Andrew was keen enough on venture capital and serious enough about taking on the role that we started working together.
It immediately became clear that Andrew was even more over-qualified than I had expected, but even more serious about venture capital and deep tech investing than I had hoped. As soon as the fund reached an appropriate size (and as soon as I got my head around the fact that Angular was ready to scale), I made Andrew an offer to join full time. We had no office. We had little to no resources. We had no brand. But Andrew jumped head-first into the opportunity, and we’ve never looked back. With Andrew on board, we’ve roughly quadrupled the number of new investment opportunities we are able to process and evaluate as a team. In fact, our most recent investment (not yet announced) was sourced by Andrew.
Andrew’s background is non-typical for VCs (as, it turns out, is true for all the best VCs…). Born in Australia but living in London since University, Andrew spent eight years as a Senior Derivatives Trader at a London-based hedge fund. There, he wrote code, managed software projects, deployed machine learning algorithms, managed teams, bought and sold positions in commodities and derivatives, and saw the impact of all those things on the fund’s actual performance. He brings a hands-on and practical approach to software, technology, and investing that is very much in line with Angular’s mission — and with the culture that we are working to build as a firm. Even more importantly, he is genuinely interested in the underlying technologies that the venture world is supposed to be backing — not just the fundraising headlines. Here, for example, is a post he recently wrote on password managers where he explains Accel’s $200M Series A bet on 1Password. So first of all, follow him on Twitter. He’s got a super interesting Twitter feed. Second, if you are a founder of an enterprise tech startup in Europe or Israel, reach out to him via email.
Finally, while you can catch Andrew (and I) around Europe fairly regularly — do let him know if you are in London and want to drop by our new but very humble office. We’re a two-minute walk from Oxford Circus, and we have delicious coffee.
So I couldn’t be happier with the team we have assembled, and I think when you meet them, you’ll feel the same.
As mentioned above, all three of us from Angular are going to be in Paris, Munich, and Berlin in early January, kicking off 2020 with a bunch of startup meetings — please either email us or let us know you’d like to meet us at this link.
