Between defending one of her protégés from a “smear campaign” and raising her debut venture capital fund, Julie Meyer would be forgiven for not knowing which way to turn. Growing Business, however, finds her in formidable form as the embattled SpinVox’s most bullish backer
It has been a busy couple of weeks for Julie Meyer. When your role calls for you to be an entrepreneur, investor and adviser all at the same time, you have to get used to being pulled in different directions. But she knew what she was signing up for when she set up her investment and advisory firm Ariadne Capital in 2000.
At the moment, her advisory skills are being called on a little more than she’d like, as she goes through what may prove to be a watershed moment for her in this capacity. One of Ariadne’s protégés, SpinVox, has been the subject of a media frenzy. It was sparked by a BBC exposé claiming that the firm, which has received more than £100m in venture backing, relies heavily on staff at overseas call centres to transcribe users’ voicemail messages rather than its famed voice recognition technology. Founders and one-time media darlings Christina Domecq and Daniel Doulton are now at the centre of what supporters have dubbed a smear campaign by disgruntled former employees.
Meyer has defended them with admirable vigour, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for her. She is in the process of raising Ariadne’s debut venture capital fund. While its size has not yet been confirmed (she was poised to make an official announcement as we went to press), she is expecting to raise £15-20m. Even before the “shit hit the fan” with SpinVox, when we first met, Meyer was pulling 15-hour days balancing fundraising with the needs of 24 fast-growing portfolio companies. She’s also a new Dragon – having starred in the online version of the show alongside Shaf Rasul since March, which is due to be televised in the autumn.
“It’s amazing what make-up can do these days,” Meyer smiles, when I reassure her that you can’t see many signs of her punishing work schedule. What is apparent, however, is a passion for cultivating an environment that supports ambitious entrepreneurs. It’s what drove her to set up Ariadne, and more recently Entrepreneur Country, a community of more than 27,000 entrepreneurs built upon a number of founding values, including a commitment to driving the economic recovery and being the most suitable backers of early-stage companies.
This idea of entrepreneurs backing entrepreneurs, of their experience being the catalyst that turns great ideas into global successes, is a well-versed mantra these days, but this wasn’t the case in 2000. She might have a keen eye for spotting game-changers (Ariadne was an early adviser to Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, before the firm’s $4bn sale to eBay), but she has also proved to be a visionary herself.
The networker
Meyer was already a serial entrepreneur when she set up Ariadne. In her early 20s, she established a training and consultancy business in Paris, and she’s often referred to as a founding mother of the new media set in the UK, where she set up First Tuesday in the late 1990s. The networking event for entrepreneurs and investors in the digital community was sold to Israeli firm Yazam for £33m in 2000.
“First Tuesday was, by definition, an international network of people,” says INSEAD graduate Meyer, who started the event (which ran on the first Tuesday of every month) after moving to the UK in 1998 and landing a job at New Media Investors. Before online social networks came on the scene, she tapped into the importance of a global connectivity to business that we take for granted now. “It was kind of a natural thing to do,” she says. “I needed to meet people, I was in my first job and we were looking for deals.”
The concept evolved from her observations of the UK’s entrepreneurial scene, where home-grown success stories often lacked the contacts and partners to help them expand abroad, without taking on hefty additional fixed costs. When American-born Meyer stepped off the plane in Paris at 21, she knew no one. By the time she left, she had been to business school and formed her own network of contacts across Europe. Going international at a young age gave her a global mindset that has shaped all her subsequent endeavours.
“I was raising money for Brent [Hoberman] and Martha [Lane Fox] with Lastminute, or with Julian and Marc [Worth] for WGSN at New Media Investors, and I saw that these businesses were looking to expand internationally, but lacked the partners in other geographies,” Meyer recalls. “With First Tuesday, I saw the people network we were developing as being an essential part of helping companies find the partners they needed.”
The investor
It might be raising its first fund, but Meyer looks horrified when I refer to Ariadne as “more than just a VC firm”. “We’re not really a VC firm at all,” she says. Its investment strategy certainly sets it apart from most VCs.
For a start, Ariadne makes a beeline for early stage firms. While this approach carries the prospect of mammoth returns if the business takes off, it also means that things can get a bit messy. “We put that first £500,000 to £1m into a company to take the product to market. We work a lot on shaping the ‘go to market’ strategy.”
Backing a pre-revenue start-up is not for the fainthearted, and Meyer believes that only successful entrepreneurs themselves should try this at home. “We’re happy to work with a company in a kind of high-risk, sometimes very unstructured way,” she says. “We call it our bear hug. We wrap around a company and provide them with a lot of support to accelerate the business, and to work through some of the tricky issues in the early stages.”
