At the age of 27, Andre de Haes raised 30 million euros ($36 million) for his London-based venture capital fund, Backed VC.
Now 30, he and his 29-year-old business partner Alex Brunicki are among a cohort of young investors who are having a greater say in how the billions that have flowed into European venture capital in recent years are spent.
But while younger investors argue that youth gives them a better understanding of what startups might resonate with their age-group, some founders, who recount frustrating meetings with inexperienced venture capitalists, fear an over-reliance on millennial investors’ intuition at the expense of know-how.
Last year venture capital investment in Europe reached its highest level since 2008, at 4.3 billion euros, according to Invest Europe. Karen McCormick, chief investment officer at Beringea LLP, says the industry has recruited “pretty aggressively” in the past two years as money has flooded in, and that has brought in far more young workers in junior roles as analysts and associates. Venture capital firms are likely to promote those people “at earlier stages and earlier ages,” she says.
Those already in senior positions include 29-year-old Katie Leviten, a partner at JamJar Investments; Uwe Horstmann, who co-founded Project A at 25 in 2012; James Wise, who became a partner at Balderton Capital at the age of 29 last year; 25-year-old Abbas Kazmi, co-founder and managing partner of Collegiate Capital and Jonathan Becker, who became a principal at e.ventures last year, at 28. In the U.S., 23-year-old Adam Goldberg is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early backer of Snap Inc.
Young venture capitalists say the phenomenon is a sign that their generation is interested in alternatives to the career paths pursued by their predecessors, such as law and banking.
“When I started five or six years ago, venture was never seen as a career,” says Wise. “You did it before starting your company or after making your millions.” Now Balderton Capital, which he joined in 2013, offers internships. “There’s more awareness of the job, it’s more of a career path,” he says.
‘Aren’t You Kids?’
Of the seven young investors interviewed for this article, only de Haes and Brunicki had full power to make investment decisions. The others go through investment committees or speak to other partners or colleagues to make final decisions.
De Haes started out fund raising by asking for investment from university professors who had taught him at Stanford and Harvard. Backed VC has now raised a second round that De Haes says is a “significant jump” in size from the 30 million euros raised in the first. Unlike the first round that cultivated their personal network, institutional investors are now investing in the new round. He says investors always check references, but in his case one called 50 people, which seemed “a higher bar for us to get over” than more experienced investors.