firstminute's 2023 Investor Summit

The 6th edition of our flagship firstminute summit has come to a close, and we could not have been more excited to welcome more than 350 of our amazing investors and portfolio founders for three days of drinks, talks, dinner and debates over some beautifully sunny days in London.

It was a blast. We host the summit every year to bring together our portfolio with our community of investors, made up of over 130 unicorn founders.

The three-day affair kicked off with an informal garden reception with our founders at General Partner Spencer Crawley’s family home in West London. 

The next day saw those same founders experience a day of bespoke world-class talks and breakout discussions. 

The panel discussions included: 

• The ever-evolving landscape of mergers and acquisitions with Marc Kinast (Celonis), Suzanne Heywood (Exor, The Economist, Christian Louboutin, Iveco), and Bharat Sajnani (Datadog) provided valuable insights into harnessing M&A as a growth driver.

• We also covered the hottest topic in a GenAI session with Steve Crossan (firstminute capital) & Nick Jakobi (Cohere). Nick and Steve discussed how AI modelling is accelerating scientific discovery and how it will create a new ecosystem of businesses but also the current limitations such as how AI won’t be relevant to all use cases and the fact that there are loads of things we don’t understand. 

We also hosted VC roundtables and fireside chats with industry experts such as:

• Off The Record sessions with Cal Henderson (Slack), Kevin Ryan (AlleyCorp, MongoDB), Ilkka Paananen (Supercell) and closed the day with Ann Hiatt. Off The Records follow the Chatham House rule 🤐 but some topics covered were building a business in challenging times, knowing when to quit a venture and advising CEOs of rapidly scaling businesses.

• Scaling in Turbulent Times with Thibaut Ceyrolle (Atomico, Snowflake)

• Building Better Products in Less Time with Jonah Jones

• Press and Storytelling sessions with Callum Burroughs from Business Insider and Iain Martin from Forbes

• Future of CTO with Bhaskar Ghosh (8VC)

• The Biggest Mistakes CEOs Make With Their Tech Approach & Infrastructure with Rob Elkin & Roja Buck 

• Highs and lows of running a commercial open-source company with Matthew Hodgson

Monday culminated in a loud and delicious dinner for our LPs and founders at London's newest multi-sensory immersive art experience Frameless.

We partnered with Picsart and the use of their new Gen AI tool, to create a firstminute galactic universe where each planet represented the sectors we invest in and all our 130 portfolio companies came to life in the space of stars surrounding their planets.

A special thank you again to a long friend and LP of firstminute, Picsart, Hovhannes Avoyan. 

On the main day of our Investor Summit, we saw over 350 LPs, founders and investors come together for fascinating conversations, networking and our main stage speakers (namedropped below).

• The Generative AI Panel with William Tunstall-Pedoe & Taryn Southern culminated in a team-building brainstorm competition which saw two ideas (Gen AI in education and Gen AI to cure loneliness) take joint first place.

• Shaun Maguire spoke about how his hard upbringing and military background shaped who he is today and how he evaluates founders at Sequoia

• Divesh Makan touched on how his early career in Private Equity helped him build his network which ultimately led to his founding of ICONIQ where collaboration and community are at the heart of everything they do.

• One of our portfolio company founder’s, Alex Kendall from Wayve spoke on the topic of AI at the wheel:  perspectives on the future of Autonomous Vehicles followed by another firstminute founder, Will Falcon discussing his company Lightning AI and powering the next big platform shift of our times.

• During the lunch break, intimate groups of our founders met with Bucky Moore from Kleiner Perkens and Lior Susan & Seth Winterroth from Eclipse.

• Miki Kuusi and Ilkka Paananen have a long and rich history which started with Miki getting hired straight out of university by Ilkka making the couple the perfect duo to for ‘The company you keep: are people your most valuable product?’.

• We leaned into our superpower which is our wider firstminute network to bring you the Burst(minute) of renowned CEO and industry leaders:

Ann Hiatt (Hypergiant)

Pep Gomez (Fever and Hard Yaka)

Martin Umaran (Globant)

Victoria Treyger (Felicis Ventures)

Michele Romanow (Clearco)

• David Helgason & Dr. Clea Kolster updated the audience on what’s next for Foobar.VC and Lowercarbon Capital, respectively, during the ClimateTech ‘Breakthrough science and impact’ bursts.

• The jam-packed day ended on a high with a discussion on Market trends, emerging opportunities, and industry predictions for 2024 with a star-studded panel comprised of Anne Glover, Chris North, Ross Mason and Somesh Dash. 

We watched with a glow, as everyone shared stories and learnt from each other, with myriad meaningful connections being made (so we were told!).

And after that, we were done. Thanks to everyone who was there this huge week. Thank you to the events superstar team of Anais x2 in particular on the firstminute team for organising it so heroically, brilliantly and immaculately.

Thank you too to everyone who was there for making it so special. See you all next year!