Chris Smith

Playfair 

Managing Partner

NetFabric.ai

Investor

Kauffman Fellows

Fellow (Class 25)

Forbes

Contributor

Ascento

FENKA Robotics

Qureight

Board Director

Material Evolution

Board Observer

YASO

Worldr

Chris is Managing Partner at Playfair, a Kauffman Fellow (Class 25), a Contributor to Forbes and helped found our D&I initiative - Female Founder Office Hours (FFOH) - in 2019.

He focuses his investing activities on pre-seed opportunities in the UK and Europe. Chris is particularly interested in robotics, autonomous transportation, business and industrial automation (especially through AI, ML and computer vision), HealthTech (except diagnostics and therapeutics) and B2B SaaS. He loves finding companies operating in unloved/overlooked sectors that are ripe for disruption.

Prior to joining Playfair, Chris was an operator at plan.com where he held senior roles including Sales Director, Head of Tech/BI and Head of Product Development. He was the 8th member of the team and over a 5 year period built an award winning sales team, introduced new products (organically and through acquisition) and led the roll out of version 4 of the platform. Revenues grew to £60m in 2018 and the company ranked #1 in The Sunday Times Tech Track 100.

In addition to his roles at plan.com, Chris worked on the re-launch/re-branding of Vannin Capital (another Bramden Investments' portfolio company which was acquired by Fortress Investment Group LLC in September 2019).

Chris executed 15 angel investments across the UK and US from 2008 to 2018 with six exits to date including SuperAwesome (acq. Epic Games), Nearbuy Systems (acq. RetailNext), Compology (acq. RoadRunner Recycling) & Bidstack (LON:BIDS). He is passionate about investing in tech companies and supporting founders using his extensive operational and legal experience.

In his previous life, Chris spent nearly a decade in the City as a transactional lawyer. He has worked with some of the world’s leading private equity and venture capital funds on predominantly international acquisitions, disposals and restructurings. At Weil, he spent time on secondment to the Silicon Valley office’s patent litigation team, UK-based food manufacturer Premier Foods and the Asset Protection Agency.

He was also the founder of a telecoms business in 2001 offering discounted international calling from 14 countries which he partially exited via an MBO in 2005.

If a pre-seed investor asks for revenue, they aren't a pre-seed investor 🚩

We're on track to make 7 new investments this year and this is the split

5 - no revenue, zero, zilch, nothing

1 - founder has hobby level of revenues

1 - founders have consulting revenue from a single project

Investors need to stop claiming that pre-seed has changed when it hasn't

Pre-seed = first money in; founders + a plan; no revenues; high risk...

#Founder #funding #business #investing #vc #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup

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