It’s transfer season, and in the world of London venture capital one big name is moving. Investor and entrepreneur Wendy Tan White is leaving startup builder Entrepreneur First (EF) to join the venture capital arm of the Business Growth Fund (BGF).
The move comes as some surprise, as Tan White joined EF less than two years ago as a venture partner, along with her husband Joe White. The pair co-founded startup-building website Moonfruit, before selling it to Yell in 2012 for £23m in cash. They became general partners at EF in March 2016 when the accelerator raised its most recent £40m fund.
Read more: Entrepreneur First turns strangers into startup founders
Tan White will be a partner at BGF Ventures, which is backed by five of the UK’s main banking groups. She will help manage a £200m fund. “I want to help UK early stage tech companies really scale,” she tells WIRED. “I'd like to work with fewer teams more deeply through each stage of growth and use the full range of experience I have.”
Tan White will remain an LP and a shareholder at EF. “I'm still fully behind EF,” she says - a profession of loyalty that is perhaps more believable given that her husband Joe is staying at the startup builder, where he’s been promoted to global CFO.
But Tan White’s move has prompted – or perhaps revealed – a larger reorganisation at EF, which was founded in 2011 by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck, and remains the only accelerator in the world which builds startups from scratch. Alongside White, existing team members Nadav Rosenberg and Zoe Jervier have taken on global titles (global director of commercial and global director of talent respectively). In addition, former Googler Alex Diaz is joining from Lystable to run the company building operations in London.
Diaz’s recruitment will free up Bentinck, who currently oversees the day-to-day management of EF, to have what the firm describes as “an increasingly global focus”. “It's increasingly clear that we need to think like a scaling operating company, not a traditional VC firm,” says Clifford. “EF’s grown a lot in the last 12 months and it's time to build a comprehensive executive team to allow us to achieve EF's global potential.”
EF already has a branch in Singapore, which produced its first group of 12 companies in March 2017.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
