Q: What’s the difference between White Bear Yard and Passion Capital?

A: White Bear Yard is the name of our co-working office space on Clerkenwell Road in London (EC1R 5DF) which we (Passion Capital team) share with 10-12 different startup teams. It was first established in 2009, well before we’d formalized an investment fund. We were still functioning as individual angel investors at that time.

Distinct from that office *space*, Passion Capital is the name of our early stage venture capital fund established and launched in late March 2011, through which we now make our investments.

From time to time it may happen that all of the teams in White Bear Yard are also Passion Capital investee/portfolio companies, but that’s not a prerequisite and is quite typically *not* the case.

Because we love having a vibrant office to walk into each and every morning, we like to surround ourselves with dynamic, energetic and ambitious teams.

If those teams also align with our investment interests and we can formally partner, that’s great! But even if not and we have the space, we love to have them sharing the office.

Hopefully that helps to clarify things, but as ever, don’t hesitate to ask ! If there are enough other questions still swimming around out there, perhaps we’ll do a real FAQ and not just this one-off.

Now that more than 3 months have passed since we first announced the fund it seems like a reasonable time to fill you in on some of the things we’ve been working on. This comes better late than never (hopefully), and we commit to posting more frequently here (promise!)

Partnerships

Though we hope to improve our efficiency further (which includes meeting more teams, giving faster and more constructive feedback, and not spending months on administrative matters), we’ve still managed to close — which means money transferred! — on 8 investments so far, with 3-4 more looking to close this month.

Most of these have not yet been announced, as we defer to our teams to decide when to do that based on whatever makes the most sense for their product, users and partners. However, we will add a “Portfolio” page to the site soon, and will include some information about these awesome teams as more and more of them decide to make a bit more noise.

Updated term sheet (here)

As a result of negotiating all of those investments, we’ve learned a lot about our paperwork, legal reviews and comments, and what makes most practical sense. As part of that process, we’re pleased to be joining SeedSummit, Index Seed, Eden Ventures, Kima Ventures, Seedcamp and many other seed investors across Europe by adopting the framework of the SeedSummit standard term sheet which has now been added to our Resources page. As the first fund in the UK/Europe to publish our standard term sheet 3 months ago, we’re extremely excited that more investors are joining us in becoming more open and transparent to help startup founders “compare apples to apples”. We’ll post soon to clarify some of the points in the new term sheet, and also highlight what’s changed from the one it replaced.

Meanwhile, we continue to take pride in the fact that we have the most founder-friendly term sheet in Europe*, by committing to use the EIS-friendly version of the SeedSummit set — which by UK definition means that as investors we hold the same class of shares as our founders and have no preference rights.

We want to be your partners, sitting on the same side of the table as we build value and create excitement in what you’ve started — and to stay as closely aligned as possible.

On that note, here’s to more good news (and more frequent updates about them!) over the next 3 months to come.

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*Let us know if we’re wrong about this please!

Team: First and foremost, it’s about the people. And just to be clear, it’s always about the people, whether we’re talking about a team to invest in, a lawyer to work with, or someone to hire. Skills are skills and can be taught, learned or refined, but a person’s true ethos and goals are paramount. With that, a founding team, partners or single founder needs to captivate us with their vision, ambition, executional ability and planning — and yes, passion.

Tech: We’re not investing in heavy R&D; usually web-based consumer or SME (SaaS) solutions. So we’re not looking for a patent portfolio, but we’d like to see something unique, innovative and which differentiates an idea from anyone else attempting the same thing.

Traction: We’ll often move forward without this last component (and do consider investing even at/just before the prototype phase), but if the first two are tick-off items, and this one is added on top, it’s a bonus.

While we’re incredibly honoured to have the vote of confidence and partnership of our investors, we are genuinely looking forward to simply doing the same old, same old — investing in fantastic founders and working together to build world-class companies with them.

We are Stefan, Eileen and Robert, and have been working together as three individual angel investors out of White Bear Yard for the last 2 years. And we’d like to continue doing that, but now with the opportunity to work with more founders, teams and go even further towards achieving eventual success.

As we bring together characteristics innate to our German, American, Chinese, British and Italian roots, we’ll strive to be as straightforward, down-to-earth and easy to work with as the people we seek to work with ourselves. To that end, we’ve started a Resources page on the site which includes links to our standard Term Sheet and ECF Provisions required by the virtue of our fund structure. Additionally, we’ve started a running list of pointers and URLs to great posts, articles and fun things we’ve seen and appreciate online. We’ll try to keep this fresh and updated (we might also even organize it a bit more over the next few days).

Let us know how things look so far.