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Summer break

I’m taking a bit of time with the family over the next three weeks and don’t expect to be posting much here.

Just thought I’d let you know

I will be at Tech Mission London tonight

I am on an investment panel at a Techcelerate event called Tech Mission London tonight at Paypal’s offices in London.  Eight companies will be pitching to the panel and getting feedback in a format styled as Dragon’s Den.  I use that description here because the UK amongst you will know what it means.  [...]

Christchurch Nightshelter – thank you for your support

Every winter I help out as a volunteer for the CARIS Islington Cold Weather Shelter in north London near where I live.  The NightShelter (as we call it) offers dinner, bed and breakfast for between 15 and I think around 50 homeless people every night for the first three months of every year.  If [...]

UK and Ireland TechTour

As I mentioned back in January and as you can see from the picture above the UK and Ireland Tech Tour is coming up next month.  I’ve been on two Tech Tours before and they work well.  I will be attending this one.  For those that aren’t familiar with the format, the Tech Tours [...]

UK Ireland Tech Tour applications open

For those of you that don’t know it, the European Tech Tour Association has been organising two or three day ‘tours’ for as long as I have been in venture capital.  These can be either country or sector specific, and the best startups in a country/sector are selected to present to a [...]

Thank you and Happy Christmas

2009 has turned out to be a good year for us at DFJ Esprit and I hope it has for you too.

After a difficult start I think the operating environment for most startups stabilised over the summer and turned mildly positive towards the end of the year.  Whilst life is obviously easier [...]

Our 3i Portfolio deal

As you might have seen, along with Coller Capital and HabourVest we at DFJ Esprit have agreed to acquire a portfolio of 3i venture capital investments.  Unfortunately the lawyers won’t let me say too much about the deal because we are now in the period between agreeing to acquire and formal completion.  What I [...]

Weekly Tweet archive

One of the reasons I write this blog is as a sort of online scrap book or diary to record both my own thoughts and interesting third party content (I also have a Tumblog which does the same thing for more personal content) – and it has been bugging me for some time that [...]

Soliciting questions for Glasshouse VC panel next week

I’m doing a panel next week at the Glasshouse Show Me The Money event next Tuesday.  The other panelists will be Michael Birch (Bebo and now the PRO Founders Fund), Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC) and Andreas Lazar (Allen & Co).

The idea is that the discussion will help entrepreneurs make the right choices about [...]

DFJ Esprit invests in Graze

I’m pleased to finally be able to let you all know that a week or two ago we invested in graze – an ecommerce company that delivers healthy eating by post. 

We think that Graze is a hot company because they are in at the beginning of what promises to be [...]