THE INVESTOR PROFILE

What challenge are you looking to solve with innovation right now?

I am an investment banker by background and worked in London for 13 years in institutional fixed income sales, serving Nordic clients and select hedge funds in London and New York. I started investing in startups as early as 2002 and, by 2009, I decided to move back to Copenhagen to join a small investment boutique in order to get more experience in investing in early-stage companies. I quickly realised that, in order to be a good investor, you have to have your own experience as an entrepreneur and this led me moving to Asia where I co-founded a startup called Tradeworks. Based in Singapore and Denmark, we enable retail traders to easily design and deploy automated trading strategies without any need for coding. It is a niche market that has been devoid of innovation for years. The challenge is to disrupt a manual, labour-intensive process through simplification and automation, where a machine can execute strategies. This helps to minimise the human risk that is normally associated with this type of trading.

Looking at your Six ‘I’s^® results, you’re an investor. How does this knowledge impact or change the way you work?

To be successful at innovation requires a combination of variables but, ultimately, you can’t execute an idea without money. As an investor, I am always thinking what are my chances of a return on investment? Part of my responsibility in Tradeworks, as well as business development, is to raise finance for the company. Being an angel investor myself, I have a good understanding of what investors look for and how to get investor pitch decks right. This is always a much harder and time-consuming task than entrepreneurs expect while they have dozens of similarly important tasks to juggle as well. Sticking to realistic business plans, conservative budgets and common sense is key!

How do you play to your strengths? What advice would you give other people who want to get better at investing?

Most business plans fail because they are built on a dream. Only 5–10 per cent survive. When I look at a pitch deck, I water down everything I see. An entrepreneur is enthusiastic but their assumptions are often wrong. I look critically at the assumptions. I then take off 50 per cent of what the plan says and see if the business model will still make sense. Anyone can put in an excel spreadsheet with financial projections; the important thing is: can the entrepreneur adequately substantiate the numbers? Keep your feet on the ground. Be realistic. Things never turn out as you think. They take more time. They cost more money.

What steps, if any, would you take to improve the areas where you are not so strong or that are important to you and how?

It’s important to bear in mind that when one leaves the corporate world to become an entrepreneur, all the resources that one might be used to will also be left behind. You need to do sales, you need to do business development, you need to keep finances in check and you risk ending up doing too much and not doing anything very well. I try to follow the Pareto rule where 80 per cent of the value is generated by focusing on 20 per cent of the tasks at hand. You have to be critical about what you need to do. I talk with my team about our strategic key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to identify exactly what needs to get done to generate most value and then we stick with it. It is often tempting to throw yourself off course with different opportunities that will invariably pop up. I try, as well, to keep inspired by meeting people in my industry who are doing innovative things who can challenge my thinking.

How has The Six ‘I’s^® helped you and your teams/business? What examples, if any, can you share?

I believe that one of the biggest pitfalls in innovation and entrepreneurship is to have a hunch and just go with it. This is very dangerous. Just because you think you have a good idea and like it, or your friends like it, does not mean there is a market for what you want to create or do. The Six ‘I’s^® helps to give a process so you do not miss out big steps; like investigating whether the idea will work, testing your assumptions, finding customers, getting the right stakeholders on board, building a value proposition that has a business model to support it. The rest is hard work and large doses of luck.

Have you produced something you would consider innovative?

Disrupting the market of foreign exchange is an innovative endeavour. Identifying the opportunity to simplify what is a complex and time-consuming activity and igniting ideas for automated software development was just the start. Now it is all about building the business and creating a sustainable financial platform for growth. Investment, implementation and continuous improvement are key going forward. Creating a sophisticated technology, enabled by a world-class user experience, is the vision and that keeps us going.