Overview:

What do Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have in common? They each started their business without venture capital. Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook out of his dorm room at Harvard. Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote and tested the first PageRank algorithms as a graduate project at Stanford.

Startup founders often face a curious paralysis. They have a working MVP or prototype, but they believe they can only go to market with funding available.

But what about going to market immediately, under your own steam?

In the B2B market, it can take 6-12 months to close a deal and in that time, your product specifications will be subject to negotiation. In the B2C market, launching with limited functionality allows you to learn about your customers and the consumer lifecycle.

So why wait until you get funded? Why not start with what you have now? The more traction you have earlier in the process, the better your valuation will be. And the more confident you will be while pitching.

This presentation will discuss the financial and non-financial methods of start-up valuation with a bias towards action. It will share methods and example of how a crash- start under own resources can bring a closer product market fit and higher valuation. It will look at the most frequently used metrics for financial and product/market fit traction, as well as some effective means of bootstrapping your way to sales.

C4E 101: Series of Lectures in Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Fall 2021
Part of the CyEC2021 Acceleration Program

Speaker: Philip Ammerman, Investment Advisor, Navigator Consulting Group

Philip Ammerman is a consultant, entrepreneur and investment advisor who has advised start-ups, investors and enterprises on digital disruption, internationalisation and investment-led growth since 1994. He is founder of Navigator Consulting, Numenor Capital and the Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

Philip started his consultancy career in 1992. He supported the first wave of disruption in sectors such as banking and travel between 1995 and 2000, when the first dot.com crash took place. In parallel, he supported “real economy” investments, primarily in industry and manufacturing, that took place in Greece, Central & Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has advised on over 120 investment transactions with a total investment value exceeding € 6 billion. He has multi-sectoral experience in due diligence, business planning and financial modelling, in sectors including digital/tech start-ups and scale-ups, agri-food, manufacturing and hospitality.

The Web 2.0 boom continued Philip’s engagement in the tech sector, and in 2010, he founded the Navigator Entrepreneurship Charter, an initiative to support growth in Europe by investing in 10 new start-ups and spin-offs between 2010 and 2020. In this capacity, Philip acts as early stage angel investor and board member, and has co- founded or invested in 6 start-ups so far, all in the B2B online services space. He has recently been appointed as Team Coordinator for Greece by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and is supporting innovative Greek companies in the field of competitiveness and internationalisation. Projects are underway for Mastihashop, an innovative food, cosmetics and parapharmaceuticals firm based on Chios gum mastic products (mastiha), as well as for Milkplan, an innovative dairy equipment manufacturer.

Philip acts as regional portfolio manager for Brookstreet Equity Partners, a London- based private equity firm active in tech and innovation investments. Brookstreet recently announced its first investment in Greece, in the nanotechnology firm Nanophos. He is a non-executive director of Redfin Capital, an asset management firm, and is an evaluator for the European Union’s Horizon 2020 SME Instrument.

Philip studied at Princeton University and Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labour Relations. He is also a graduate of YCombinator’s Startup School and the Oxford Fintech Programme.

Originally from Athens, Greece, Philip is a resident in Cyprus since 2016, and travels over 250 days per year. He has implemented project work in over 40 countries, and has lived and worked in Greece, Cyprus, Germany, France and the United States.

Expertise: Angel investments, venture capital, private equity, growth capital, due diligence, financial modelling, business planning, start-ups, mergers & acquisitions, digital transformation.

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