Venture capital is changing - structurally, not cyclically. This fireside conversation explores what that shift means for founders raising capital now.
Gil Dibner and Ross Morrison break down how investor behaviour is evolving under tighter capital conditions, new fund models, and increased pressure from LPs. They unpack what’s driving these changes - from AI and fund construction to geopolitics and longer exit timelines - and how those forces are shaping judgement at the investment committee level.
Rather than focusing on tactics, this session centres on patterns : how investors behave when capital tightens, what consistently matters across market cycles, and how founders can position themselves credibly when expectations reset.
Essential viewing for founders planning to raise in the next 12–24 months, and anyone looking to understand how venture decisions are actually made today.
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors.
Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Hi. I thought what would what would be interesting is if we kinda just kinda talked to each other, and then we'll open the floor to you guys as well. So if you have questions, there there should should be mics later on. We bring two different perspectives.
Angular Ventures is a venture firm. Adam Street is an LP, and Ross will tell you more about that, but they're the the vehicles that invest into venture firms. Just two two different perspectives on on the state of tech, the state of venture, state of finance in general.
So I thought maybe kick it off by asking Ross to introduce yourself and Adams Street. What is Adams Street? Because most people know him probably haven't heard of it. Maybe we can start there and then go into the more interesting stuff. Perfect. Thanks, Gil, and good morning, everybody.
You'll hear from the accent. I'm actually from Edinburgh, so it's it's fantastic to be home, especially on a sunny day in Edinburgh. So thanks for having me up on the stage with Gil. It's a it's a great privilege. By ways of introduction, lovely to meet you, Ross Morrison.
I'm partner at Adam Street. I've been there for fifteen years. I worked for another Fund of Funds and I'll come back to describe what that is for five years prior to joining Adam Street, mostly in London but also in Silicon Valley. So what is a fund of funds?
A fund of funds is an LP effectively, and what we do is we collect typically pension money, but it can be all sources of capital from sovereign wealth funds to high net worth, everything in between. And those clients look to us to to build private markets portfolios on their behalf.
And what's unique about Adam Street is that we were the world's first fund of funds. So we're a fifty year old firm, which in the speak of venture capital is as old as it really gets. We were we started life investing into growth equity companies in Silicon Valley using the capital of the First National Bank of Chicago.
We did that for the first seven years of our life, seventy two to seventy nine. And then pension money changed to allow it to invest into venture capital. We were already doing it, that's why we started invent investing into funds and are recognized as creating the world's first fund of funds.
So what does this all mean and why are we here talking about it? The benefit of Adams Street as an LP of having invested into venture capital for fifty years globally, predominantly in Silicon Valley, but also twenty five years here in Europe. Adams Street has probably got the longest deepest track record of investing into venture capital in Europe.
And part of the conversation I'm hoping to get into Gill today with is explaining how that all works and what that might mean for you and the audience and why, you know, the headline I think today is that Adams Street is quietly bullish about what we've achieved so far with European venture capital and why we're doubling down in Europe for the next twenty five years.
Great. I think before we get into Europe specifically, I actually didn't I I guess I knew this, but I didn't really know it. Didn't register until you told me again last night that only thirty percent of your time is spent on venture y stuff.
So it might be actually useful for tech founders in the audience to understand how that whole thing fits into the broader picture of finance. Because the money to finance all this innovation comes from somewhere, and it's a slice of a slice of a slice of a of a larger pool.
So can you give some context on on where tech, particularly early stage tech fits into the broader investment landscape and what what the function of a tech founder is in this broader financial market? Yeah. Great. I'll try and parcel it out. The headline is that tech founders and entrepreneurs are the the beating heart of everything that we try and generate performance from.
And how that all comes together in the world of finances, let's just take a typical pension fund who roughly used to have fifty percent in bonds, fifty percent in equities, typically all of those equities were in public markets. US LPs, I would argue, for a very long period of time have been allocated into private markets.
It was five percent, some more plans are more kind of ten percent. If you think about the entire pie of what they have to invest in, they've typically been investing five to ten percent into private markets. Private markets include private equity and venture capital.
If you take Harvard, Princeton, Yale, all those endowments, their allocation of private markets is much larger. It's typically thirty, forty, sometimes fifty percent into private markets. And they're able to do that because they've got a longer term liquidity horizon where they don't need a lot of money all of the time, whereas if you're managing a pension scheme, you you need liquidity.
So in the grand scheme of things, private markets is is kind of small piece of the pie. European, I would argue, LPs have not allocated as much to private markets, and I think that shaped our ecosystem a little bit. So how it all works is this five, ten percent of global asset management money flows into the private markets.
And typically, the ratio of allocation to private markets is thirty percent venture capital, seventy percent private equity. Thirty percent venture capital is early stage. It's Gil Dibner backing great tech entrepreneurs like yourself in the audience to try and build great companies. That takes a really long period of time.
It starts with an idea and then becomes a product. Hopefully, product finds product market fit, revenues, geographic expansion, build big companies are built and then they're exited like dream last week. In the private equity world, these are different category of companies. They're still private but they're typically profitable.
They're cash flow generating. They're more mature. They don't really have the growth rates. They don't really have the huge global TAM that an early stage venture company can achieve. Nevertheless, because of the characteristics of being profitable, a lot of the time innovative, these are attractive targets for private equity.
And that is why they take up about seventy percent of private market share. So I'm throwing a lot of numbers out here, and sorry if this is sounding complicated. But at Adams Street, we're really fortunate because we do both. We do venture capital and we do private equity.
And what's interesting is over the last ten years, the private equity guys and girls used to just be very kind of non conversant in technology. And because technology has now rippled through every end market and and vertical, they can no longer understand technology and and pretend that it isn't affecting all of the businesses they they invest in.
So what what we've seen over the last ten years is a collision of the private equity folks and the venture capital coming together. And so when you think about building and taking your companies to the next level, how you think about financing is really important.
If you're going for global domination and building a great company, early stage venture capital is absolutely the key. Private equity, however, might actually be a really attractive financing structure for you. And all private equity, they're not just big funds. They're small, medium, large, and mega funds as well.
So you always find size categories. And within private equity, there are investment managers who only invest in technology companies. HG would be an example here in Europe where HG is the largest software investor in Europe, full stop. It's the third largest by NAV in terms of technology, assembled technology and net asset value in Europe.
I think I think only SAP and Dassault systems exceeds its its market value. So there are huge sources of capital for technology companies here in Europe. But depending on the cash flow profile, depending on the business that you're building, picking the right investment manager, venture capital, or private equity is really important for for you guys to work out.
But on the early stage on the company creation, venture capital is is probably the most relevant for the folks in the room and where we like to spend a disproportionate amount of our time even though it's thirty percent of our dollars. Cool. So I'd I'd love to get your perspective on on Europe with maybe a of a longer view.
So where was Europe in twenty ten, twenty fifteen? Where is Europe today? And and if you could maybe can compare it to the US, you know, I know we're we're living through a bit of a weird period in US, you know, in global history.
You know, as as an American originally, you know, now living in Europe, but as, you know, my conviction is that even four years of Trump is not gonna totally destroy what what the US has built over a hundred years, at least I hope so.
But I I I think it would be interesting to share your perspective as a as a international LP on what the Silicon Valley ecosystem was able to achieve, what made that special, and then how is Europe functioning and growing in comparison to what was done there?
Yeah. Lots in there. Let me try and break it out, but I I think it's really important to try and zoom out and and give a bit of perspective. So if you think about Silicon Valley, it's been around for fifty odd years. So that means it's had five decades of compounding annual financing, company creation, talent, huge wins, which over time just has created an unbelievably competitive, efficient talent pool and company creation like nowhere else in the world.
And we always get drawn into comparisons with Silicon Valley as we should do. But I think as you think about context, it's also really important to understand that it's quite difficult to compare something that's fifty year old with something in Europe that's arguably kind of twenty year old.
What we like and get confidence from is that we see with our global lens on the trajectory that Europe's on, the companies that it's created, and the global market share that's now occupying that say to us that there's a lot of positive signals here.
For context, I think it's also really important to understand, like, why is it taking Europe maybe a little bit longer than we otherwise would have hoped and thought to be on level par with the US? And we we actually got off to just a dreadful start, to to be blunt about.
It was a really bad timing. If you go back to the few years before the dot com era, ninety seven, ninety eight, ninety nine, if you go into maybe a comparable tech ecosystem, which was Israel, outside of Silicon Valley so what happened was a lot of Silicon Valley VCs said, hey, tech's global.
Let's expand geographically. Israel and Europe were their hubs, basically. So they began doing that. A lot of them started for for different reasons a little bit earlier in Israel. And so Israel had some company creation, some exits, which allowed its ecosystem to start developing arguably five plus years before Europe did.
For Europe, it really started in that ninety seven, ninety eight, ninety nine period. And what happened was there was a huge amount of hype predicated on poor business models, far too much capital chasing far too few weak companies. The onset and hype around the Internet meant that a lot of pension a lot of capital moved into European VC as it did globally.
Tech tech was a big hype. And effectively, it all ended in tears very quickly. The dot com crash happened. Europe had just invested a huge amount of capital into unproven VCs, invested in unproven companies, and a lot of people lost a lot of capital.
And so it was like Europe turned up to this amazing party. Everybody had been partying for a decade. The u like, US had been partying for thirty years. And we turned up, like, at the midnight hour, and the lights went on. And we suffered the exact same hangover as the US did and as Asia did and as everywhere else did.
Because it was a huge, you know, it was a graveyard shift for about five plus years until everybody questioned the venture model, so on and so forth. So we got the hangover. We didn't get the party. Okay? That was the dot com era.
And what that also meant, which people maybe don't appreciate, is a lot of the capital that got invested by European institutions got lost. And there's been a huge amount of negativity, non belief into the asset class ever since. So we talk about European ecosystem and venture, which is fantastic, but it's actually been funded by non Europeans, predominantly US capital investing into European venture, ironically.
And that's beginning to change. We wanna help change that. But that's kind of how Europe got started. Then there was this big graveyard shift that we talked about. And what you need for a vibrant ecosystem to blossom and accelerate is you need companies, great companies like you guys are creating.
Because these companies are mini factories of talent and the next alumni of generation of companies and founders that go on to create great things. Europe didn't have a lot of them. The the the the the milestone, there was a couple actually, was MySQL, which ended up being a meaningful exit in the in the early two thousands.
And then along came Skype, which was probably one of the first kind of recognized notable companies of scale that all of a sudden, there was a line in the map, if you will. Like, Europe Europe's woken up. I wouldn't say it's arrived, but it's woken up.
If you fast forward today, there's depending on the count of it, these numbers are always changing, and it's only one way to think about the depth of the ecosystem. There's about six hundred and eighty unicorns spread across seventy one different cities in Europe today.
The growth and depth of company creation is unparalleled compared to what it was in two thousand and five. So twenty years of company creation, recognition of Europe as a a sensible place to invest and allocate capital. But what I would say is from the two thousand and five to two thousand fifteen period, it was still hard yards.
There wasn't, like, capital flying in, and this is still an attractive place. And we still have a bit of an uphill challenge there, even though it's improved considerably. So if you think about Europe today, where I'm investing into European venture, about forty or so billion.
Two thousand twenty four is gonna end up, something like that. If you compare that to the US, it's still about a hundred and fifty, two hundred billion. So if you think about the quantum of capital going into Europe versus the US, there's still a lot of catching up.
But it's if you compare that forty, fifty billion compared to what it was in two thousand and thirteen, which was about eight billion, The growth, the depth of the ecosystem is commensurable, and it's very attractive. So fast forward in how do we think about Europe?
We think it's attractive. We think it's hugely grown up, especially in the last decade. What are the apart from we're talking about numbers, what are the other kind of points on the board that you would speak to? And it'd be great, Gil, talk about Angular here is, if we think about the best investors arguably perceived by the market, Silicon Valley, so if you think Benchmark, Accel, Andreessen, you know, you're probably familiar with all the logos.
They've now got teams and offices in Europe, and they're trying to build out. And for them, they've recognized that they've been missing out on great European companies, but accessing those companies are really difficult because Europe's different from the US. If you go to the US Silicon Valley, Sandhill Road, you've got probably eighty, ninety percent of concentration of talent, capital, so on and so forth in a two mile radius.
That's very different from Europe. It's very dispersed. So it's quite difficult to have a two, three person team in London and actively cover Europe. Just from we all know living here, the geographical diversification and the creation of many ecosystems that are across Europe.
Nevertheless, a lot of great companies and if we think about our understanding of the ecosystem, what drives venture returns is outlier companies. Okay? Like a a crazy stat and and we're comfortable with it is that of all the capital that we invest into venture capital, so say it's a hundred million dollars, let's make up the numbers, Fifty million of that hundred will not return cost.
Okay? We know that we're gonna lose fifty percent of everything that we invest in venture. What's even more pronounced is that we know that only ten percent of the capital that we invest will drive all of the returns. Okay? So ten percent of capital that we invest in venture capital returns a hundred percent of our returns.
So what does that mean? It means that we have to build portfolios with the likes of Gil and Angular that allows us and Gil to get into phenomenal companies that drive huge outsized returns that lifts all boats in our portfolio. So it's really exciting, but also very important to understand how to invest into venture capital as an LP and recognize the risk return that that that were undertaken.
I wanna ask if I could about the current moment because you you've given a really good overview of sort of how we got to here. Without getting too deep in the sort of inside baseball of VC, which you and I tend to do, Is there anything unique about this moment, twenty twenty five, if you compare it to past decades, past periods?
You know, from where I sit, are some things that look different to me. I've only been observing the market closely for ten, fifteen years. As a firm, you guys have been observing it for fifty years. Is it just history repeats itself and it's kind of all more or less the same and good companies will win, etcetera, etcetera?
Or is there anything structurally different going on today in the US or Europe that that founders need to be aware of and that that's changing some of these dynamics? Yeah. Part of it, who knows? But I think I've drawn some similarities and maybe some some differences.
So this risk return, the ten percent driving outlier companies, what do those companies look like? They're global companies. They might have HQ in Europe, but they're global companies. So that that is a phenomenal characteristic. It's really important to understand that. Because if you're gonna capture and be a market leader, you're not gonna be a market leader just in the UK or the champion of France or the champion of Benelux.
You need to be champion of your market. And a lot of the market encompasses the US market. And so the recognition of the need to go to the US quickly, effectively, efficiently is a really important characteristic and one that's not necessarily as well accepted, I think, culturally.
If you look at Israel, again, I think for a good part of their history, they didn't do that. They switched mindset and recognition of that. And outside of London, Tel Aviv is the only country to have created a hundred unicorns. They've disproportionately knocked it out the park.
And I think part of that recognition of global markets, that their market's far too small for anything, is the necessity. And so I think that necessity was maybe known by a lot of European founders to maybe a longer path to necessarily go on that global expansion.
Part of it's confidence. Part of it's having poster childs that go out and say, right, it doesn't matter where we're from. We're gonna take on the world because Silicon Valley companies think like that. But they can they can sell to the biggest deepest market on their doorstep immediately.
Any company starting outside of the US needs to get its way into it. And that's why it's really important to partner with and think about as you're getting funding from venture capital, what is your route to the next, not just the next stage of financing, but the next stage of building your company.
And how are VCs like Gil and Angular actually going to be able to invest in you at the early stage, bend your curve because all the experience that they have working with founders, and then use their exceptional network in the US to get you the right signals for the next stages of financing, which will disproportionately likely result in follow on financing for your business as well as accessing the US market.
And that in itself, I think, has always been around. I think if you went back to January, you know, the the the the sentiment was, oh my goodness. Like, all that matters in the world is the US. Goodbye, Europe. Okay? There was a real strong negative sense around Europe.
Here or there? No. No. Just just here. Here. Here. Here Europe. If from a global standpoint, if you if you're a global investor, at the beginning of this year, before everything happens that we've been reading about newspapers and have seen, there's terrible negative stance on Europe.
And if you look to the number of Delaware registered companies coming out of Europe who are registering their companies to begin with in the US, it was like an accepted theme. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's probably quite a clever thing.
But how life can change in three months is pretty interesting. And so I think there's a few things that, from a geopolitical standpoint, we shouldn't ever worry about. Tactically having a Delaware resident company is a positive. But in reality, focusing on your business regardless what Trump or whoever geopolitical issue is going on is paramount.
You know, building your business. Forget, like, our data shows that venture returns are completely uncorrelated to capital cycles, and we love it because of that. So there's the innovation cycle and there's the capital cycle. Ventures in the innovation cycle and it's uncorrelated with capital cycles.
And so forget the geopolitical issues that affect GDP because you guys are on another trajectory. You asked me what's different. So that's what is always been around, but maybe less transparent. Go global, go quickly, go earlier, maybe less so. I think what's different now is AI and we're at the early stages of its application.
So forget infrastructure and hard significant capital spend because that all belongs in the US. Predominantly, you know, Asia is also to a certain degree. But AI, I think, upturns everything because the efficiency and the change in business model all of a sudden is a structural change.
And the ability to do more and use AI to accelerate development, I think this whole theme of globalization of venture capital is a very long term theme. It will continue. I think the world just got flatter. Things are gonna accelerate because everybody has access to this now.
And so I think that is a structural change that will open up, huge, great companies. And we're just at the very early stages of this application of AI. It's like you're running a marathon. Somebody's pressed the start gun, and everybody globally in Silicon Valley and Europe has, like, ran the first mile.
We've still got the rest of the marathon to go here. So I think it's really exciting, and it's hard because of the speed of development just how that will play out. But I think the world just got a little bit flatter, and I'm interested to hear your views on that too.
Yeah. I'll I'll answer. But in the meantime, if anyone has questions, I think we have some mics in the audience. So please just raise your hand and we can get a mic to you. I mean, think there is so I agree with you on the AI thing.
I agree with you on the going global thing. I mean, as a statistic, I think almost every single company in our portfolio that has any revenue at all has US you know, revenue in the US. Most of our companies I mean, none of our companies are American.
Like, none of them are Americans in America. Many of them are Delaware registered. We're huge advocates of that. Some jurisdictions are easier than others. UK is not that bad. Israel's pretty good. Germany is a nightmare. So, you know, we anytime we can, we we prefer that a company incorporated in Delaware.
I I think we're know, the the the AI thing, I think, is characterized by this tremendous localized hype relative to other sectors and spaces. And I think the thing that's interesting about it is the excitement is evenly understood by everyone. There's no one who's like an AI skeptic and doesn't believe that this is huge.
I think that's actually more problematic than beneficial because as a VC, you're always looking for those cases where, hey. Like, we found some small pocket that believes in something that everyone else will believe in later, but they don't believe in now, and so we get good good good price on that.
Right? And and in today's world, everybody agrees that this is huge, and so the prices are out of whack. The other thing that I think is misunderstood by a lot of people is that I think that technology is is is very fundamentally deflationary.
I think it just makes it a lot easier to do stuff. It makes it harder to write barriers to entry because what's easier for you like, when a when a founder comes in and does a cool AI demo that it took them a month to build, I'm like, that is not a good thing.
That is a bad thing because it means someone else somewhere else is someone else somewhere else is building the same demo and has access to the same building blocks that you had access to. So I think that that makes our job harder. Any questions? We'd love to yeah.
There's the one over here. Hi. This has been amazing. I really appreciate your time. My question is one of the things that's very clear within the Scottish ecosystem in particular is that there is a high volume of reasonably high volume of start ups and an extremely low conversion towards scale ups.
My question to to to you is, are there regulatory levers that from a policy perspective that can empower the kind of confidence to achieve the global scale that is necessary to make specifically the Scottish market attractive to global investors like yourselves? Yeah. I I think I'll try and be specific on Scotland, but the theme, the structural challenge that you highlight, the start up to scale up, I think is a UK and European issue.
So I think Scotland is part of the same situation, which is we fundraise for around the world to advocate to invest in European venture. And I've got the slide that's fantastic. And it says, the number of startups coming out of Europe is the same as the number of startups coming out of the US.
So as a forward indicator of great companies, Europe's on par. And Scotland and the UK is is leading within that. But as you're absolutely right, the amount of capital in the scale ups is dwarfed by the amount of capital available in the US.
There are changes that are happening at the UK government level. To change that, the Mansion House Pact is advocating for a lot of local authorities to invest in private markets, specifically venture capital until the apple cart to allow more capital to flow into the market.
We are on a lot of roundtables to help that change. But like any government, it just takes a long period of time. And I think the most important thing is to always remember that great companies will always be able to find capital. Now how you go about that is a challenge and, you know, speak to Gil and get inside with folks like Angular is really important because they understand where the scale capital is and where the right scale capital is for your business model as well and to help you orientate that.
There's a huge amount of value that the likes of Angular can do there. So there will always be capital, but you are right. Structurally, it will just take time. And it's like, you know, when we had the MySQL and the Skype example, and now you've got six hundred and eighty unicorns.
Those will commensurably require much larger scale up capital. And it's coming, and it's changed. And every year, it gets larger, a hundred million rounds and so on and so forth, however you want to categorize it. But it won't happen overnight. But it will happen through folks being confident, building global businesses, and demanding that scale up capital come from the likes of General Catalyst and Lightspeed and Andreessen and all the great names are here.
Because if you build a great business, they are dying to invest in them. Like, they've got huge amounts of capital that they need to put at working rate businesses. So build great businesses, and the capital will come, and then let the government and everybody else kinda catch up and fill in behind.
Yeah. I I just wanna add that I think there's a I completely agree with everything Ross said. I don't know if you're asking from the perspective of a founder or from an ecosystem builder, but I think there's a there's a macro policy response to that kind of question, which is, hey, what can a local government or a national government do to help with, you know, whatever.
I, as an American observing, you know, I I bet my entire career on European and Israeli tech, like, believe in this. Right? But I think that is a, in my mind, a European disease, where wherever you go in Europe, there's someone who's like, oh, well, what can the government of, like, East Western Slovakia do to improve? Like, no one cares.
Like, no no one should care at all. The the the founders in that ecosystem should not care. The macro sorry. The micro answer is way more interesting, which is, okay. What can your company do to finance itself and support its growth? And that needs to be answered on a micro level.
And and there I would say your ecosystem is what you decide it is. And I learned this lesson in Israel super clearly. You would go to you know, we would go due diligence on an Israeli company, and you suddenly realize all their emails are in English.
There isn't a single non Israeli who works for that company. Their first language for everybody is Hebrew, and every single email is English. And you'd ask to see, why is everyone emailing in English? And, like, of course, we're emailing in English. We're we're building a global company.
We're not gonna switch when we hire our first American. We're global from day one. And then I asked, you know, one of my bosses at the time have you know, I I would get these pitch decks in English and Hebrew. And my my Hebrew clock speed is pretty high, but not as fast as my English one.
And I was like, hey. Did did you guys ever fund the company that sent us a deck in Hebron? Like, no. Of course. Are you kidding? And the guy walked out of my office. And the point is, like, you can decide on your ecosystem.
And there's VCs, as Ross said, there's VCs all over the world, all over Europe, and all over the US. I would love to hear from you. And it's a question of your own perspective and and you choosing what playing field you're playing on.
And, you know, just when you think about who you're talking to in terms of financing, you're talking to in of customers, who you're talking to in terms of who you're gonna hire, where they're gonna be based, where you're gonna set up offices, just think about what's the right thing for the business.
If it if it if the right thing for your business is to be headquartered in New York or Chicago, I mean, one of our German founders just moved to Chicago. Because, like, we're in the logistics business. That's we already got Germany covered. We need to be headquartered in Chicago.
And I was like, you sure you wanna live in Chicago? He's like, don't care. I don't care about the weather. I wanna be in Chicago because that's where my business needs to be. Great. Like, that that's the way they should be thinking. So solve it on a micro level and the macro will follow.
Hi. Thanks for sharing your insights, particularly about Israel. I think, Ross, you mentioned a very interesting point that there's about one hundred unicorns that popped up from Israel and Gil, thanks for sharing your insights on that. Why do you think that the Israel ecosystem churns out so many unicorns?
Yeah. It comes with confidence. They got there were first of all, it's a tiny geography. Five million? Ten. Ten. Sorry. Half. I'm just talking about Scotland. Getting mixed up. So, it's the same question as, like, why are the Nordics why have they built such great global businesses from Sweden?
Because their domestic markets have never ever been big enough. So by default, they've always had to export from day one. And they've got connection with the US implicitly. And so their default export market's always been the US. And as soon as you have great poster child success stories, then all of a sudden it comes back to this micro question of how do you build great companies?
How do you set up a sales system in the US? How do you keep your technical talent at home? How do you go fast, go far? And in the same characteristics of what's happening in Europe now is US VCs have always had presence in Israel.
And so that connectivity to the US has always been really strong in the same way over the last ten years. That connectivity of US VCs and companies from Europe going to the US is now accelerating. And so I think it's all that connection to the US has been there.
Of course, the technical talent, of course, the nature of a lot of the founders that come out of there. But a lot can be achieved in a little amount of time. Wasn't a company five years ago. Just think about that. Wizz wasn't a company five years ago.
Think about what you guys can achieve in that time frame with your own businesses. Which businesses in the US or globally are similar into some of the problems that they've solved? Go and speak to those COOs and CIOs and people that have gone on to create companies.
They would love to help you. I think this is why when anybody touches venture capital, it becomes really exciting and nobody leaves. Because everybody wants to help each other. Everybody wants to find out how did you go from here a to b to c to e.
And everybody's willing to help. And that's the answer to the micro question. Hopefully, that helps. But look, London didn't have a hundred unicorns ten years ago either. And, you know, you think about the pan European story. UK is about thirty, thirty five percent of the European story.
It's truly pan European. And maybe just to end on I can see I'm getting circled. Maybe just a positive note to end on that I wanna share with you guys is, you know, I've been a student of venture capital for twenty years, and I've I've worked I've been very, very privileged to work with leaders that have invested in the asset class for a long period of time.
Adam Street will announce this week that we've raised our first dedicated venture capital fund just for Europe. It didn't happen overnight. It's been years in the making. We're entirely grateful to our global investors that have given us the confidence to take their capital and double down in Europe, but we will announce a highly oversubscribed fund for Europe this week.
I think it's it's another leg in the story of our twenty five year tenure in Europe. I'd like to think in the next ten years that initial first fund and by the way, raising a first fund is not easy. Gail can attest to that.
Anybody who raised their first fund is easy. I'm giving you the headlines. Was oversubscribed. It was not an easy journey, just like the journey you guys are on is not easy. But it's a milestone, And there'll be a fun two, and there'll be a fun three, and I'm really excited about the next decade plus going forward because people turning up to be in this room today and learn and and be adventurous and confident about building their businesses.
