#7: Hannah Seal, Index Ventures, on investing in regulated markets
Welcome back to The Form Playbook, our newsletter supporting founders building the future of regulated markets.
This month:
🎙️ Interview with Hannah Seal, Partner at Index Ventures, on investing in regulated markets
📰 News & Views: New blog from us on Winning in Regulated Markets: Mapping What Matters
⏰ Form Updates: Peppy raises a $45m Series B, Patrick joined the EUVC podcast, Leo caught up with Global Counsel podcast, and Andrew speaks to the FT about R&D support for startups
Hannah Seal, Index Ventures Partner, on investing in regulated markets
Hannah Seal is a Partner at Index Ventures, working with companies like Remote, Multiverse, Fonoa and Beauty Pie. As a former operator at eBay and Ocado, and now at Index investing in policy-adjacent markets like the future of work, Hannah has seen what it takes for founders to take on complex, regulated sectors and win.
Hannah’s Advice for Founders:
Deep insight about your market, as well as realism about what it will take to build a global business in a regulated sector, is essential to being an exceptional entrepreneur.
Navigating a pre-seed or seed round in 2023 isn’t without challenges, and the best advice must be tailored to your runway and efficiency. But entrepreneurs with a burning desire to build something significant can flourish in the aftermath of crises — just look at the dot-com bubble and financial crisis.
There is opportunity in complexity: Fonoa and Loctax, which are both solving different aspects of business tax headaches, show the prize available to those willing to break down barriers in even the toughest markets.
Read the full interview on Medium: Hannah Seal, Index Ventures Partner, on investing in regulated markets
News & Views
Andrew has a new blog on Winning in Regulated Markets: Mapping What Matters
Building a start-up in a regulated market is challenging: rules are constantly evolving, policy affects different business functions in different ways, and, as you scale, different countries will have different frameworks.
To win, the best founders optimise their regulatory strategy like any other function.
At Form, we run a session with every new portfolio company to map what matters early, to avoid learning the hard way later on. So we’ve written up our framework, running through the areas where policy has real business impact: product, go-to-market, finance, operations, brand and the broader ecosystem.
Form Updates
Peppy raised a $45m Series B to expand its work connecting employees to real, human health experts to the US. Congrats to a brilliant team on the round, which is a testament to their remarkable vision and execution.
Patrick was on the EUVC podcast, discussing how Form Ventures was founded and how we were built to be differentiated from Day 1
Leo spoke with Global Counsel, the public policy advisory firm, about the state of the UK tech scene and how it compares to other countries, ft. our collaboration with Atomico on startup policies across Europe
Andrew was in the Financial Times, highlighting that the UK’s proposed cuts to R&D tax relief are still due to come into force in April, despite a welcome consultation to revisit the issue
As always, if you know anyone building the future of regulated markets — or you’re an investor thinking about how policy affects your portfolio, get in touch.