Introducing Form Scouts
Today, we’re announcing the launch of Form Scouts - a group of policy leaders from the world’s most successful tech companies: GoCardless, Google DeepMind, Klarna, Multiverse, Octopus Energy, Stripe, Tools for Humanity, Wayve, and more, who over the past year have been helping Form find the best companies, early.
To understand why this is so important to our mission, let’s go back to the start...
When we started Form, we had five core beliefs:
Technological change will accelerate - reshaping economies, industries, and daily life.
As technology’s influence deepens, political and regulatory scrutiny will intensify. The most game-changing technology will need completely new regulatory infrastructure.
For founders, navigating this new intersection of innovation and government will be a defining challenge.
There is a need for a fund built to help founders succeed in markets shaped by political and regulatory forces.
Form will be that fund
The question for us has always been: how do we become that fund? And how do scouts help?
Finding great companies early
Firstly, like every other venture fund, backing the most world-changing startups early is the name of the game. Finding them is one of the biggest challenges.
We’ve always asked ourselves how we can build a community which is authentic to Form’s mission, and can genuinely help us find those companies.
Policy leaders at the big tech companies, from which so many great new companies emerge, are our core network. These leaders aren’t just shaping policy; they’re plugged into the startup ecosystem, and among the first to spot the next wave of outlier founders spinning out of their organisations. They’re at the heart of their respective businesses, and have been historically overlooked for scout networks. So for the first time, we’ve brought them together to help us find new companies, before anyone else.
Helping supercharge those companies
The second thing we have to do to become the fund to help founders take on these tough-to-crack regulated opportunities, is to be fully embedded in the debate on where policy and tech collide. The three of us spend a lot of time engaging policymakers, or speaking to our founders about how to move fast through regulatory challenges - but three of us can only go so far! Form Scouts are at the very frontier of the key debates on tech policy, giving Form, and our portfolio, a direct line into those debates.
Nine months in, the impact is already clear: Form Scouts are helping us spot the next generation of outliers, while giving our portfolio a head start in the markets where policy and tech collide.
To the policy leaders reading this: if you’re as excited as we are about this intersection, we’d love to hear from you.