We’ve got a broad background as a diverse team at magicsauce.online.
I’ve (Kris) directly helped startups raise over £60m to date, I’ve been US Chief of Sales and took a company from 30k to 130k subscribers there as part of the Senior Leadership Team. They went on to exit for c£100m while I was there. I’m a serial mentor for the likes of Black Valley, Raise Ventures and Carbon 13. I’m also Head of Founder Education at Diversity-X.
Anji (my co-founder and partner) is the operational brain and has played a part in helping those companies raise £60m+. She’s got over 20 years of operational experience across a range of industries and provides rigour to our processes and decision making.
We have two daughters (and don’t want them coming into the world we’re in) and had grown utterly fed up of the lack of funding to under-represented founders and started to coalesce ideas around how tech, communities and purpose-led accelerators could lead the change to more equality of opportunity in funding startups led by the global majority. They’re criminally underfunded as a ratio of total founders given that diverse teams consistently outperform all male, white teams. We’re not just looking to built a platform that enables underestimated founders to find investment. We’re looking to coalesce partners globally to fund the 95% of founders who don’t have access to the capital ringfenced by around 5% of the global population. There’s a parallel way where the 95% can largely be funded by the 95% and we want to be at the forefront of that. We see Magic Sauce Online as an AngelList for the rest of the world with subscription free access in emerging nations and profitability though quality applications driving performance led revenues for us as an outcome of better outcomes for underestimated founders.
Magicsauce.online assesses, educates and then matches founders to investors. There’s a set of learning modules of over 70+ hours of learning on both sides for Founders and new Angels
We hit some hiccups.
We built out our own version 1 of the platform that earned revenues and proved concept. We then embarked on version 2 last year. Our software engineer left us in the lurch when we launched our beta to our waiting list of 250 founders & investors. We then had to hire a team from scratch and we’re delighted with the new team that’s joined us.
Our Lead Developer Anhar has over 15+ years of delivering enterprise class solutions as an architect and engineer for blue chip companies and an incubator/venture studio. A polyglot polymath, he’s ideally placed to ensure our platform avoids bias in its’ matching.
Naily (CPO, the ‘Mary Poppins of Startups’) is a recovering software engineer and has helped countless startups and scale up founders (non-technical mainly) to be able to articulate their vision to, manage and grow their tech teams effectively.
Felix is a new addition to the team who’s building out the front end of the new platform. As a new graduate, he was attracted to helping us because of the mission alignment to get more underestimated founders funded globally.
We also have a friend helping out on the design & branding front who’s got sterling expertise, has run their own agency, and has worked for one of the foremost brand agencies globally.
We’ve built partnerships with carefully chosen organisations that are interested in changing the status quo like Vestd, Diversity-X, Colorintech, Raise Ventures, Black Valley, The MIgrant Accelerator , Venturing Women, and many more. We also support various communities that have tens of thousands of members globally with a ‘give first’ approach.
One of our free resources (a Hack Pack for ideation stage underestimated founders) found its’ way into 5 continents last year, we’ve run free deck reviews for underestimated founders and various ad-hoc masterclasses, and made our learning resources available to accelerators, communities and incubators supporting under-represented founders.
