Article
Growing up
By the age of 14, I’d lived in Kenya, Nigeria, UK, Thailand and Australia, and commuted back and forth between Melbourne and school in Oxford, UK six times a year as an unaccompanied minor. Rapid, unpredictable change amongst a wide range of cultures was and still remains relatively ‘normal’ to me.
Experience
My first experience of entrepreneurship was ironically within the UK’s largest gas company (previously state owned), where I became a senior part of a new internal startup tasked with selling over $1bn of property in a managed fashion. Whilst not majorly creative, it taught me the importance of focus, speed, clarity, proactivity and teamwork, many of the values that live within Frog today.My 13 years at 3i gave me not only a track record but experience of all stages of private equity, from start-up’s to mature, profit-making buyouts. It was here that I saw the opportunity in growth equity, specially in software, and how I came to launch Frog Capital.
At Frog Capital
Scaling innovative organisations from 50 to up and beyond 500 people is seriously hard. I passionately believe senior scale-up leaders need and deserve excellent, proactive and professional growth investors through this phase. Many market it, few do it well. We’ve designed Frog, bottom up, to be the best partner a team could choose.Like a scale-up, we are continuously tweaking and improving.
Positive Growth
The biggest change we have made recently, and the one I am most proud of, is to focus only on companies that have a clear net positive impact on society. These are commercial companies but ones where everyone involved just knows that the business is doing good work. Some call it ‘purpose-led’. For us it’s Positive Growth Equity.