Frederic Court

About

Last month, at the same time that the London-based venture firm Felix Capital was announcing that it has closed its fourth and newest fund with $600 million in capital commitments, we had a separate chat with Felix’s founder, Frederic Court, about how competition in Europe has changed, given that so many U.S. venture firms have opened offices on the continent, including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and General Catalyst. [...] I’ve got no doubt that many people on our team are getting calls. We talk quite openly about it. Candidly, the hardest thing about running a venture firm is team building. [But] we have a certain way of doing things; we are very much a culture of “we” versus “I”. We have a few great people who came and joined our firm, then moved on with great success, but the people who stayed and the people who joined more recently are very much attracted by this team culture. We pick our battles together, we win them together and we lose them together. And that’s very much a culture that I wanted from the very beginning. Even our fundraising is done in a very open way, with the list of all our investors available to the [entire] team. We don’t feel that we need to be secretive there. [...] Unsurprisingly, Court said the expanded array of options is great for founders. He also told us that most European investors would prefer to stick with European firms or start their own shops where they can have more influence. We thought