The Super Angel Podcast
00:00:02 · Anthony, S1
[00:00:02] S0: Is this a dream? [00:00:03] S1: No. It's not a dream. I'm an angel. [00:00:06] S0: Why would God send me an angel?
00:00:08 · S1
[00:00:08] S1: Because God knows that everyone needs a little coaching now Hi, and welcome there. To the Super Angel Podcast, the go to podcast for angels backing the next generation of European unicorn founders. If you love our show, do drop us a review, share it with your friends, and join our community eu. Bc Today we're happy to welcome Pranav, currently EMEA General Manager at Airwallex, a $5,500,000,000 global payments and financial platform for modern businesses. Prior to joining Airwallex, Pranav spent five years at UK fintech GoCardless in a variety of roles including strategy, international expansion, and running the global SME business. Since starting angel investing in 2021, Pranav has invested in around 25 primarily b to b fintech and SaaS businesses and as an LP in one fund. If you're an angel listening in and wanting to get closer to the European angel scene, do not hesitate to reach out to us. We'd love to connect and see how we can play together. And now some words from our beloved sponsors. Verbarn from Carta is the easiest way to launch and run your Synthroid. Verbarn's end to end platform automates your back office so you can focus on what matters, supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs and building your network. Angel investors are the fuel to innovation, and they've created the Atom SPV to allow for more deals, more ownership, and less fees. Backed by Carter, the leading fintech infrastructure company, Verbant will be with you all from fundraising to exit. Investors on the Verbant platform have raised over $2,500,000,000 in global investments for companies including Revolut, Vault, and SpaceX. If you'd like to learn more, please check out www.vauban.io/euvc. Loving the podcast? Don't miss out on our meetups bringing the EUVC and Super Angel community together. Off of the high of the gargle blasters from our London event, kindly supported by SVB UK, Vauban, and Isomacapital, and more events are coming. So make sure to subscribe on eu.vce. To stay in the loop for future mind blowing events.
00:02:54 · S2, Pranav Sood, Anthony
[00:02:54] S2: Prada, Welcome to the Super Angel podcast. We're so excited to have [00:02:58] S3: you with us. Thank you very much for having me. I am equally excited to be here. Thanks for joining the pod, Pranav. I'm really excited to have you on [00:03:05] S0: the show as I think you're one of the most thoughtful operators I know. So do you wanna start by sharing a bit your story to the listeners and also what got you into angel investing?
00:03:13 · Pranav Sood
[00:03:13] S3: Yeah. 100%. So my name is Pranav. I currently run Airwallex's EMEA business. Airwallex is a fintech platform for global businesses. So we help businesses of all sizes to collect, convert, hold, and and send money around the world. We're a pretty reasonable sized company, a couple of $100,000,000 of ARR valued about $5,500,000,000, but relatively more recent in the EMEA region. So the business came out of out of Asia. I've been here since April of last year. Prior to this, I was also in fintech, another business called GoCardless. I spent nearly five years there doing a whole bunch of different stuff, strategy, international. And then the last two and a half years, I ran our our SME business around the world. And, actually, it was that GoCardless experience which got me into angel investing because I was very, very, very fortunate to be able to spend time with and learn from two guys who I think are one of... Used to be at least one of a couple of the most active angels in Europe, one being Matt Robinson and the other one being Carlos Gonzalez Callanas, who's now obviously a partner at Index. And so those guys got into Angel probably 2019 or so. I spent decent amount of time with them. I talked to Carlos and Matt a bunch about what they had seen, what they'd done. And I thought, well, I don't have the same amount of liquidity as these guys, but I can at least have a go and and see if I can learn some of the same things that they are. And so that was really how I decided to make my first step in. And subsequently, I think the GoCardless crew has also been quite active as as angel investors. So people like Erez as well, also out there, and Hiroki does a bit here and there as well. But I guess for me, the thing that I I realized was unlike a Carlos or a Matt or a Hiroki, I'm still quite early in my career as an operator. And so for them, I think they can get into almost any deal that they want because they are very well known. They've got now huge portfolios. Ultimately, they... They're the kinds of people who have the value of the network effect. And so for me, I thought that doesn't yet apply to me. I'm still not at that stage in my career. So what else can I do to try and get my foot in the door here and and start building deal flow?
00:05:16 · Pranav Sood, S2
And, yeah, that kind of brings me to where I am today and and maybe the approach that I follow, and and perhaps we'll talk about that as we go [00:05:23] S2: through the conversation. I just wanted to touch on something you said there, which was I didn't have the liquidity like these guys. If you'd be open to just, you know, I'd love to hear how you thought about your portfolio setup and everything when having to consider, wait a second, I don't have huge liquidity at this time. So how do I get started in this?
00:05:44 · Pranav Sood, Anthony
[00:05:44] S3: The way that I thought about it was to say, want to get to a certain number of investments in my portfolio because I think at that number, it starts to make sense from a returns perspective. And using that number and also a view of how much of my total investable assets I was happy to allocate to Angel as an asset class, you can then back solve into what the right ticket size is to start with. For me, I think the number is I want to have, you know, 50 plus, you know, 50 to 100 investments. And obviously, have my own view of how much money I have in general. And that then allows me to then back solve into how much of a ticket should I start to write. And I think, you know, one of the things that I'm really glad to have had the advice to do is not to start by investing big checks, you know, here, there, and everywhere, which I've I've seen some others maybe start with and rather start the opposite end of the spectrum, which is write smaller checks maybe than you ultimately could afford to, but then give yourself the optionality to increase ticket size as you get more proficient, you get better deal flow, and, hopefully, also, you get the opportunity to invest in in more and more attractive deals. [00:06:48] S0: You know, having now done... And you'll tell us how much and and all of that, like, do you wanna share maybe with the audience a few memorable deals or one that's close