I know some of you will have already received a mail from us this week - apologies for doubling up but I hope you’ll find it valuable.

We’re moving platforms and will be providing more value and insight to the people that matter - you, our listeners, readers and followers.

Everything always comes full circle.

Some of you may know that I launched a venture a couple of years ago.

I raised a few hundred k pre-seed at the peak of market hubris back in early 2021 and set off to revolutionise how CFOs operated in startups and SMEs.

I was going to change the world.

Instead, 2 years on and 2 products in, I hadn’t been able to get the traction I needed (despite great feedback on the product) to raise enough to keep my team employed and the business going at pace.

So I stopped. And decided to bootstrap instead.

I’ll write about that whole journey in more detail one of these days, but for now, let’s just treat that as the on ramp to where I am now.

Because one of the major realisations I had whilst building was that the main role of the CFO wasn’t about the numbers themselves, but rather how they communicated not only the numbers, but also the business’ story to others - both internally and externally.

It’s what I have spent my life doing, from my passion for languages, to learning how to present a company through its accounts to leading teams and ultimately building my own fractional CFO consultancy supporting venture backed tech startups from Seed to Series B, finally culminating in Nothing Ventured - the podcast and now newsletter exploring the people, voices and stories that make up the venture ecosystem.

And that’s what I aim to do in this weekly newsletter share the stories and insights that will help you navigate the startup ecosystem better whether you’re a CFO, VC, founder or just someone interested in what’s going on in venture.

Because that’s what I love doing, sharing knowledge and helping turn numbers into narrative.

So, with that said, let’s get right to it.

In conversation with Daniel Glazer - Managing Partner of the London Office of WSGR

On this week’s pod, I interviewed Daniel Glazer who heads up the London office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR), a law firm focussed on technology, life sciences and scaling businesses in the US and beyond.

I first met Daniel back sometime in 2017 or 2018 in WSGR’s offices in London’s Old Street and was struck at the time by how down to earth he was and more importantly, how giving he was of his time.

The offices bear witness to some of WSGR’s incredible successes - one of which Daniel mentioned on the podcast, the fact that the law firm had been responsible for incorporating Google when it was still operating out of a garage taking them all the way through to IPO some 6 years later.

(Side note, that may have been the norm back in the early noughties, but time to IPO has changed a fair amount, to see individual and median exit timeframes check out this article by Sammy Abdullah from Blossom Street Ventures).