Ruth Foxe Blader, a Partner at Anthemis Group, discusses her international focus on investing in FinTech and InsurTech startups. She emphasizes the need for investors to see beyond founders' storytelling and communication skills, and instead evaluate their potential to execute their mission. Ruth also highlights emerging generative AI trends and her outlook on the future of financial services.
Ruth Foxe Blader, a Partner at Anthemis Group, discusses her international focus on investing in FinTech and InsurTech startups. She emphasizes the need for investors to see beyond founders' storytelling and communication skills, and instead evaluate their potential to execute their mission. Ruth also highlights emerging generative AI trends and her outlook on the future of financial services.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
[4:13] Venture capital is a game of exceptions and contrarian thinking.
[9:27] Founder's genuine obsession with their idea creates infectious passion.
[13:30] Great entrepreneurs recognize their strengths and hire accordingly to achieve their mission.
[18:31] Aggressive realism is crucial for founders and investors in the challenging venture market.
[22:47] Generative AI has the potential to bring about transformative changes eagerly awaited by the market.
The non-profit organization that Ruth is passionate about: WVC:E
About Ruth Foxe Blader
Ruth Foxe Blader is a Partner at Anthemis and thought leader in fintech and insurtech. At Anthemis, Ruth leads strategic investment efforts across Europe and North America. Ruth specializes in technology-enabled business models, insurance technology, risk transfer, early stage investing, product strategy and digital transformation.
Prior to joining Anthemis, Ruth worked for Allianz SE and was a founding member of the AllianzX team, where she led investments in startups including Lemonade, MoneyFarm, Argus Cyber Security and SimpleSurance.
About Anthemis Group
Anthemis Group is a global multi-stage investment platform that deploys human, intellectual and financial capital diversely and inclusively to affect change and build resiliency in the financial system. By creating fertile ground for a diverse group of startups, investors, entrepreneurs, institutions, academics, and visionaries to converge, Anthemis believes they can solve the financial systems’ most pressing challenges faster, better and for the benefit of all. Its portfolio companies include Elevate, Rize Ag, Project Admission, TreasurySpring, Flyby Robotics, Agreena, Flock, Kasheesh among others.
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Generative AI — obviously everybody is excited about. It, feels incredibly important as a kind of infrastructure technology, and I think that honestly, the market has been really waiting for something that feels transformational from a technology perspective because that's when really, really big businesses get made.
Gopi Rangan: You are listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur - a podcast for founders with ambitious ideas. Venture capital investors and other early believers tell you relatable, insightful, and authentic stories to help you realize your vision. Welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. My guest today is Ruth Foxe Bladder. She's a partner at Anthemis. Anthemis Group is a an active venture capital firm, and she mainly focuses on FinTech and InsurTech investments in Europe and North America.
We're gonna talk about her investments, including, hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about one of our common investments where we co-invested in a company called Joshin and many others. We'll talk to her about how she makes investment decisions, what gets her excited, what are questions that she asks founders when she meets them for the first time.
Ruth, welcome to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur.
Ruth Foxe Blader: Thank you so much for having me.
Gopi Rangan: Let's start with you. You grew up in New Jersey, but now you live in France, but you went to college a little bit in Germany as well. A very international background.
Ruth Foxe Blader: Yeah, I did. I grew up in New Jersey. I'm American. I lived mostly in New York and New Jersey.
I did also live in the Midwest. I lived in Iowa City for a couple of years and I moved to France about 15 years ago. So I have been investing across the US and Europe for my entire career as a venture investor. I definitely do have a bit of an international orientation.
Gopi Rangan: How did you get attracted to the world of investing?
Ruth Foxe Blader: It's funny, I began my career in New York in a digital agency right after the.com bust. So sort of the, the first era of the internet and of information technology, and I thought it was really exciting, but at the time, I guess what we were doing all, although it was innovative by those standards of that time, by today's standards, you know, it was really quite boring.
We were kind of making corporate websites, the first corporate websites and. Content management systems, which we would make, you know, bespoke content management systems in-house. And I was kind of digital project manager. And then I ran business development both in the US and in Europe.
As I continued my career helping large organizations digitize. I became involved with the startup community and the startup ecosystem, and I worked at PepsiCo for a while, helping brands to deploy kind of startup technology in the marketing space. And then I went to Allianz to help Allianz work with startups.
What what became really clear to me was a few things. One, the interesting stuff that was happening on the cutting edge and the really world-changing technology innovations were happening at the startup scale, not at the kind of large organization scale, and they always had been, I was a little bit less familiar with it in my early days in digital. We were doing project work, but there was this whole other community of people, of entrepreneurs who were really taking these cutting edge technologies and sort of building the future. And for me, that was just something I wanted to be a part of.
So at Allianz, I moved the organization from working with startups to investing in them, and that was based on my firm belief that what large organizations had were, were large balance sheets and large customer communities, and those were certainly things that were more valuable to startups than advice and kind of pilot projects and things like that.
Gopi Rangan: So you started your career during the.com boom time, and you helped large corporations arrive on the internet, and then you made your way into the startup world and now you're actively investing in startups. Yeah, that's right. Very interesting journey indeed. Why do you like venture capital?
Ruth Foxe Blader: I really love working with entrepreneurs. I think there's something incredibly exciting about not only thinking about what the world will look like, but helping to shape it. I always tell my team we should spend our time on projects that are worth doing, and I think, you have this really self-directed ability to do interesting work when you do the work that we do.
Gopi Rangan: Working with founders is fascinating because they're passionate and they're very ambitious. They're very aggressive. But you've been in the venture world for many years now. In addition to the normal things that we typically like about startups, what's keeping you so excited about venture capital and you chasing after every new deal and looking for these opportunities?
I'm curious to see where that firepower comes from.
Ruth Foxe Blader: I think it's partly the nature of a venture investor. You just have to be kind of relentlessly curious, and I think one of the things that fuels venture investors is the new and the opportunity to do new things. I had one of my founders say to me a couple years ago, something which was very poignant.
He said, "you know, you've got a portfolio of options, but this is my only thing and I really need it to work." And I think that that's true. If you have the dedication and the ability to launch and scale a startup, that's a really special kind of talent. And there are other people who do like to have their fingers in a bunch of different pies and who are curious and energized by shifting gears constantly and applying the learnings that you, that you gain in one industry or with one founder to another founder in another industry, talking to a lot of different people.
There's a certain aspect of what we do, which is sort of unfocused, but I think that it also gives a lot of energy to people who are sort of there for it.
Gopi Rangan: Yeah, we learn a lot from founders. They show us how the world can be, they have a vision for the future and it usually starts pretty fuzzy and unclear and then over time it they crystallize that vision.
I want to talk to you more about startups, but let's start with Anthemis. Can you give a quick description of Anthemis. What kind of investments do you focus on? What's your typical stage and other preferences you have for your investments?
Ruth Foxe Blader: Yeah, Anthemis is a multi-stage investment platform focused on positive change in financial services.
So personally at Anthemis, I look at everything from pre-seed through Series C, and I also manage our investment team. So I do quite a few different roles and, and again, have my focus in quite a few areas. But what we're really interested in are startups and, and entrepreneurs who are interested from the earliest stages of development.
We have a venture studio called the Female Innovators Lab for women entrepreneurs that are looking to work on projects related to financial services all the way through growth stage. And I guess the common thread is that we're very keen on how information technology is going to really dramatically revolutionize the financial system and hopefully for the better.
Gopi Rangan: How many companies do you invest in roughly in a year? Well,
Ruth Foxe Blader: I would say my team across two funds will do between six and 12 deals in any given calendar year, and I will be involved with all of those companies in one way or another. We also, as a house, we have 200 active portfolio companies, and we've been around for more than a decade, so it's kind of not our first rodeo.
Gopi Rangan: How long does it take for you to go from, "I met the entrepreneur. This is very interesting." to the point where you say, yeah, "I want to invest in this company."
Ruth Foxe Blader: Like everything in venture, there are no rules. So I could meet someone and get to conviction in as little as a week or two. I might know an entrepreneur for a year or more before investing in their company.
You know, sometimes it'll take, take them a whole cycle through a company and, and I'll invest in the second one. So yeah, we have such a varied experience and it's very, very difficult to really make predictions in venture capital. It's a game of exceptions, and that's what's kind of exciting about it, but it also makes it continuously challenging and difficult to really create frameworks around, unfortunately.
Gopi Rangan: It's a game of exceptions. So you're looking for outliers and contrarian thinking — something that the mainstream economy has not adopted yet. What happens in that first meeting? What do you look for? What questions do you ask founders?
Ruth Foxe Blader: First of all, although it is the type of job where you do get to do a lot of different things and you can be fairly unfocused, we're a sector focused fund. So we do have deep level of expertise in the area of investing that we do, which is financial services. And that in addition to desk research and all different kinds of research that we will do will allow us to really meet most founders with a prepared mind. We can't just sort of be flitting around meeting interesting people and giving them money, unfortunately. That would be great. But we really do try to build as much conviction on a space or a technology or an opportunity or a need as we can prior to meeting the great company. And I think that's what's really interesting; that you can have a thesis, you can have ideas about what you wanna invest in, but unless there's an absolutely amazing entrepreneur building a company in that space, you really can't do a deal. So those two things have to come together.
Typically, what I'll look for in the first meeting with a founder is someone who has a deep insight, some form of an insight and a fascination with something which has caused them to believe that they have the unique solution to a problem.
I really like founders who know their businesses well, even at the earliest stages, who have made assumptions about the types of experiments that they're going to run, the types of outcomes that they expect to have. So even if they don't have a lot of data yet they have a strong sense of what they're looking for to confirm the initial founding insight. If it's a slightly later stage company, subject matter expertise and knowledge of their own business and the space that they're working in, being present becomes even more important to me.
Gopi Rangan: Can you give an example? Can we talk about one situation? How did the conversation evolve? What happened in the first meeting and how did you develop conviction?
Ruth Foxe Blader: Oh! We can talk about all of the examples. There have been certain founders, there have been certain entrepreneurs who are just so passionately obsessed with the topic that they're working on, that their passion is really infectious and they seem kind of like evangelists, I would say more than anything.
I remember during kind of the last crypto winter, I met a woman named Ambre Soubiran in Paris, and she was and is the CEO of a crypto markets data company called Kaiko. She was working from the deep conviction that in order for crypto to be institutionalized and adopted by financial institutions, there's the prerequisite of having clean, serviceable, consistent, reliable data. And so she worked to build the pipes and the tools to connect to all the crypto exchanges that were operating the time to get that data and to provide it to financial institutions in a way that they could ingest the data and begin to explore the crypto markets and basically I think that the things that were really interesting about that initial meeting were number one, I also believe that reliable data is a prerequisite for mature market. So tick, you know, the, the kind of thesis element is there, belief in kind of data as a core component of infrastructure.
She didn't have to convince me very hard of that, but I think what I found so convincing was just her incredible passion for the work that she was doing, the incredible depth of her knowledge, the conviction of how interesting and exciting this space should be and would be and will be, and just her overall desire to sort of talk and share openly about it. And I have that experience with founders from all over the world and you know, they express their passion in different ways, but that infectious conviction and passion about a core insight is definitely something that's fundamentally important to me.
Gopi Rangan: So this company, Kaiko, checked the box on many things you typically look for in a startup, but specifically what got you excited was the passion. The founder was able to tell a story about the future and how crypto's gonna change the world and how financial systems will be different. That passion came through in those conversations. But some founders are great at telling stories. Do you ever worry that you might fall trap and start drinking the Kool-Aid and get carried away?
And what happens when founders don't have a beautiful storytelling skill and they still have a lot of substance? How do you manage the two ends of the spectrum?
Ruth Foxe Blader: Those are, I think, fantastic questions. So, there is no kind of product or service without extraordinarily good execution. And if you're investing at the earliest stages, it's possible to be seduced by a fantastic storyteller who then can't necessarily pull a team together to, in an organized manner, execute against a set of goals.
And so to the extent that we're engaging with a company, we're really trying to assess a bunch of different things. Some of them are just basic character traits that we believe make a great founder — a level of self-awareness, the ability to communicate. Certainly the storytelling ability is preeminently important. It's a part of being able to bring a team together. It's a part of being able to continuously fundraise and you know, the CEO of a startup, their job is to keep money in the bank. So that can be very serviceable. I think the CEO of a company doesn't have to do every single job in the company. They need to be able to attract a great team, but they also need to be self-aware about what they're not good at.
And they need to be able to identify skills in other people that are complimentary to them. So we're really looking for those types of signals that, not that an individual has all the skills, but that they know that they don't, and they're actively looking to attract and recruit great people into their organizations.
I think a lot about how you deal with founders that aren't the type of storyteller that captivates every audience. And I think about that because. I feel like it's really important to invest in all different kinds of people because the world is an extremely diverse place, and I think that we need to have entrepreneurs that represent the world that we're backing and not just a certain type of entrepreneur that we've gotten used to, that we tell ourselves "this is the entrepreneur that wins."
I believe that there's a lot of room at the top and that there are a lot of winners out there, and that a lot of those winners are being overlooked and some of the reasons they're being overlooked might be because of the style in which they're talking about what they're doing. So I really try to spend time with people and there's also people who are just really too slick in their storytelling and, and don't feel totally trustworthy.
So, I think if someone has the ability to communicate the genuine interest of the insight that they've had, which has caused them to want to work for 10 or 20 years on this business, then I have time for stylistic differences and, and how a story is told and how data and information is shared.
Gopi Rangan: So as long as the story is authentic, it's genuine and it connects to their life or their profession somehow, and it comes from that place where they really care and they have a mission to stay with it for many, many years, it'll come through in the narrative. They don't need to be skilled in the art of selling.
Ruth Foxe Blader: Yeah, but I think that has to intersect with a reality that I believe in, in the world too. I mean, people are passionate about all sorts of things, and as venture investor, my job is to create a point of view about the future. And so if what someone tells me can conforms to that view or picks up themes from that view of the future, it tends to resonate.
And if the story resonates, even if it isn't super polished or the person's English isn't perfect or there's something unusual about the presentation, I definitely will work to scratch the surface and understand this person's capabilities and cuz as we said before, venture is a game of outliers.
It doesn't make sense to invest in the same people who look the same and talk the same and have the same educational background and the same economic background if you wanna find outliers.
Gopi Rangan: Well, if English doesn't work, you can switch to French or German. You speak multiple languages.
Ruth Foxe Blader: I do. Yeah.
Gopi Rangan: Uh, I see the, the way you're thinking about this, there's a worldview they have that is directly connected to the founder and their mission, but it also needs to connect with some realities of how to build a business.
I guess that's what attracted you to Joshin, for example, where the founders had a direct personal experience of how to care for disabled children, and they're now focusing on that topic as their life's mission. They have the perfect combination of both passion and the realities of how to build a business.
Ruth Foxe Blader: Yeah, absolutely. Those incredibly mission-driven founders are always such a joy to invest in. So the women at Joshin, who are twin sisters, whose older brother was disabled, experienced firsthand the struggles of families that that live with disabilities. And of course, as investors, one of the things that we think about our addressable markets and when we think about one in five families in the United States, living with someone with a disability and helping to care for someone with a disability, you know, that's a very reasonable sized addressable market and also, again, a problem worth solving.
Gopi Rangan: What's your advice to founders in today's end environment? The market has changed. We are off the peak and hype of 2021 2022. It's a much slower market, much more difficult to fundraise, and it's also as an investor, much harder to find good companies. What's your advice to founders? How can they prepare themselves to meet you?
Ruth Foxe Blader: I think it's super important to be realistic. I think aggressive realism is the right approach to this type of situation.
There is an awful lot of macro factors which are difficult in venture capital. These days. We've had historic interest rate rises. We've had two bank failures. It's absolutely wild. And, and you know, just a, just a huge slowdown. I think a repricing, a general sense of price and security in the market, which is making it very difficult for investors to make deals compounded by an extremely frothy market, which was sort of building over a few years, companies really chasing valuations, which in some cases don't make a lot of sense.
Nothing's gonna stop crazy entrepreneurs from launching new ideas. And in fact, this type of market is the type of market where some of the best companies ever, and I would, I would argue all of the best companies have been launched. So I don't think that there's a reason to not pursue your dream, but I think if you're pursuing your dream and your dream comes with an attachment to a certain valuation or a certain capital trajectory of the business, which would be heavily reliant on an extremely frothy market — the Fed printing a trillion dollars every couple months — I'd say that just isn't realistic right now.
Gopi Rangan: What are you doing differently compared to a year ago, two years ago?
Ruth Foxe Blader: Not much, honestly. We're still deploying capital. We're still looking for great entrepreneurs that are tackling hard problems.
We have the luxury of having a bit more time to do due diligence. I think that was the thing that really suffered the most over the five-year period leading up to 2021 was just the pace of deals. The deal velocity was a bit unhealthy and it was really difficult, I think both for founders and for investors to identify if the fit was gonna be right.
I strongly believe that having the right investors on your cap table makes a big difference to entrepreneurs. I think most entrepreneurs derive. You know, some level of emotional support from their investors. And you know, this is gonna be a personal relationship and I think it's very important to assess that fit in addition to knowledge and subject matter expertise and network, and all the things that can be quite complimentary.
But you know, for us, we're still really excited about the opportunities out there. Probably more excited than ever than we have been in years to deploy capital, because it's just a better environment for getting reasonable prices. So, not much has changed at Anthemis.
Gopi Rangan: In this market, it becomes more important to have high quality investors on the cap table. They understand the ups and downs of the market. They don't unfairly negotiate and hurt the company. They are very supportive of founders, especially when they go through these ups and downs emotionally. And those tourist investors don't typically stay for the long term. Having them on the cap table can be a huge negative for companies in today's environment.
I'm watching to see who I'm investing with along with, I don't need to look for signals for confirmation that why I form a conviction. But I do look for who else is on a cap table who can potentially screw up the company by being a bad actor and that I have seen more often in this market.
Ruth Foxe Blader: Yeah, I guess as all the old sayings will tell you, this is the type of environment where you know who your friends are and I have a lot of empathy for everyone involved.
I think really rapid shifts and volatility can be tough to deal with. I personally find these kinds of environments exciting. I think it's when interesting things happen and sometimes you need a little friction to create sparks. So I find it exciting. But I agree; this can be the type of environment where either by choice or by dent of market realities, the kind of capital structure that an entrepreneur thought they had to fall back on doesn't exist. And for founders who have been accustomed to a very plentiful capital environment, this is gonna be a really big adjustment.
Gopi Rangan: You mentioned that you're actively deploying. From that perspective, not much has changed although there are some macro trends and macro changes like Fed printing money, those kind of things are worrying.
What are specific themes within FinTech and in InsurTech you are excited about?
Ruth Foxe Blader: So there's a bunch of different stuff, actually. Like I said earlier, I'm most excited about entrepreneurs and so my kind of conviction is very much founder-led. But the themes that I've been thinking about a lot lately broadly are environmental themes of electrification.
I'm wondering what role startups, and specifically financial services startups, are going to play in the broader trend towards electrification? Both in the kind of mobility space, but also kind of the micro infrastructure of homes and businesses. I've made one investment in that space in the UK, a company called Home Tree. I think it's really interesting and I'd love to see a little bit more, cuz that does feel like a pretty big generational transformation.
I think generative AI, obviously everybody is excited about, it, feels incredibly important as a kind of infrastructure technology, and I think that honestly the market has been really waiting for something that feels transformational from a technology perspective, because that's when really, really big businesses get made.
For me, it's at this point, unclear if the majority of the value there is going to accrue to the large players. But I think that there is work to be done in the financial services space around generative AI and model assurance, compliance, regulatory understanding of how these models work and function; and then in insurance and I guess lending as well, kind of underwriting. Seeing how also a lot of the kind of Chat GPT craze is impacting operational costs in the companies that I'm already working with, and just how quickly those experiments are being deployed and institutionalized is also super exciting.
Gopi Rangan: I see that you have a broad set of interests, starting with mobility to generative AI to other aspects of FinTech. Here's a philosophical question: if I were to give you a chance to change something about venture capital; something that is broken that you could fix. What is wrong with venture capital today that needs to change? What would you like to fix?
I would love to see LPs truly allocating to more managers, and sort of as I said, I think that there's a representation challenge in terms of the world population and, and certainly customer bases, you know, being represented amongst venture investors. I think that most venture investors still have pretty similar backgrounds from a class and education perspective, and I would really love to see the people who are putting money into venture capital thinking about ways to broaden the horizons and not just because I think that would be nice, but also because I think that we would see a lot of really interesting solutions to hard problems.
Ruth Foxe Blader: I think we just need more diversity. We need people from different backgrounds working on the toughest problems on our planet, and they're numerous. I work with one of my coworkers and with whom I founded an organization called WVC:E which looks to promote diversity and inclusivity in venture and specifically focuses on women investors, founders, LPs, and women working in tech.
So that's been really fun and really energizing. We we're really looking to help bring different people from different backgrounds to the party and sort of see what new and interesting stuff can happen.
Gopi Rangan: The lack of diversity is indeed a problem within in the industry, which is not just nice to have, but we are not able to target the right kind of problems, support the right kind of founders, they are underrepresented and underfunded. I hope more diversity we'll solve that problem.
I usually ask my guests about community involvement, a nonprofit organization that they're passionate about. You already mentioned WVC:E. Maybe we could talk about that. What is WVC:E ? What does it do, and what are you passionate about?
Ruth Foxe Blader: Yeah, WVC:E is something that my colleague Sophie Winwood and I founded last year. It started as an annual summit, which we held in Paris, and it was really based on the feeling that there was a lot of interesting stuff going on in the United States to bring female investors together and women who are involved in venture capital together, but not enough going on in Europe.
And so we thought, you know what? We'll just put together like an event. It'll be really cool, which was a totally insane idea. And off the side of our desk, we brought together 350 women in Paris Station F, which is a really cool event space. And we had the objective to do the best venture capital event in the world.
We really wanted it to be content led. There was content for GPs, LPs, women in venture, investors and women who worked in tech. And it was just awesome. It was just a really great day of exchange, networking and learning and content. And so off the back of that, we decided really that the feedback was so strong that the industry really has a continued need.
And so we do almost monthly side events, either virtual or in person around different conferences and in different locations. We've made it much more international. It was largely European the first year, although we did have some participants from the US and Africa. And we will have the the second WVC:E annual summit in Paris, again, October 2nd and third. And I would love for you to join on October 3rd, which is a female founder showcase day, where we'll be also hosting and inviting male investors too. And that was one of the things that we really responded to from the community. I think it was a wonderful experience for women working in venture to really be able to exchange with one another.
But there's also the feeling that we're all in this together, and it's important to bring everybody into the fold.
Gopi Rangan: Thank you for the invitation. I'd love to join. Now, Europe has lagged behind in the startup world and the venture capital world. Although strangely, the father of venture capital is a European George Dorio, and yet Europe is still catching up.
I'm glad to see that WVC:E and other events like this have really energized the ecosystem in Europe.
Ruth, thank you so much for spending time with me. Thanks for sharing your personal nuggets of wisdom and specific examples from your experiences. I look forward to sharing your stories with the world.
Ruth Foxe Blader: Thank you so much. Wonderful to see you.
Gopi Rangan: Thank you for listening to The Sure Shot Entrepreneur. I hope you enjoyed listening to real-life stories about early believers supporting ambitious entrepreneurs. Please subscribe to the podcast and post a review. Your comments will help other entrepreneurs find this podcast.
I look forward to catching you at the next episode.