OK, so no grant this time… :-(

I’m disappointed to have missed out this time round, of course: but a Tech City grant was always going to be a bit of a long shot for a Surbiton-based non-social-media startup. Some of the TSB’s anonymous judges clearly liked my whole “Soft Factory” pitch: but given that the point of the competition was to fund loss-making collaborative Tech City projects rather than Tech City companies, perhaps I did ultimately end up veering too far towards the latter (certainly, one of the judges felt compelled to reiterate this point several times). And being in a consortium of one probably didn’t help either. Oh well. 😦

Still, I’ll be doing my 2-minute thing at the TSB’s investor day this Wednesday (please feel free to say hello!) in the 3.55pm-to-4.25pm Pitch Session #5 (AKA the mid-afternoon graveyard shift). Given the homeopathically low amount of interest that UK angels tend to have in manufacturing and the brutal-but-unavoidable fact that angels are mainly there to sniff around the 18 grantees, my expectations for positive funding outcomes from the day are perhaps even lower than the normal ankle-highness. All the same, it’s always nice both to catch up with people you already know and to meet new people. For example (going through the list of attendees), Twickenham-based Wren Capital looks interesting, as does MMC Ventures: and perhaps I should be cultivating more of a relationship with NESTA Investments. Anyone else there I should be talking with?

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