Julie Meyer is one of the leading champions for entrepreneurship in Europe. With over 20 years investment and advisory experience helping start-up businesses, she is the founder and CEO of Ariadne Capital, founder of Entrepreneur Country, co-founder of First Tuesday, dragon on BBC’s Online Dragons’ Den and weekly columnist in London’s City A.M.
Through these intertwining roles of entrepreneur, advisor, investor and industry commentator, Julie has set her mission to build a growth story for the UK and Europe. This passion and entrepreneurial flair has earned her awards as Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, World Economic Forum Global Leader of Tomorrow and a place in the Wall Street Journal’s Top 30 Most Influential Women in Europe.
An American by birth and a European in spirit, Julie went to Paris in September 1988 and has been working with technology business leaders and entrepreneurs ever since. She moved to London in July 1998.
From 1998 to 1999, Julie was part of the team at NewMedia Investors, which became early stage investment firm SPARK Ventures in October 1999.
During this time she took her first steps in the entrepreneurial arena founding First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs, which many credit for igniting the Internet generation in Europe. It was sold for $50million in cash and shares to an Israeli company in July 2000.
At its heyday, 500,000 entrepreneurs were meeting on the first Tuesday of the month as well as online.
One of the lessons she learned from First Tuesday was that many entrepreneurs wanted to bypass venture capitalists. Often, the most attractive investors were other, successful entrepreneurs.
So in 2000 she founded Ariadne Capital as a way to pool the capital and experience of successful entrepreneurs who want to help the next generation of start-ups.
Fifty entrepreneurs have backed the company. They invest capital, time and their networks. Ariadne’s key sectors include digital media and entertainment, as well as software and life services such as finance, e-health and digital homes.
Julie told WorkLife where her inspiration to start in business came from:
“My father’s a doctor. He went to California and he became the first lung specialist, and actually he was an entrepreneur.
“He set up his own pulmonary practice in California in 1966 and I grew up not realising my dad was an entrepreneur because I thought my dad was a doctor. And it was a bumpy ride. I grew up where what normal was ‘bumpy ride’ and that was ok.”
THINK BIG...
Julie recently launched Entrepreneur Country, a networking and events business, with the tagline ‘where breakthrough moments triumph over near-death experiences’. The motto expresses the entrepreneurial journey.
“You have to persist against all odds” she says. “That’s what success is - it’s when people persist when normal rational people would just give up.”
Julie explains: “When you go to Entrepreneur Country you have to start with the belief that we have the power within to build the world anew.
“The second thing you have to do is believe Jerry Garcia: ‘You do not merely want to be the best of the best, you want to be considered the only one to do what you do.’ That should be the mantra of every entrepreneur out there.
“I know when I set up Ariadne Capital I didn’t say, ‘Hmm, let’s see... I might just set up another VC firm and see what happens.’ I said, ‘I am going to redefine the financing of entrepreneurship in Europe.’”
Julie has enormous skill in spotting promising new ventures at an early stage. She was one of the early advisors in the internet telephone service Skype. She saw potential in Espotting Media, which launched pay-per-click internet advertising 10 years ago. She regrets that the firm didn’t have enough money to capitalise on its potential and the advantage it had was lost to companies like Google.
Ariadne sees about 80 entrepreneurs a month. Sometimes Julie sees smart people who can analyse forever but are paralysed when faced with incomplete information. She explains that she can tell quickly whether an entrepreneur would be successful.
“They think big. They never lose their ambition to create a category-defining firm. They are inviting you to a journey that they are going to make, whether or not you participate.”
Ariadne has invested in a number of promising ventures at an early stage, such as SpinVox, which turns spoken messages into text that can be emailed or sent as an SMS message to a mobile phone. Busy people can then quickly scan a page of text instead of spending hours wading through voicemail.
“SpinVox had massive ambition. Sometimes the only time I could sit down with the chief executive, who had to travel almost constantly, was on Sunday mornings - and I’d find 60 people working in SpinVox’s offices then. That impressed me.”
However, to be a successful technology entrepreneur is to recognise that technology is, in many ways, secondary.
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