I
f you were looking for a list of the best VCs in Europe, Saul Klein would be at the top of the pile. A partner at Index Ventures London Offices, Saul has invested in the likes of Skype, TweetDeck and Betfair, as well as sat on the boards of success stories such as Codecademy, MyHeritage and Songkick.
Arguably an entrepreneur first and investor second, Saul has over 15 years of experience building and exiting companies across the world. He was the co- founder and original CEO of what is now LoveFilm, as well as being a top executive at Skype before being sold to eBay for $3.1billion. More recent projects include co-founding Seedcamp out of a need to find and fund the next generation of tech start-ups across Europe, as well as OpenCoffee Club, now active in over 90 cities across the world.
Speaking on the wake of announcing Saul as a speaker at the entrepreneurcountry Forum on 30th September, I ask him to share where his entrepreneurial journey began, how he moved onto venture capital, and what he has learnt along the way. We start with his upbringing and what inspired his later entrepreneurial career path, with Saul sharing some of his early influences. “My mother worked in education, my dad was an entrepreneur and my grandparents were either entrepreneurs or engineers, so growing up I had the pick of three careers” says Saul. “I think my dad was perhaps the biggest influence on me – he was always running businesses but other than a couple of weeks a year at trade shows he took my sister and I to school every morning and was home for dinner every night. It taught me that work/ life balance is important.” Deciding early on that technology and entrepreneurship were of interest, Saul received his first big break at The Telegraph. Based in Canary Wharf in the early nineties, Klein joined a team of three and was assigned the mammoth task of putting the newspaper online.
“The Telegraph has always been a very old fashioned British newspaper and to date it loses around half a million readers a year to death, and yet it was the first major newspaper to go online. We worked on the digital strategy with then editor Ben Rooney, who now runs tech coverage for Wall Street Journal. It was a great training ground in embracing technology and the capabilities of the internet for the first time.”
Klein’s second big break came after reading an article in Wired, then “a weird San Francisco tech magazine” which had just been released in the UK. “The article was on Jim Clark, who had started a company with Marc Andreessen out of the University of Illinois called Mosaic Communications, which went on to be called Netscape. The team and I
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