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How Do Business Angels Think About 'Team?' Unique Insights From Super Angel Jonathan Milner

This article is more than 9 years old.

“Team, team and team” you expect to hear if you ask most Business Angels for the top three things that matter when investing. None more than Dr. Jonathan Milner; PhD, angel investor, founder and CEO of AIM company of the year Abcam, ‘Most outstanding contribution to the Mediscience industry’ award winner and one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the UK; In this interview you will gain a unique insight to how Business Angels think about the team. I mean really think about the team.

Jonathan may be one of the UK’s most low-key Business Angels - if you Google ‘Jonathan Milner’ you will find little more than his background as part of Abcam’s senior management team page - but as a fervent member of the respected and exclusive ‘Cambridge Angels’ group, Jonathan is also one of the UK’s most prolific angel investors.

Super Angel Jonathan Milner

Jonathan has built an impressive portfolio; he has invested over £11 million into 31 different companies, seen four successful exits (Horizon Discovery, Frontier Developments, Curidium and Phonetic Arts) which have covered the entire portfolio plus 60% return and Jonathan still has 24 companies still going including Oval Medical Technologies currently listed on SyndicateRoom . While Jonathan has also had three failures he says it is exactly because he has built his investment portfolio to expect both the successes and the inevitable failures that his returns so far have more than covered his entire angel investment portfolio.

Turning to Jonathan’s personal motivation, it is clear he is a passionate business angel. Jonathan says he became a business angel because “it’s fun”  and because he loves “the thrill of being part of a startup that can change the world.” As expected it is clear Jonathan also values ‘the team’ above all else - saying it is “without a doubt” the most important thing when deciding whether to invest. He explains the team is the driving force to success and that a top performing team will “figure out a way of making things work” expecting them to be able to “walk through walls to get it done.” So, has Jonathan’s faith in putting the team first helped lead him to such success? Talking to him further, it certainly looks like it.

We discussed one of Jonathan’s notable success stories, Horizon Discovery, a biotech company that provides tools and services to support research into personal medicine. Horizon Discovery recently shot to IPO fame by successfully listing on AIM in March of this year, securing £68.6 million.

Jonathan makes it clear that Horizon Discovery co-founder, Chris Torrance, was key to his decision to invest in the company. In fact, Jonathan is explicit that he invested because Chris was “very knowledgeable yet humble” and Jonathan had a “strong belief [Chris] could do it”. Jonathan was also impressed by Chris’ wider ambition and personal humility - Chris was willing to step down as CEO - making way for Darrin Disley, of whom Jonathan also greatly approved, to focus on growing the business commercially. As Darrin has successfully lead the company to IPO, these are decisions that, for all, hindsight appears to have validated.

Conversely, a bad team can be a company’s undoing. While Jonathan admits “ life is too short to invest in people you don’t enjoy working with, ” for a business angel the importance of getting the team right goes beyond working enjoyment to tangibly impacting success, too. So much so, when asked what his ‘recipe for disaster’ is, Jonathan replied from experience: that the times he lost money was when he “invested against [his] instincts about the team.” So, not only is a great team the key to success but a bad team could mark a path to ruin.

Jonathan is clearly passionate about young businesses beyond their commercial worth. For instance, when he talks about working with Horizon Discovery, it is clear Jonathan has a real relationship with both the founders and the company itself. He explains that the reason he became a Non-Executive Director for Horizon Discovery was so that he could “stick up for the executive team and founders”. As a business angel the ultimate goal is for the team and company to succeed and from there the financial returns will follow. Jonathan believes this is the converse to the aims of Venture Capitalists, who Jonathan laments are driven instead by money and their own returns, with the company and its founders’ success being irrelevant.

A piece of advice

If pitching isn’t intimidating enough, after reading this account any budding entrepreneur may be even more fearful about how they come across during a pitch, but Jonathan offers some words of comfort. First, he reassures that “any good business angel will see through the nervousness” but advises that a good tactic is to follow up with an angel after a business pitch, taking initiative to try and meet again in a less stressful setting. Jonathan is also certainly looking for team players - avoiding big egos and founders that are either unable or unwilling (for fear of usurpation) to attract top talent - so if you are putting the success of your company first, then you are laying solid foundations.

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