Hugh Campbell, Founding Partner at GP Bullhound, on preparing your company for an exit

In this episode, Seedcamp Partner Carlos was joined by Hugh Campbell from GP Bullhound. The conversation begins with Hugh explaining his time at Oxford where he studied "Physiology, psychology and philosophy". They then proceed into speaking about his work experience with City Bank and Goldman Sachs before his 3 co-founders decided to take the lessons learned in investment banking to create GP Bullhound. Since it's inception the company has now expanded outside London to new locations like Manchester, Germany and France to be closer to great tech companies because these come from all over Europe.

Speaking about the challenges of fundraising Hugh shares that in his view today's biggest challenge for founders in the UK is not to raise £1M early stage round given the existing tax benefits but it's much harder for businesses that are at 10 or 15 people and want to grow to 100 and need a larger round. He then proceeds to share his tips on fundraising and give examples on how to build better relationships with investors while explaining how trust plays a big part of an M&A deal. Regarding exits they discuss the rise of private equity firms in the purchasing of tech busiensses and how those are different from traditional large acquirers like Google, Microsoft or Facebook.

During the podcast Hugh and Carlos also approach the state of enterprise software market especially regarding exit options. They then proceed speaking about the evolution of the European investor and tech scene during the last decade focusing in the IPO scene and how it is improving in Europe with IPOs like Auto Trader, Boohoo, Zalando and Rocket Internet. These have been impacting the entire European landscape including the German technology market fuelling it's incredibly fast growth - especially in Berlin all of which despite not having the tax brakes in the UK.

Finally they discuss the expansion strategies for UK based companies and Hugh shares his favourite book for young entrepreneurs so that they can evaluate if their idea is any good at an early stage.

Show notes from the episode:
Carlos Website: http://www.carlosespinal.com
Seedcamp: http://www.seedcamp.com
GP Bullhound: http://www.gpbullhound.com/

Related bio links:
Carlos: uk.linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal / @twitter.com/cee
Hugh: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/hucampbell / https://twitter.com/hugh_gpb