A few weeks ago I sat down with Sarah Drinkwater, founder of Common Magic.
Sarah came to venture from the outside. Journalist, club night runner, vintage clothing shop owner, operator, angel. Her journey looks nothing like a straight line. As you often find, that’s kind of the point.
Her fund, Common Magic, backs products with community at their core, building on her experience creating products with community at their core, from music nights to Google Maps.
There are a few things she said that resonated strongly for me:
Companies don’t usually die because they run out of money. They die because emotional capital runs out first. Co-founder misalignment, a loss of belief, or something else that’s a drain on vibes. Across 68 investments, Sarah said the pattern is consistent. What I took away from this is something you hear frequently, which is that true passion and a deep “why” behind what you are building are vitally important. I think this is especially valuable to bear in mind if you are investing in the “current thing” during the peak of a hype cycle. The “current thing” attracts tourists, who aren’t always building for the right reasons. When the going gets tough, the energy reserves necessary to keep pushing deplete rapidly unless the belief and core values in the founding team are strong and consistent.
Somewhat related to (1): the hardest problems in building a company are social, not technical / rational. Organisations are just groups of people. They make decisions emotionally, they are subject to politics. This touches every aspect of entrepreneurship.
Product: especially when you can vibe-code things rapidly, building a deep understanding of the human behaviours and needs for whatever you have in mind is vital. It’s about understanding how people think, and what they want - even if that’s different to what they’re telling you.
Sales: if the champion loves the product but the buyer isn’t there yet, you’re not going to sell anything.
People: if the team are running on fumes, underpaid and overworked (as is always the case in startups), but absolutely aligned on where they’re going, you can achieve a remarkable amount. If they’re well paid, not stretched, but misaligned, you can achieve remarkably little. As Elon puts it, the outcome of any given company is the vector sum of the people within it.
Every investment is a vote for the world you want to see.
This is something we really believe strongly at Odin, and is the reason we decided to build this company. More people should be voting with their money on the world they want. For Sarah, this shapes everything from how she sources to how she runs LP coffees and how she thinks about her portfolio’s go-to-market.
We also got into the state of the European venture ecosystem and what she’d tell someone thinking about raising their first fund right now.
Hope you enjoy it!
PR
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