Tom Wilson

🚀 Big news from FirstPartyCapital Today we are proud to announce the launch of FirstPartyFinance, our new solution to help founders access the flexible, non-dilutive capital they need to scale. For too long, innovation in our sector has been held back by slow payment terms and a lack of understanding by traditional financial institutions. FirstPartyFinance aims to change that by connecting ad tech and digital media companies with debt solutions that increase cash flow, fuel growth, and allow founders to maintain more control and ownership of their companies. This marks the third pillar of our support model for adtech businesses: • FirstPartyCapital: direct investment in high-growth companies • FirstPartyStudio: strategic incubation and operational support • FirstPartyFinance: debt financing Delighted to be working with my former FastPay colleague, James Ryall, to launch this new business unit! FirstPartyFinance will serve companies both inside and outside the FPC equity portfolio, and seeks to provide global coverage including the US, UK, Europe, APAC, and Brazil. The goal is simple: Adtech vendors and publishers the liquidity they need to compete and innovate at a time of huge change in the industry. 👉 If you are building in adtech or digital media and want to explore how this can support your growth, we’d love to talk. #AdTech #VC #Innovation #FirstPartyFinance #FirstPartyCapital #FirstPartyStudio #lending #debtfinance

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Everyone’s talking about the tariff crisis and its impacts, but there are still just a handful of people talking about its impacts on early stage startups and their investors, so I’m sharing our experience at Rockies Venture Club. We're already seeing some challenges that are quite significant for some of our portfolio companies and in time we may see more. One portfolio company just moved its manufacturing to Toronto in late 2024 and shipping product back to the U.S. in a price sensitive market is a challenge.  They’re working on moving some production back to the U.S., but this never moves as quickly as you would like.  Impacts on early stage companies are different than the big manufacturers. On the one hand, early-stage companies are much more fragile than more mature companies and they struggle to deal with rapid change.  On the other hand, if we're looking at economics over survivability, these early startups have a lot of time to allow the impact of tariffs to wear off before they are ready to exit, so the impact on angel investor returns may be minimal. On the face of it, tariffs don't impact much of angel and VC investing. Angel investments tend to be long term and will outlast this crisis. Instead, it's the massive global tariffs on everything all at once that has created a crash in the markets and inevitable inflation and a recession that will have impact.  Those things will impact VC as capital dries up across the food chain from institutional LPs to angels.  On the other hand, people will be laid off in large numbers and this often leads to a spike in the formation of startups.  That's good for VC, so long as VC's limited partners are still making capital calls. In the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 we saw unprecedented numbers of new companies being formed which led to a decade of outstanding VC performance.   Rockies Venture Club's Take on This Rockies Venture Club's philosophy about economic downturns is that it is always a good time to be investing regardless of the macroeconomic situation. While we can't predict the markets, we know that we have time for corrections and using a "dollar cost averaging" approach gives us diversification of investment vintages which smooths out returns. We are watching the economy closely and looking for trends indicating risks for our portfolio companies.  Our primary advice to companies during times like this is to treat cash like gold. Try doing things like leveraging AI to cut costs and operate more efficiently. Use cash sparingly and figure out whatever ways you can to make it last.  If you need to raise capital, you will likely see lower valuations if you can get a term sheet at all.  With any luck, the checkbooks will open up again in 12-18 months, and we'll be back to normal. If you're looking to exit now, it's going to take a while, so make sure you're not running on fumes when it comes time to negotiate.  More info at www.rockiesventureclub.org #tariffs #startups #venturecapital

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Great to hear Steffen Tjerrild, Co-Founder of UK-based AI video generation unicorn Synthesia, speak on being the first company of its kind to be ISO 42001 certified today at VantaCon in London. ISO 42001 is an AI Management System focused on responsible, transparent, and accountable AI deployment. Synthesia is turning this proactive security and compliance posture focused on AI safety into a differentiator.

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