Barclays Eagle Labs Global Connect
Spring 2024 applications closed
We’re helping high-growth UK businesses access and increase their exposure to international markets through our Global Connect Programme.
San Francisco or ‘Silicon Valley’ is one of the most established entrepreneurial ecosystems in the world and we’ve worked with business growth experts to create a virtual programme that helps ambitious UK businesses learn how to scale, expand or raise funding in the US.
The programme is delivered by our US partner, Panache Ventures.
Timelines
Global Connect Spring 2024
Applications now open
02 April 24
Applications close
24 May 24, 17:00 BST
Programme launch
27 May 24
The programme:
This three week virtual programme (delivered in the evenings) is designed to give founders the opportunity to learn from Silicon Valley veterans and teach them the fundamentals of raising early-stage institutional funding in the US, through a series of tailored webinars. By taking part in the programme, you will:
- Gain insight from experienced founders, investors and mentors
- Understand the culture, best practices and how to navigate and do business in Silicon Valley with its dense population of entrepreneurs and investors
- Learn how to prepare for US funding rounds
- Learn how to fine-tune your pitch by pitching to a panel of Silicon Valley VC’s and veterans for direct and honest feedback.
Week 1: Welcome to America
What makes the American startup ecosystem so special? Week 1 of Barclays Global Connect begins with an in-depth analysis of Silicon Valley, including the structural differences between the world's largest tech ecosystem and that of the UK. We dig into the Valley's unique culture and etiquette and hear from UK founders on their experiences in America.
Week 2: The Fundamentals of Fundraising
Week 2 of Barclays Global Connect focuses on fundraising, with a goal of unpacking the best practices used by founders to raise from Silicon Valley VCs. We dig into the psychology of American VCs, how they make investment decisions, and the ways in which founders can increase the likelihood of success.
Week 3: What's it Really Like
In the final week of Barclays Global Connect, we'll hear from real Silicon Valley VCs and UK founders who have successful raised money in the Valley to get the low down on the true fundraising experience. The program culminates with a VC pitch panel, where a select number of participants will get the opportunity to pitch their startup live and gain feedback from Silicon Valley experts.
Testimonials
Hear from founders who have already been on Global Connect to hear about their experiences.
Global Connect
Learn how to raise and do business in Silicon Valley.
Spring 2024 applications closed
Speakers
Maren Bannon
January Ventures
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
Maren Bannon is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at January Ventures, a pre-seed focused firm focused on investing early and opening doors for the visionary founders of the future. January Ventures closed Fund II in March 2022. Investments focus on two themes: modern productivity and health.
Maren is an engineer turned operator and entrepreneur. Before co-founding January Ventures, Maren was CEO and co-founder of LittleLane, a mobile marketplace for local experiences. Her operating experience also includes marketing and sales roles at health tech startups as well as leading consumer marketing for a $1B product at Genentech. She is a contributor at Forbes and a Mentor at Stanford StartX and TechStars. She has an MBA from Stanford and an Engineering degree from Dartmouth. Maren is based in London, United Kingdom.
Andrea Barrica
O.school
Founder / CEO
Andrea Barrica is the CEO and founder of O.school, a judgment-free media platform to learn about sexuality and pleasure. As a queer woman of color, she’s been fighting to bring more humanity to the tech industry, and her mission is to create the world’s most trusted sexual wellness brand to help people increase their sexual health, power, and confidence. Previously, Andrea co-founded the leading financial solution for growing startups, inDinero.com, which now employs 150+ employees globally.
Saalim Chowdhury
Techstars
Managing Director
Saalim Chowdhury is the Managing Director at Techstars London. He invests in and nurtures early stage startups, with a keen focus on minority and otherwise overlooked founders. Prior to Techstars, he was a Partner at 500 Startups, where he led and worked on 30 accelerators in 20 markets across the world. A startup veteran and technical founder, he helped build ScanSafe (acquired by Cisco) and Skillbridge (acquired by Toptal) creating $200m in exit value. For his sins, Saalim's career started at the Boston Consulting Group, and he is a graduate of Oxford, Cambridge and LSE.
McKeever Conwell
rarebreed
Founder
McKeever “Mac” Conwell II is a software engineer by trade and was a former DOD contractor with a top-secret clearance. He was a two-time founder with an exit and a failure. Next Mac moved on to the venture capital world via the Maryland Technology Development Corporation as part of their Seed Investment Team. During his four years there, Mac amassed experience leading an initiative to create the first and only, at the time, state-backed pre-seed fund for women and minorities in the country; known as the Builder Fund. The program institutionalized the friends and family round for black-, women-, and minority-led startups and was subsequently funded long-term by the state of Maryland. Mac then went on to found RareBreed Ventures, a pre-seed to seed venture fund that invests in exceptional founders outside of large tech ecosystems.
Andy Davis
10x10 Fund
Cofounder
Andy Davis is the head of 10x10, the UK's group of Black founders and VCs, and an early-stage investor who invests in Black founders.
Arjun Dev Arora
Format One
Founder / CEO
Arjun Dev Arora is a former VC and entrepreneur who advises funds, startups, and Fortune 100 companies on strategic planning, monetization, and funding. Arjun was previously a Partner at 500 Startups, Founder & CEO of ReTargeter (acquired by Sellpoints in 2015), and head of business development at Yahoo! Real Estate.
Arjun has spoken about entrepreneurship internationally (Europe, Asia, and the Middle East), and was recognized at the: White House, United Nations (UN), and the Global Summit for Entrepreneurship, for his success and commitment to a values-centered organization. He also holds a BSc, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science / Entrepreneurship & Technology from UC Berkeley.
Allan Cannon
Krucial
Cofounder and CEO
Allan Cannon is co-founder and CEO of space technology scale up Krucial, where he is responsible for business growth and strategy. He's raised £4M from a mixture of VC, Institutional and Angel investors from Europe and North America. With a background in complex technology, business development and spacecraft mission design, Allan is on a mission to make digital transformation easier for all —anywhere on earth. Allan is also a keen advocate for the next generation of entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, and leaders. He currently sits on the board of CodeClan, a digital bootcamp accelerator and is an active member of the Scottish tech ecosystem.
Steven Drost
CodeBase
Founder / CSO
Steven is a two-time entrepreneur, once successful, once failed. He has extensive experience of hiring, building revenues, selling companies, fund raising, and more. He has the scars and war stories to prove it. He is currently the Chief Strategy Officer at CodeBase and sees many startups per year. He loves to help businesses grow and network founders with peers, customers and investors.
Penny Harwood
London & Partners
SVP Business Development
Penny is the SVP Business Development at London & Partners and leads the San Francisco office. She has worked with hundreds of high-growth scaling companies from the Bay Area, Pacific Northwest, and Western Canada advising and supporting as they globalize, scale, and grow in London. She has deep expertise advising C level executives, across key sectors in particular in technology, fintech, ecommerce, creative and smart mobility. She also supports the highly successful trade services for London scale-ups as they expand to the west coast. Penny has been integrally involved in several Silicon Valley Comes to the UK Female Founder missions to the Bay Area.
Prior to London & Partners, Penny was the Director of Customer Support, Starmine (acquired by Thomson/Reuters) in San Francisco. Previously she led west coast sales teams at Bloomberg L.P in San Francisco. She moved from Bloomberg L.P in London where she focused on major buy-side clients in London and Paris. Penny has a BA (Hons) in French and Economics from Kingston University, London.
Samit Kalra
1984 Ventures
Partner
Samit Kalra grew up in Sydney where he worked at a few startups and then spent a few years as an investment banker. Eager to work in tech, he moved to San Francisco in 2017 to work at AngelList, in a mix of a startup ops as well as a venture role. From there, he joined the early-stage team at Bain Capital Ventures where he focused on seed/Series A investing and also ran the scout program. From there, he joined one of Bain's scout funds, 1984 Ventures, where he is now a partner.
Marvin Liao
GameGroove
Capital Partner
Marvin Liao is an investor, executive coach and formal advisor to several large Family Offices. He was previously a Partner at venture capital fund 500 Startups, where he ran the firm’s flagship San Francisco-based accelerator program and invested in Seed stage startups. He has invested in over 400 Pre-Seed & Seed stage startups to-date.
Marvin also spent 10.5 years at Yahoo! as an executive with extensive experience across Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States in his career at the company.
Marvin presently serves on the boards/advisory boards of several internet advertising and ad technology companies across the globe. He is a frequent speaker at many Digital Marketing & Tech Startup Conferences.
Jamie Moore
Orrick
Partner
Jamie Moore is a Partner at Orrick, where he works with early and late stage companies in intellectual property rich sectors and those who invest in them, including some of the most active venture capital funds, corporate and individual investors. He presents on corporate law and venture capital, including practitioners’ conferences on practical legal issues in venture capital transactions and SEIS/EIS investments.
Chris Neumann
Panache Ventures
Founder / CEO
Chris Neumann is a General Partner at Panache Ventures, Canada’s leading early-stage fund. He invests in Pre-Seed and Seed stage startups, with a particular focus on enterprise data, machine learning, AI and Web3.
Prior to joining Panache, Chris founded Commonwealth Ventures (now Panache Academy) a San Francisco-based accelerator for Canadian and UK startups whose graduates have raised more than US $100M in funding from top Silicon Valley VCs.
Chris has been a Venture Partner at 500 Startups, where he led investments in nearly two dozen countries, the CEO and Cofounder of DataHero (acquired by Cloudability in 2016) and the first employee of Aster Data (acquired by Teradata in 2011). He is a Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at the Beedie School of Business, an Advisor to The Data Lab and an Associate of the Creative Destruction Lab.
Jacob Shadbolt
Icepanel
Cofounder
Previously a UX Designer at Mastercard, where he noticed the pain of technical knowledge transfer.
Fun: snow, dirt and water
Consumes: Coffee, great food, cold beer
Likes: Simplicity and humour.
Mike Sigal
Upside Partners
Cofounder
Mike Sigal is the Cofounder of Upside Partners, a Silicon Valley-based consultancy that helps corporations and institutions develop operational excellence in innovation through the application of startup and venture capital best practices. Mike has spent nearly 30 years working in the global startup ecosystem as an entrepreneur and innovation advisor, including as founder of 7 companies (3 exits, 1 IPO) and advisor to dozens of institutions on implementing startup ecosystem inspired innovation strategies.
Previously, Mike served as Founding Executive Producer of SWIFT’s Innotribe Startup Challenge and Industry Challenge programs which have resulted in an estimated $2B in investments, acquisitions and partnerships between participating startups, SWIFT’s member institutions and FinTech investors globally. He’s an active startup mentor and frequent speaker at startup, innovation and FinTech conferences.
Steven Webster
asensei
Founder / CEO
Steven Webster has spent the past 20 years at the forefront of the fusion of technology and design, having held a variety of leadership roles at Adobe and Microsoft. A 4th degree black belt, Steven was also one of the most successful Karate and Ju Jitsu coaches in Britain at the university level. He moved from Scotland to California in 2009 after the sale of his software company to Adobe. In 2014, after a three-year stint at Microsoft leading an innovation team, Steven left to start asensei. The opportunity to combine a passion for coaching with deep expertise in technology makes asensei the perfect opportunity for Steven to build a groundbreaking connected coaching company
Monique Woodard
Cake Ventures
General Partner and Founder
Monique Woodard is a venture capital investor at the intersection of technology and newly powerful consumer groups. She invests in the future of technology being driven by major demographic trends like the shift to majority-minority, an increase in the spending power of women, and an aging Baby Boomer population and has invested in startup ecosystems across the US and sub-Saharan Africa. Monique invests in companies with global ambitions who are creating technology products that meet the needs of tomorrow’s population.
Monique has been an advisor to technology-focused organizations including Women 2.0, Hackers/Founders, and Startup Policy Lab. She regularly speaks, writes, and advises in the areas of consumer technology, emerging demographics, and diversity and has been interviewed around entrepreneurship and investing for USA Today, MSNBC, New York Times, Buzzfeed, NPR, TheRoot, and Essence Magazine.
Elizabeth Yin
Hustle Fund
General Partner and Founder
Elizabeth Yin is a cofounder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an adtech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014).
Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan. Elizabeth has reviewed over 20,000 startup pitches from around the world and has helped portfolio founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Her work and writing on startup fundraising has been featured in numerous publications including TechCrunch, Forbes, Huffington Post, BetaKit, and more.
About our partner
Panache Ventures
Panache Ventures is Canada's leading early-stage venture capital fund, with over 100 investments across Canada and the US. Panache Academy, based in San Francisco, partners with global investors, governments and corporates to narrow the expertise gap between international ecosystems and Silicon Valley. Its unique programmes match Silicon Valley investors and subject-matter experts with international founders to empower high-growth startups and scaleups around the world.
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