One of the trickiest skills to teach a child is resilience – the ability to bounce back from difficulty.
Taking that capacity to process problems and move on into later professional careers could be an asset. And when it comes to scaling the startup mountain, it could be the difference between success and failure.
“You’re gonna get heaps of knockbacks in everything you do,” Kane Harrison, CEO of Wombat, tells TechBlast. “You’ve just got to keep going and not take them too personally.
“Persistence is the key. And that’s persistence with everything: whether it’s products, marketing or fundraising.”
Wombat, founded in 2017 with Mike Newman, is a fractional investment platform which featured on our sister publication BusinessCloud’s FinTech 50 ranking last year.
By allowing its more than 250,000 users to invest across themes such as tech, robotics, electric vehicles, AI, gaming, ESG or impact investing, it aims to help people begin their investment journey and look to long-term holdings.
Remote-first
The company employs 31 people. It has a HQ in Bank, London and development hub in York, but has a remote-first working policy with staff based in locations such as Bournemouth, Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester.
“Hiring is definitely a challenge – making sure we’ve got the right people at the right time. You want to hire people that can work in a FinTech and a startup and be really rapid and agile. It’s important to optimise for ‘done’, not ‘perfect’,” says Harrison.
“We recruit based on the person – what they are like as people, their values, their morals, their work ethic.
“COVID actually meant we could hire people based on their talent and who they are, as opposed to geographically being located near London. So we’ve got some really amazing talent off the back of that – and super-motivated people as well.”
Zoom
Wombat has raised around £8 million to date including long-term backing from Fuel Ventures and crowdfunding success on Crowdcube. It expects to complete a £10-15m funding round in the next 12 months or so to fund a European launch.
Harrison says Zoom meetings with investors are now the norm. “We’ve actually had a lot of investors, especially angels, invest just off the back of a Zoom meeting. I haven’t met quite a few of them [in person] actually!
“Even VCs will invest off the back of a number of Zoom meetings – making sure you’ve got similar networks and they can identify you across a number of different people and get references. It’s the way the world’s going.”
Colleagues
He adds: “One of our guys that works for us – Ben – we thought he was like 5’11” tall for months. He’s always sitting down in meetings. But it turns out he’s 6’4″!
“It’s funny because you might not have not met someone in person, but you feel like they are quite a good friend because you’ve known them for six months and spoken to them every day.”
The keen golfer and snowboarder says retention has been helped by offering incentives through the Juno platform – one of Fuel’s other portfolio companies – to staff.
“They can earn points towards having their house cleaned, fitness classes, to buy airpods… whatever works for them.”