Speakers

Michael is an early-stage VC investor at firstminute capital, a $500m seed fund investing across Europe backed by a network of 130+ unicorn founders. He invests mainly in B2B software and has led investments and worked closely with companies including Nabla, ai.work, Agemo, Maihem, Lupa, Holdbar, Ontik, Granola, Claimsorted, Toongether, Mistral, Layla, Revyze, Teero and Scalera. He also leads on French investment for the fund and is on the board of Typology (Series B). Before firstminute, he spent more than a decade as a journalist, which is unusual in venture and gives him a unique and differentiated perspective. Most recently he was founding editor of Sifted.eu, and before that as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. At Sifted, he helped scale the company from an idea to a media platform with a team of 80 journalists and engineers producing world-class, in-depth coverage of the European technology landscape. At the Financial Times, he was senior correspondent and bureau chief in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm and New York. As a foreign correspondent, he interviewed break-through founders, anonymous hackers, rogue traders, presidents, military dictators, global CEOs, and quirky billionaires. He has a first-class degree from Cambridge University.