Inside Angel Investing: Chris Mairs’ Embarrassingly Long History of Getting it Right

The AWS Startup Podcast

Telecom software maker Metaswitch Networks was bootstrapped for the first 25 years of its profitable existence before the team decided to take outside investors including Sandhill Road standout Sequoia Capital. A few years after Sequoia invested in the London-based company, Chris Mairs, who was Metaswitch’s chief scientist, asked a Sequoia partner what the key requirements were for investing in a company. As Mairs recalls the conversation, the Sequoia partner highlighted three things. 1. The people. 2. The business needed to be quite young so there was plenty of opportunity for growth. 3. The Sequoia team needed to be able to bicycle from Sandhill Road to the company’s head offices. Metaswitch had only one of those right. The only one that mattered. Remember, Metaswitch Networks was a 25-year-old business based 5,380 miles away (and across an ocean) in North London. “All I can say,” the partner told Mairs, “is your people must be pretty damned amazing.” And while that punchline was delivered with humor, it cuts to the core of how Mairs invests today. “That has been the core thinking behind my own angel investing since then,” he says. “If the people aren’t exceptional it doesn’t matter how good the market it, it doesn’t matter how smart the technology is – it’s not worth making the bet.”