
Investor Circle
Investor Circle is the podcast series from Canopy Community brought to life to capture insights from investors across the globe. In each short interview we get under the skin of how the investors think and make decisions as well as what kind of people they are.
Our goal is to build empathy within the community of the what, when, who, how and why behind raising funding for your startup. #Empatia
This series is primarily for Founders of early stage startups who are looking to raise their first funding, but it’s also helpful for investors looking to raise their first funds and for anyone in the ecosystem who is interested in how this all works.
https://www.canopy.community/
Note: you can also watch these episodes on youtube.com/@canopycommunity617
Investor Circle
Why Your Investor Relationships Matter More Than Your Pitch Deck
Drew Ellis joins us from South Devon to share his entrepreneurial journey from designing iconic album covers for stars like Radiohead and Pink Floyd to running Eye to Eye Capital, a funding firm focused on projects aligned with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
• Started as an art student working with Hypnosis, the famous design company behind Dark Side of the Moon
• Founded Icon, a record sleeve design agency with clients including Robert Plant, David Gilmour, and ABBA
• Sold his first business in 1989 to a UK print company looking for creative capabilities
• Left corporate life after his board responded to his internet proposal with "the internet's a fad"
• Now runs Eye to Eye Capital, providing debt funding for sustainable projects
• Works with philanthropic funds offering 10-year interest-free loans that convert to grants
• Personal investment philosophy centers on understanding the product and trusting the people involved
• Currently considering investing in a South Devon rum company
• Key advice for founders: build resilience gradually and research potential investors carefully
• Emphasizes the importance of the founder-investor relationship: "You've got to like them"
Community Membership at Canopy
Virtual Incubation at Canopy
Virtual Incubation for new and emerging Founders. Zero to One.
Scribe
Find and connect with angel investors in the UK Founded by Rob Cossins
Revolut
Business banking from Revolut
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Note: you can also watch these episodes on youtube.com/@canopycommunity617
all right, good morning. It's fantastic to have drew here. Thank you so much for making some time for us today. Drew where are you in the world right now?
Drew Ellis:good morning stewart.
Stewart Noakes:I am in sunny well partially sunny um south devon, okay, in between dartmoor and the coast, a lovely part of the world, and I'm here in lisbon, so our proper international chapter today and now. I obviously we know each other from like minds and for me, being a general man about town and the exeter area and kind of one of those connectors and joining the dots together, you know what do you do in life, what's, uh, what's eye to eye capital and how does your whole world hold together?
Drew Ellis:my whole world. Uh, I've finally reached the stage now where I can do what I do from anywhere in the world. So I'm not quite sure why I'm doing it from Devon. I should be doing it from Capri or somewhere and just coincidentally my wife has become a digital nomad so we literally could do what we do from anywhere in the world. Yeah, I mean, in my early days, you know, obviously I was used to commuting to an office. It used to take me at least an hour, maybe an hour and a quarter every day to get into London. I finally got my commute down to five minutes about five years ago because I opened a co-working space opposite my house so I could literally just leave home and cross the road and go to work, work. But as I say now, I finally got it down to a lot of zoom meet google, meet meetings, um, working with clients all over the world, um, without actually physically meeting them. So, yeah, um, I mean, I started out as an art student, um in london, um, working during my degree with uh, one of the most famous um record sleeve design companies.
Drew Ellis:Um, there was at the time called hypnosis, who designed dark side of the moon and floated the pig over battery power station. Um, there's a great documentary um on Netflix and prime called squaring the circle. Um, which features me, um towards the end talking about some of the sleeves that I worked on and some of the creative work that I did amazing, so that's worth a little look for people to see, kind of how, how, how the old world worked, you know, when we were on drawing tables with sticky tape and cow gum and no, no mac inside and what did you imagine that you were going to end up doing when you were going to art school and stuff well, that was the thing I I didn't know um, like most young people, you know, you've got various interests and different things.
Drew Ellis:My passion was music, because, as a youngster, um, and design and somebody I can't remember who. It was said to me well, why don't you design record covers? And I said is that a job? And they went yeah, of course it's a job. People get paid to do that.
Drew Ellis:So I did some research and decided to write my thesis on record sleeve design, came across this group called Hypnosis and went to interview them and they were incredibly welcoming and helpful and they were giving me off cuts of stuff. They were putting a book together, um, so they gave me off cuts of of um photographs to put into my thesis. And during my interview with them, they started interviewing me and saying, well, what, why do you need all this stuff? What do you do? And I said, well, I'm a graphics student. And they said, so, you design? And I said yeah, and they said we're really busy. Do you think you could spare a few hours every day? And um, so I said, well, yeah, absolutely, and came to work for them. You know, um, during my degree. So, uh, that was a great start. Great start working for some of the artists that I'd only been buying their records. You know the previous year when I was at school.
Stewart Noakes:So so you've gone from very artistic to now eye to eye capital, with a whole load of other things in between, and from London to Devon yeah what's your experience of investment so far?
Drew Ellis:so, um, we at eye to eye capital, we deal with debt, not equity, so I'm raising funds for projects that conform to the UN 17 Sustainable Goals. So as long as you hit five of those, your project hits five of those, we can help find funding for you, and they range from companies that are cleaning aircraft fuel to make it more sustainable to real estate projects featuring green recycling units, building data warehouses, building the latest top. You know the big topic is AI at the moment, so we're getting a lot of instructions from from people who are building ai um data warehouses and this is debt right, so it's something they've got to service.
Drew Ellis:This is something they've got to pay back. Yeah, yeah, I mean there are. There is a philanthropic fund that we work with, um, where you put down a 20% deposit in escrow and then they'll fund your project 100%, provided that you hit five of these UN sustainable goals and that lasts. It's a 10-year term, there's no interest, there's no payment due until the final year and as long as you they'll be audited once. Once um they've they've hit those five sustainable goals, the debt is then turned into what they call a forgivable loan or essentially, a grant. Well, that's incredible. Which is incredible?
Stewart Noakes:yeah, yeah, there's not many companies that can qualify are you able to talk about the source of funds for that? You know what?
Drew Ellis:private individuals in the U S? Um billionaires who DAF they're called donor advised funds. So they've been going for 50, 60 years now. Uh, and we started out with. You know people like the Carnegie's and the melons and the the huge American families that have so much wealth that they they they don't really need to make that much more. Um, they're more interested in making an impact in the world. So if you go to them with a, with a business that's saying, look, we're making aircraft feel more sustainable, they say, wow, that sounds fantastic. Yeah, we'd like to get involved fantastic and it's five sustainable development goals.
Stewart Noakes:Is there any other criteria for it? You know, does a company have to be like brand new, or can it be 20 years old? It?
Drew Ellis:can be brand new, it can be an SPV, you know, special purpose vehicle, so long as the project, when it's audited, as I say, you pick those five goals and you stick to them. There's no, you know messing about. Oh, we've decided we're not going to do that one. Can we do this one? Um, you pick them, you stick to them, you get audited every year, both internally and externally, and then there's a final audit in the 10th year and what's the?
Stewart Noakes:what's the repercussion? If you don't hit the five development goals, you have to pay all the money back.
Drew Ellis:If everyone you don't hit. You have to pay 20 of the original loan okay, which is why there's the stuff which is why there?
Stewart Noakes:are five. Yeah, yeah, oh, interesting, interesting, absolutely what's interest? I would add yeah, although the interest isn't horrendous I think there's a whole story there to ask you at some point in the future about how you got involved with that one. But uh tell, tell the founders and the people that are watching this today like, um, what's your personal experience of investing in the past?
Drew Ellis:um to invest in yourself. Um, you know you have a belief, you have an idea, you have a product, um, and you want it to scale. Um, you have to have a lot of resilience. You know things go wrong all the time. You'll have terrible cash flow moments. It's a real struggle.
Drew Ellis:It's not the wonderful sort of YouTube digital nomad vision of working in the Philippines or Bali and you know on your laptop nomad vision of working in the Philippines or Bali and you know on your laptop, um, that's not reality, um, for the majority of people. Um, you've got to have a solid business plan. Um, you've got to have a solid idea. You've got to have a great team. Um, if you have a co-founder, obviously you've got to pick somebody that you are happy to work with, both out of work and in work, because you don't just sort of work for your eight to 14 hours a day or however long you're working, and then not see them. You're going to see them at the weekends. Your families are going to be integrated. Families are going to be integrated. It's a really crucial part of building a business that you've got a fantastic team that are pulling together.
Stewart Noakes:Fantastic, and are there any ideas that you're looking at investing at at the moment?
Drew Ellis:I'm looking at a rum company, as I like drinking rum, so why not? They're people. I know they're based in South Devon. They're people that I occasionally work with as I sit on the committee for the Dartmouth Food Festival, and they help provide drinks to sample rum to sample during the weekend, and it's great rum, so why not support? You know, it's a.
Stewart Noakes:It's a crowdfunded job, so okay and I mean obviously exeter's the home of crowdfunding, right in terms of crowdfunding and stuff, so you'd expect a lot of crowdfunding to be happening.
Drew Ellis:Um, yeah, in fact, crowd, crowd, crowd cube started the same year. That, like Mine started. Isn't that funny, really? Yeah, so I know Darren Westlake very well and we bumped into each other the other day and he's got a new startup, funnily enough, in the music industry which links to Spotify and makes Spotify a little bit more, have a little bit more engagement fan engagement which is a great idea. So I've been talking to him giving him a little bit of advice on the music industry contacts that I've got. Do you think you're investing in that one? I might do. I might do. I might do. Yeah.
Stewart Noakes:What's your criteria when you look at investment? You talked about the rum. You know them and it's a product that you understand, I understand, yeah, yeah. Are those the criteria you look for, like that personal relevance for you, or is there something else?
Drew Ellis:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously it's got to make financial sense, you know. Going back to the rum company, you know they're a profitable company, so they're already trading. They're already trading. They're already trading. Yeah, it's not a, it's not a startup.
Drew Ellis:Um, investing in startups obviously is incredibly high risk and, um, to be honest, a lot of the tech companies that are coming out of america um, have got the right address book, um, so the early investors in those companies are the people that have built solid Silicon Valley companies before, and the chances of you getting a look in are fairly remote until it gets to a point where they go public and then you can buy shares. Normally it's a bit of a you know a boys club, as it were, and I'm sure it's the same in in any major city. Yeah, there'll be, you know investor, investor clubs and people saying, hey, joe, I've just come across this thing. I think this is really good. I'm going to go in. Do you want to come in with me? And they go yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, I'll come in with you and they build a little base.
Stewart Noakes:You, I'm sure you're smiling, stewart, I'm sure you've come across this well it's all about signals and trust in those environments, right, yeah, it's the signal that somebody you know has a shrewd brain has found something interesting, and so you're going to follow that because you trust the fact that they've got good track record. And, yeah, and so when you know them well enough that you don't expect that they're pulling the wool over your eyes, you know, yeah, yeah yeah, absolutely.
Drew Ellis:Um, you know it's, it's, um, it's, as I say, for me it's been a really interesting journey because I've never had a proper job, as my father would say, until I sold my first business. So when I left Hypnosis, I started my own record sleeve design agency called Icon and carried on the good work that they were doing. They turned into a film production company. On the good work that they were doing. They turned into a film production company. So we um were able to get a lot of clients from them, which obviously was a great start for me, because I was effectively a startup with no investment um and grew that to a big three and a half thousand square foot office on farringham road in london, just opposite the old guardian building, and um opened an office in studio city in la to look after the american market. Um, because we were working with, you know, big artists like robert plant and david gilmore and phil collins and genesis and abba. You know we launched radiohead. We worked with juran juran, so there were always really important releases um that we would design a slightly different cover for for the american market, so which they loved, of course, because the super fans would buy the album twice. Good news for everybody um and then um. I sold that in 1989. Um I was like 30, 30, 31 I think um to a uk public company who were a print business and didn't have a creative front end and the mac had just come on. We've got a tiny little mac. Se, a brick the brick. If you remember, there was a queue for all. The designers sort of suddenly stopped using drawing tables and all wanted to learn quark express as it was then um, the design tool that we were all using. Um and when I sold, the part of the deal that that I struck with the company was that they would buy a mac for everybody. So we suddenly had 25 designers with Macs, which was a huge advantage against our competition. It was still on drawing boards, so we grew that to one of the biggest pre-press companies working in the entertainment industry at the time. And while I was there I was the youngest group, md um. Their senior staff were in their late 50s, early 60s and um.
Drew Ellis:In 1993 I had a compu serve account and um. I was sort of learning about this thing called the internet and I realized that if I wanted to build websites I I could design them, but I couldn't program them. So I needed developers. And I went to the group CEO and I said look, I want to hire some developers. I want to stop hiring designers, I want to start hiring developers. And he said what are they? And I said well, I don't know either, but I know I need these guys. So you know we need to. You know, learn and excuse me. He said write a board report.
Drew Ellis:And you know, as an entrepreneur, I've never written a business plan in my life. I probably shouldn't say that, but you know I haven't and I just do stuff. You know you have a business partner. You say should we open an office in LA? Yeah, that's a great idea. Okay, we'll go and open an office in LA. Yeah, that's a great idea. Okay, we'll go and open. You know we'll go and open an office in LA. You know, if it doesn't work, you can always close it. So no harm done. And so I did write this board report and it came back and written in pencil on the cover was the internet's a fad. It'll never take off.
Stewart Noakes:I wish I kept it Absolutely.
Drew Ellis:That's a framer, that one, it is a framer and I thought about it for another six months thinking, you know, I mean, I laugh at this now, god, you're in your 60s, you know nothing, he says. And so I resigned. And you know, it was the old car keys on the table and the company credit card. And where are you going? And I said look, I'm out. You know you guys are driving me mad. Got home and my wife was sitting outside with a young baby and she said oh, you're home early, darling. Where's the car? Well, it's okay, I've got a Mac. Yeah, it's going to be a bit of where's the car? Well, it's okay, I've got a mac. Conversation, yeah, anyway.
Drew Ellis:So I started eye to eye in my spare room with with a mac, and then um found a studio in london via my network of people, um, and we got busy. So you know, you hire, you hire your first hire and then your second and your third, and we grew that and we built some of the first websites ever, um, in 1994 to 2000, riding that dot-com bubble, which was just incredible. You know people coming to you with tens of thousands of dollars to build a website which you would build in a weekend on wordpress. Now you know it's, it's. It's frightening, really when I when I think back literally to when I started in business and there were no computers, to having been through the computer age, been through the internet age, been through the social media age and now I'm entering the ai age, um, the the technical transformation that's gone on in my lifetime is is absolutely eye-opening, I think yeah, incredible isn't it.
Stewart Noakes:And uh, in my first role, uh, I was actually worked for a company called gc mark only combat information systems and we worked on yeah, yeah, we worked on the software for tornado aircraft. But what was interesting about that was when I arrived, which was in the uh mid 90s, the technology spanned back to the origins of the project, so you could literally um, you were using ticker tape and punch tape with whole yes, yeah.
Stewart Noakes:This stuff had to work in military theater and you had to support everything that was out there, as well as everything that was going to be out there, you know. So I saw right back to punch cards, basically Through to Andriel.
Drew Ellis:Yeah, I've just watched the because I'm an investor in Palantir, so um, uh, which I know some people would get offended by, but hey, um, it's the future. Um and Anderle is the. Is the? Um the physical manifestation? Effectively, you know, you've got the AI that's driving this and they're the guys that are making the products. And, um, there's this little film out on YouTube of um guys couple of guys breaking down in a Land Rover in the middle of the desert and then you suddenly see these drones. This is like 50, 60 drones heading their way. There's like 50, 60 drones heading their way and they've got a little box on the back of the Land Rover and it's tracking these drones and as soon as it comes within range, it sends out an audio pulse and all these drones just drop out of the sky onto the ground gone, just knocked out. This is incredible stuff. You know it's science fiction.
Drew Ellis:Really is um, absolutely amazing living in our own future, right, living in our own future.
Stewart Noakes:We are, yeah, very black mirror, yeah so let's draw ourselves to a close with this one. Then there are hopefully some very first-time founders watching this, trying to get through this podcast series empathy and the key, as we say in Portugal, with what the mindset is from an investor. But thinking the other way around, what's your best advice for these first-time founders, as somebody who's invested and been an entrepreneur so much yourself?
Drew Ellis:I think a couple of things. One is build up your resilience, because that's absolutely crucial, and if you're sending out a pitch deck, find out what the investor or the potential investor is looking for. You know, just sending out 15 pitch decks to people that you've kind of heard the name of is a waste of everybody's time.
Stewart Noakes:You don't think those big mailing lists on a spreadsheet from some random linkedin person is going to really get it done?
Drew Ellis:throw enough shit against a wall. Some of it will stick, but really be be a little bit more strategic. Um, look at the, the investors that you would like to be working with. What is it that appeals to you about them? Because, again, going back to this, uh, co-founder relationship, you know you are entering into a relationship with your backer and so you've got to like them. Um, you've got to understand what it is that they're after. What is it? What particular sector are they focused on? What, um are they looking to? You know, aside from obviously making money, um, what's their purpose? You know there's there's an awful lot of talk about purpose and businesses having a purpose, but, um, you should throw that back at them and say, well, look why, why would you be interested in investing in us?
Stewart Noakes:okay, and and just to delve a little bit on that resilience thing how do you build up resilience? Because it's not like doing chin-ups, right, you can't just like go to a bar and work it out. How do you do that?
Drew Ellis:I don't know. It kind of is because you the the more stress you put yourself under and the more um you're able to cope with that. Um it's, you know, taking on a little bit at a time. Don't suddenly throw yourself in at the deep end and you'll drown. But it's like learning to swim. Just build up your resilience over time. Recognize that when you get turned down, that that's just maybe not now, it's not, no, forever. Don't just take things personally either. Um, just, it's a, it's a fact. Okay, I've, I've, I've done that. It's not worked. Fine, move on. Um, you, you've got to have this strength in yourself to your self-belief that you will make it through.
Stewart Noakes:Thank you so much true it's been great to have you on here today. Thank you so much for all your your self-belief that you will make it through. Thank you so much, stuart. It's been great to have you on here today. Thank you so much for all your shares and look forward to seeing you again in the next one when I'm back. Indeed, yeah, see you soon, stuart. Thanks a lot, thanks mate Bye.