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Entrepeneur First, the London-headquartered “talent investor” and company builder backed by Silicon Valley’s Greylock, is losing long-time employee Matt Wichrowski to a career in venture capital.TechCrunch has learned that Wichrowski, who is currently running EF’s “Launch” programme in Europe and is an angel investor, is joining Berlin-based Fly Ventures, where he’ll be giving the enterprise and “deeptech” seed investor a bigger presence in London.He’s expected to make the move officially in late February or early March and will split his time between Berlin and London.
It is also thought that Wichrowski’s recruitment will coincide with Fly Venture beginning to invest out of its rumoured second fund.Confirming that he is joining Fly Ventures, Wichrowski provided TechCrunch with the following statement:I’m extremely excited to be joining the Fly team.
While I haven’t started yet it does feel like the perfect partnership for me to join.
Their investment focus (enterprise and deeptech seed) aligns very very well with the portfolio I worked with at Entrepreneur First/angel investments.
And I’m really excited to build a lot of operational excellence within the fund like global network cultivation and platform support for our entrepreneurs.
But for sure the most exciting element for me is the team I’ll be working with.
I’ve worked with Fly via EF for a few years now and have always been impressed and now having gotten to know them more in depth over the past few months I’m thrilled to call them my (future) partners.Meanwhile, I understand that Fly Ventures will still be headed up by partners Fredrik Bergenlid (tech lead) and Gabriel Matuschka (investment lead), and there are no plans to open a formal London office as such — Berlin will remain Fly’s home.However, the VC firm has already made a number of deeptech investments in the U.K., including Wayve, Bloomsbury AI (exited to Facebook) and Scape.
The latter two were co-investments with EF, while the broader thinking is that deeptech investing in Europe requires U.K.
coverage, hence Wichrowski’s appointment.To that end, Wichrowski has been actively involved with the U.K.
early-stage tech scene for several years, including angel backing CloudNC, amongst others.
He moved over to the U.K.
in 2014 (from his home in Chicago), when he studied for an MBA at London Business School.
He’s worked at Entrepreneur First since 2016 and built much of the company builder’s seed-stage funding product.
Wichrowski also spent 18 months working for EF out of Boston, where he led U.S.
investor relations and network building.Sources at EF tell me Wichrowski is highly regarded amongst the leadership team, while EF itself has come a long way since 2016.
A fun fact: He originally joined EF on a three-month contract but has ended up doing a four-year stint at the company builder.
Not a bad run, I’d say.
