Adam French founded Scalable Capital just over a decade ago, grew it into what is now one of Europe’s fastest-growing online investment platforms, and then swapped seats to become a partner at Antler.
That history – from builder to investor – shapes how he talks about what it actually takes to back a founder in a world where AI is moving faster than ever, and it’s not necessarily the version most people picture when they think about venture capital.
Founders come into Antler’s offices and spend eight weeks there, often before the business even exists, before any money changes hands. French frames the period not as due diligence in the usual sense but as something closer to a courtship: “I like to say to the founders that meet with us that we have to earn the rights to be an investor in the company.”
At IFGS at London’s Guildhall this year, Tech Funding News sat down with French to unpack what trust looks like on both sides of the table in today’s ever-changing startup landscape.
Before the first check
If you ask French what’s changed about how he evaluates founders, he likes to start with what hasn’t. “It’s more of our evaluation goes on the team than it does the idea in many ways,” he says, and the traits he’s looking for have stayed largely consistent.
There is always a vibe check to understand a founder’s determination and relentlessness, as he puts it, because building a business is often brutal in all directions. “If you can’t stand the pressure of going through those ups and downs,” he says, then the likelihood of powering through it is slim – even, he adds, for those in it purely for the money.
Magnetism matters just as much, French says, which is the pull that makes it easier to bring a team together, win over early clients, or convince someone to take a chance on a company that barely exists yet. So does the ability to think from first principles, which he describes as taking a problem and turning it “upside down” to find a solution that looks different from everyone else’s.
There is, however, one particular trait in which French says has shifted, and that’s bias towards action. “It’s just more intense these days,” he explains, adding that the barriers to building have never been lower.
“There’s nothing stopping you or I or anybody else from picking up one of these amazing tools, be it something like Claude Code or even Lovable, which actually is an Antler portfolio company, to get something of a minimum viable product from zero to one,” French says.
With founders now coming into Antler’s residency with businesses that have been “mocked up” within seconds, the question he’s left asking is whether the founder has the ability to act on it all the way through.
Building businesses differently
While that shift has changed who Antler backs, it’s also changed what founders are building towards. French, reflecting on his own decade-old decision to start Scalable Capital, doesn’t pretend hindsight would have made it any easier.
“If I knew what I did now, I probably wouldn’t have started,” he says, admitting that the famous quote often cited by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is one he’s always said himself.
“Every day there was a challenge, we got through the challenge, there was another challenge, the challenges only got bigger,” he explains. “One of the reasons why I’m now on the VC side of the table is that I’m not sure if I want to start a business again.”
But if he were starting today, the business itself would look unrecognisable. “If I was to think we’re going to start Scalable today, we wouldn’t have built it in the same way.”
“It’s clear that there’s an advantage to be had by leveraging AI in ways that I could only have dreamt of 10 years ago.”
He’s also started to wonder whether the old funding cycle is even necessary anymore. One small raise at the start, with a lean team of three or four, could very well lead to a billion-dollar valuation without ever having to go back to investors again.
Lovable, he says, is already showing what that looks like at the extreme end, where revenue per employee runs, in his estimate, 10 times higher than what Scalable could have in its early days.
What’s next
Antler has been steadily steadily building out its second UK fund, with dozens of investments made so far and roughly 80 more expected over the next two to three years.
What French is most excited about, however, is what’s to come next in the UK, especially with Mansion House reforms.
“One of the things that has been lacking here in the UK is domestic capital being invested into UK growth,” French says. “That’s changing.”
The reforms, part of a push to get UK pension funds investing more in domestic growth companies, are something French has been tracking closely.
“They’re moving slowly, but if that is successfully deployed into UK tech, that’s a wall of tens of billions of capital that we haven’t been seeing so far.”
Paired with the kind of lean, AI-built companies he’s been describing, that capital lands differently than it would have before. As French puts it: “Just think about what we might be able to do with a little bit of money behind us as well.”
This content is produced in media partnership with Native Teams and Innovate Finance.
