One of my earliest memories was watching a slicing, dicing, chopping demonstration all afternoon when I was 3 years old in the Woolworths in Newton Abbott, Devon. I was mesmerised by the whole process – the patter, the speed that vegetables, fruits and roots were reduced to cocktail foods, the clamour of Devon housewives and their husbands fighting to buy at the end of the demo in a recession hit 1970s Britain.

I was as excited by the demonstration as I was by the pigs in the market next door.

Pigs - not at a market

Slightly less time ago, just before the first internet bubble burst, I was flying home from Chicago and picked up a bunch of magazines including the New Yorker on the flight. I have to admit the cartoons never really made me laugh as much as they probably should have and I am not sure I would buy it for the articles. However, I read an amazing and long piece about the people who invented and then sold all those magical kitchen gadget things you see being sold on Oxford Street, in markets, on QVC and department stores. It took me back almost 30 years and also made me think.

What I didn’t know until I read this article was that the original demonstrators were also the inventors of the products and were from several generations of the same family. The ‘pitchmen’ that appeared on QVC, and consistently broke the QVC hourly sales records when they did, had actually invented the things that they were selling.

I thought about this again recently when I was talking to some entrepreneurs who were actually inventors who had not yet become entrepreneurs, though they show every sign of being them in the future. They had all developed different versions of cool things and were then thinking about who should sell it. Sometimes the stuff that is invented is cool enough for this to work but it is very rare.

The New Yorker article showed that the pitchmen and successful inventor are one and the same person. You have to have  an end user in mind when you make stuff, and you have to love it enough to be able to sell it. If you do, nobody can sell it as well as you.

I wanted to find the article to share it and after 15 minutes of Googling managed to find it. It was written by a writer that I predict big things for, Malcolm Gladwell. If anyone has any doubt as to who the best person an entrepreneur can turn to to sell their stuff, or if they just want to read a great story, I recommend this.

Trusty Darren has put together an incredible line up of people for our dinner in London on May 6th including some of the most experienced web retail pioneers operating at the moment including founders/CEOs/Chairs from MyDeco, GlassesDirect, Tesco.com, Koodos and other great names you will have heard of.

Our discussion dinners are not big – less than 20 guests – as this keeps conversation flowing and meaningful and the atmosphere intimate. Entrepreneurs to attend as our guests, a few selected investors get to pay.

We would love to hear from a couple of entrepreneurs who are building great web retail businesses that would like to talk and network with some others who have done, and are doing, just that.

Drop us a line if you are interested or wanted to recommend someone, we are trying harder to be easier to track down!

This discussion dinner would not happen without ongoing support from:

• Taylor Wessing
• Kleinwort Benson
• Deloitte

Jens Lapinski, an old colleague from Library House, and now CEO of a start up so secret I am not sure I can name it, (it cannot have launched or I know he would have had a party), AI Hit, has just published an open list of UK and European VC investors.

Jens' list of VC funds

Great list although there is always room for more and I would urge anyone else with info should post it to his list here.

Some notes of caution.

1. Not all of these VCs are currently active in the UK. Some have made a single investment then collapsed, or refocused their activities in other regions.
2. It does not cover funds closed before March 2007 (although in general, the older the fund, the less likely it will be to have spare capital).
3. Not all of these funds are actually active or ready to invest. One announcement does not make a fund close, particularly with respect to some of the government funded initiatives.
4. This list does not cover private equity funds or other sources of capital.

A couple of thoughts on additional fields.

1. I would love to know the size and date of the most recent NEW investment in a company. This gives a useful indicator of the real activity in the fund.
2. It would also be useful to know how many investments a fund expects to make.

Thanks for making the list public Jens. Typically thorough.

Having said in a recent post that I was getting bored of investors being gloomy and the ones that got my attention spoke about how cool their portfolios were, I thought I would like to make a point of naming the ones that do.

First on my list is Chris Smart at Acacia Capital (formerly IDG Ventures). I bumped into him at Stansted Airport on Wednesday on the way to a dinner we organised in Edinburgh this week. We were in the queue for security and I took out my iPhone to be scanned and he pounced.

“Ah, an iPhone, do you have the Shazam app? It is amazing. Listens to and recognises music, tells you who is playing on the radio or in a club, Synchs to iTunes. Available as a free download from the iStore…”

As it happens, I did – but two of the people I was travelling with didn’t and by the time we got to Pret a Manger for a pre-flight caffeine injection, both of them had it thanks to Chris’s boundless enthusiasm – and a very cool product.

Bad photo

On the flight, I took the world’s worst photo – from my iPhone, through a plane window, blindly as I was in the aisle seat, as the plane accelerated bumpily down the runway. Shame as I don’t get to see Air Force 1 every day.

Air Force 1 from EZY235

In the past few months I have noticed that at many of the events I have gone to where (grown up) entrepreneurs are present alongside investors there has been a noticeable shift in the balance of power.

Many VCs, once the kings of their worlds – even the small first-fund ones – have been morose. Some of the best entrepreneurs I have been talking to saw the end of ‘Good Times‘ well before the now infamous Sequoia presentation of October 2008, have cut their cloth and altered their plans accordingly. They are heads down and leading their businesses, often without any thought of even speaking to investors – equity or debt – why waste time they reason.

Likin this lichen taken with my new point-and-click

They might have a point. With notable exceptions, (Atlas, Accel, Balderton, Index), there have been very few meaningful new funds in the past year and I heard that since Gordon’s grand announcements about supporting entrepreneurs with billions, approximately £ 17 million has actually been spent. You need to have a pretty strong relationship with your bank manager these days to go asking for more money from them. Most banks are happy during good times for you to run your account in breach of covenants. Mike Luckwell, a wily cove who has been making money from HIT Entertainment, Carlton, WPP and others for over 40 years made the point recently that they also know this makes it very easy for them to pull the rug when things are tough – and they do. There is no question it is hard to get funding on terms acceptable to both sides these days.

Entrepreneurs seem to be getting on with running their businesses without worrying too much about the money people. Whilst some investors hate to recognise it, investment is not the only thing that makes a company grow and despite reports of doom and gloom from many quarters, we are seeing entrepeenurial businesses getting cash from customers and from corporates who are finding that joint ventures are a way to draw on highly focused teams to innovate at a time when their R&D budgets may be under pressure.

This means that some of the investors I talk to feel marginalised. One, with a fund of multiple hundreds of millions commented that he didn’t see why he could invest in start ups when he could buy eBay at 3x cash.

Perhaps we need to reconsider what VCs do? Last time I looked they aint investing in public stock, they are trying to find great ideas and help build them into great businesses. The potential returns for this are massive but you need to have the right investors on board with you. This particular comment prompted two entrepreneurs in the room to comment privately later that they wouldn’t take money from an investor like this if they could possibly help it as they were more concerned with their own position and status than for the companies they invested in. A tad harsh perhaps but people have long memories.

If you are considering working with investors at this time, and there are some great ones out there, you might want to listen to what they talk about in public.  If they are wishing themselves into other asset classes, bemoaning the state of the industry in general it could say many things about them. If they are talking about how their investments are fighting, focusing and winning, and finding ways to help them out, it might send a totally different message that people will remember for a long time – even if they are not looking for money now.