Believe in your vision
In the run-up to Global Entrepreneurship Week, we are featuring a number of start-ups offering their experience and advice to others looking to strike out on their own.
CEO of Capdesk Christian Gabriel has seen his business grow with support from Guernsey-based 1818 Venture Capital.
Describe Capdesk in a single tweet
It’s a SaaS platform enabling businesses to cut legal and accounting fees by managing cap tables and employee share plans digitally. We help private companies share equity with employees and investors and empower shareholders to trade equity without needing to go public.
How did it all start and why?
At the beginning of my career, I worked as a director for an investment platform and noticed all the equity being sold existed only in spreadsheets. This piqued my curiosity. I started looking into it and found out that, actually, virtually all private companies kept equity information on spreadsheets. This meant records in companies with several years of funding history were an absolute mess and a lack of transparency – making it hard for shareholders to keep track of what their equity was actually worth.
I tried searching for any alternative solutions on the market, but couldn’t find anything. I was quite surprised that nobody had attempted to solve this huge problem for businesses. That’s how I got the idea of creating Capdesk.
What have you achieved so far?
Since we started in 2015, Capdesk has reached several milestones.
In March we raised our biggest funding yet, securing £1.5m. from major London-based VC Fuel Ventures as well as several angel investors. The impact of this has made a tremendous difference. We’ve used part of the capital to attract key talent and we’re leveraging the solid network and expert business knowledge of Fuel Ventures to propel our growth.
Since January, Capdesk has doubled the size of its team. Twenty percent of the current team was recruited right after this year’s funding round. More importantly, the members we’ve brought on board over the last quarter are seen as instrumental to the business.
Many of our achievements relate to our increasingly sophisticated product as we keep adding features. Clients can now sign multiple documents and certificates electronically, issue grants online, process transactions of employees who wish to exit and exercise their options, and many more.
Perhaps more importantly, we’ve completed a Beta version of a feature to allow us to facilitate safe secondary transactions. Very soon, for the first time ever, employees will be able to cash out what they own in the company without having to wait for the business to be acquired or IPO. This is a game-changer for our industry and we’re proud to be the first-movers in our field setting an example for innovation.
Commercially, we’ve grown revenue by 400% since January. This year we hit +400 companies while keeping our churn rate consistently below 0.5%. We’re trusted by some of Europe’s most prestigious growth companies, such as Nutmeg, Secret Escapes, Privitar, and gohenry (plus a handful of unicorns). We have more than 75,000 shareholders and employees registered on the platform. These numbers, put together, make us Europe’s leading equity management platform.
What inspired you to go it alone?
As a child, my family moved around a lot. I had to come up with different projects to keep myself entertained. Because of that, being curious and a self-starter became part of my nature. When I made my first entrepreneurial steps as a young adult, that didn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Especially when, looking back, you consider that I come from both a home country – Denmark – and a family which embraced and inspired entrepreneurship.
Any advice for budding entrepreneurs?
Believe in your vision. Know that it will always take longer than you thought to realise it. But keep putting in the work day and night because eventually you will have built something that was worth the struggle.
And throughout this whole process, put culture first in whatever you do. There will always be ups and downs in the various stages your company goes through, but having a team that’s aligned around the same set of principles will always be something you can count on. As I like to say, culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Probably the hardest part of my entrepreneurial journey so far has been coming to London to expand our reach in the UK. Trying to set up an office, hire talent, sell a product and raise funds in a place where you have no real network was truly a test for me and the company. However, that’s what made it even more rewarding when we achieved our first funding round – raising investment from Guernsey-based 1818 Ventures – and hiring a local team.
When you’ve built your career around something you have created yourself, there’s no feeling in the world that’s more rewarding than seeing talented people choosing to work for your company, betting on it; and similarly, seeing investors with years of experience in the industry believe in your vision and trust you with their own money. That’s the beauty of entrepreneurship – it’s high risk but also very high reward.
