Jonas Ngoenha

Beazy

Co-Founder and CEO

Google

Amongst top 5% of applicants accepted for Google Black Founders Fund Europe 2022.
Thank you to Google for selecting us out of 700+ applicants to receive funding AND support 🙌 We could not be more thrilled!
€100K equity-free funding, €200K Google Cloud credits  and, most importantly, a 6-month acceleration program with the amazing Google team and mentors 🤩

Following Google’s commitment to building a more equitable future for everyone, Google for Startups created a $4 million Black Founders Fund and selected 40 exceptional startups from six countries in Europe who have been awarded up to €100,000 in equity-free cash, paired with up to €200,000 per startup in Google Cloud credits and support from experts at Google.

Check out what happens when you #FundBlackFounders → goo.gle/BFF

Google BFF Europe 2022 Recipient

Facebook Small Business Grants Recipient

The Berlin School of Economics and Law

Berliner Startup Stipendium Recipient

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Beazy has been awarded CHF10K as part of the Y-Grants by the EPFL.

EPFL Y-Grant Recipient

Social Impact Award

Beazy won the Social Impact Award Switzerland 2018 and got incubated at Impact Hub Lausanne & Geneva.

Social Impact Award Switzerland Winner

GreenHub

GreenHub is Berlin's newest Start Up Incubator focused on early-stage startups with a sustainable or socially impactful goal. We're looking for young startup tackling one (or multiple) of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
Starting January 2020, early stage startups will be selected every month to participate in our three months acceleration program in the heart of Berlin’s Proptech scene.
They have the opportunity to access key tools to grow successfully, including investment, expertise and mentoring.
I'm in charge of Marketing, Strategy and act as Event Manager as well.

Head of Marketing, Strategy & Event Manager

Wesser und Partner

Fundraiser and team manager

Co-Founder & CEO @ Beazy | Google BFF "22

I'm Jonas, the co-founder & CEO of Beazy 😄

I'm currently building Beazy, the operating system for the creative industry. It’s an all-in-one platform for teams to plan, produce and deliver content from start to finish 🚀

We make content production easy by bringing together brands, professionals, equipment owners and locations around projects and giving them the necessary collaborative tools to make their vision come to life! 📸

📈 We worked with amazing companies such as Zalando, H&M, Bolt, Pinterest, Gorillas, UrbanSportsClub, SAP, Bombinate, TaxFix, Babbel and many more
🌍 Created a community of creatives active in 150+ cities in 50+ countries
💻 Built an incredible fully-remote team
💸 Raised multiple successful rounds of funding from great investors!

📩 Feel free to get in touch with me at jonas.ngoenha@beazy.co

www.beazy.co

Former VC Investor - Now Supporting Tech Businesses Turn Strategy into Execution – Whilst Sharing Insight from Both Sides of the Fence

Hey!

I’m Kiran. I’m a VC investor by trade but I quit in 2024 as I knew I was an operator at heart and I wanted to be on the field, not watching and shouting from the sidelines.

In my time as a VC, I met hundreds of founders, deep dived on most sectors within enterprise SaaS and I invested into a dozen companies and sat on each of their Boards. When it comes to startups and scaleups, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

I founded Catenae in 2024 to support enterprise software businesses with their scaling plans. I undertake fractional Chief of Staff roles with my retained clients to help founders translate their strategy into repeatable execution whilst increasing their capacity and making sure the tasks that really move the needle get done. I also work as a coach and a mentor to those looking for less hands-on support but someone to soundboard their ideas, plans or problems with.

If you’re interested in working together on a retained basis, hit me with a DM. If you’d like to book in some coaching time, check out my Hubble page: https://www.hubble.social/kiranmehta.

Alternatively, if you just want some daily insights from one of the few people in the UK that has both investing and operational experience, hit that follow button and ring the bell.

Kiran Mehta

If I was raising a VC fund in the UK right now (not my current plan btw!) I would be solely focussed on single round investing at pre-seed, with zero capital held back for follow ons.

'Why?'

We all know the UK suffers from smaller exits than our US counterparts. We can argue on why and how to solve it but it won't change overnight, it'll take a 10 year cycle to change imo. The majority of the VC market is software and there's a very small amount of UK based software businesses that exit for £100m+.

Therefore, if you wait until Seed or Series-A, and valuations are £10m-£20m it's almost impossible to make venture level returns. You'd need >20% success rate just to return the fund. That's extremely difficult in my view.

However, if you're investing at pre-seed, you're talking valuations in the £1m-£3m range. That means you can realistically get 10x returns even on exits in the £10m-£50m region. You also have a chance of a runaway, of that £2m valued pre-seed deal doing 30x-40x.

The math just don't math on investing later stage for me.

'Why no capital held back for follow ons though?'

1️⃣ Sunk cost fallacy can kill your returns, I wouldn't want the ability to be able to follow on. I'd want to do one cheque, right out of the gate and live and die with the company being strong enough to attract external capital.

2️⃣ You will never ever get a better price than the first round, therefore every round you follow on is depleting your ability to hit the big returns.

3️⃣ If you're not following on, you don't need as bigger fund and therefore your own fundraising cycle should be quicker.

I'm taking a half step back from LinkedIn posting this year.

Whilst most people start the year thinking about what they can do more of, I'm going the opposite way, thinking about what I can do less of without effecting output.

When I started posting on LinkedIn regularly 3-4 years ago I worked for a VC fund in a super competitive market, I had no prior background in VC, no network and no credibility. I started posting daily to try and solve some of that, and it helped massively.

Roll forward to today and I think I've got some credibility, no longer work in VC anyway, have a solid set of regular clients and I honestly don't think I need to focus as much on the network growth and building a reputation, I just need to continue to maintain it in the most effective way.

I've always said I'll never outsource to a ghost writer or start using AI for my posts but at the moment daily is getting a bit unmanageable so I'm going to step back to just posting on weekdays, trying to have a full unplug on the weekends and giving myself some extra time and thinking space.

It isn't always about doing more, sometimes the way to jump forward is to do less things but do them ruthlessly well.

I often find founders start with a default assumption that they should be fundraising. Some of them are right but, in my experience, a greater proportion would be better off taking another route.

This week we look at how we got here (i.e. why is raising the default for so many), what it really takes to successfully fundraise in today's market and if being VC backed is really the right thing for you and your business.

Welcome to the Newsletter (Regular Readers Feel Free to Skip!) Welcome to Uncoventurenal, the newsletter where we look deeper than the quick headlines

Open article: Why Everyone Wants to Raise, Why Most Shouldn’t and a Decision Framework to Make the Right Decision for Your Business. by Kiran Mehta • 7 min read

Why Everyone Wants to Raise, Why Most Shouldn’t and a Decision Framework to Make the Right Decision for Your Business.

One of the things I think, and am hoping, we are going to see in abundance in 2026 is a reduction in the amount of software vendors that sell annual or multi-year commitments.

This isn't 2021 anymore, people aren't willing to tie themselves in to products that work today but could quickly be sub-standard, given the rate of innovation, in a couple of months.

I've never liked long term SaaS commitments, it drives poor behaviour internally in my opinion. If you've got a killer product and you're all in on continuing to improve it, stop leaving money on the table by locking customers out that won't sign up to a long term commitment, get them on a one month rolling contract and back yourself to continue to deliver.

Ever wondered what a typical VC due diligence process looks like and/or interested in my view on why I think the majority of the time due diligence destroys more value than it creates? Check out this week's episode of Unconventurenal!

Open article: What Does Investor Due Diligence Look Like and Why I Think Most of it is Value Destructive. by Kiran Mehta • 6 min read

What Does Investor Due Diligence Look Like and Why I Think Most of it is Value Destructive.

taplio

The Battle

Jonas Ngoenha

Kiran Mehta

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreKiran Mehta's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Jonas Ngoenha

Kiran Mehta

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Kiran Mehta's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreKiran Mehta's LinkedIn Performance