It’s been a good week for dinners this week, first off we had Caroline Harding-Gelbard of Paperless Post on growing your business, followed by Lawrence Barclay from DN Capital talking to us about what he looks for in the companies he invests in. Here’s the low down:

Planning for international growth
As always, this was a relaxed and friendly TableCrowd dinner at Lima Floral in Covent Garden, where Caroline Harding-Gelbard spoke enthusiastically about international growth and gave an insight into what you should and shouldn’t do. It may well sound like an obvious statement, but one of her best pieces of advice was to,

Go where the demand is!

This means choosing a country or area for a better reason than, “because it is big”. For more of her tips, take a look here.

Dinner with early stage investor from DN Capital
Lawrence Barclay joined his fellow diners at Aubaine in Dover St, where he provided a comical and honest approach to his talk after dinner. He immediately charmed the room by announcing that he’d just written his notes on the back of a business card!

Introducing DN Capital as a Tech-interested venture capital firm with a fund of €150m, Lawrence spoke of his personal background starting in big tobacco before moving into pharmaceuticals. Lawrence then entered consumer investing, at which point, he briefed the table on what he would expect to see from an investment meeting, starting with stating:

We need to look for businesses that have multi-billion dollar potential

So, what matters to Lawrence?

• The team – the average horizon is 8 years so it’s important to work with great people; their track record is important
• Market
• Product
• What terms of investment are you willing to accept?
• Passion – it’s key. You HAVE to be obsessed with what you are doing
• Empathy
• Humility

As a final note, Lawrence recommended Take Eat Easy, a new company he’s investing in that’s expanding across Europe. Our speakers were joined by: SaaScribe Media, Clocked, RATP Dev UK, Digital Score, The Partners, Klusstr, Compare and Share, EarlyBird, eRentz, Torsion Information Security, S-Company, Zoom Labs, Product Hunt, Kiwi Girl, London Early Years Foundation, Wicked Uncle, and EarlyBird amongst others.

Special thanks to our speakers Caroline Gelbard-Harding and Lawrence Barclay, along with our partner Wellers.

Check out the upcoming TableCrowd dinners and see when you’ll be joining us for dinner.