We had a brilliant dinner last night at Jamie’s Italian in Piccadilly, with the equally superb Matthew Bradley, an investor at Forward Partners, speaking on the topic of turning an idea into a valuable business within 12 months no less!

He started off by giving a quick run through on his background, including how he started his career in investment banking, followed by an MBA and setting up a business in sunglasses. This led to investing in some startups which is when he realised he’s better at investing than operating a business. Enter his latest role as investor at Forward Partners, an investment firm like few others.

Forward Partners invests in eCommerce at idea and seed stage (very few investors follow this particular business model), which means they look for solo founders, offering to back them up to £250k, throwing in warehouse space and access to their team too. With three partners, the rest of the team focus on helping their investment in marketing, legal, product and operations. Their purpose is to increase success.

Dinner covered their booklet, ‘The Path Forward’, which entails their framework for making an idea a fully fledged business. Matthew explained there are three steps (Read more about these steps here):

1. Idea Validation
2. Building a valuable product
3. Creating a valuable business

Matthew finished up the evening with an informal Q&A session covering everything from the definition of a co-founder, when you need one to Forward Partners’ specific criteria for investing and how much time until success and the exit plan should occur? Read all about these topics and more here.

We were joined by Pearlshare, MyFriendsRoom, Talented Group, Borne Agency, thebrunettecupcake.com, Trinity Capital, Jambo App, Iratel Ventures, OneLane App, Host Digital, Scrummy, Solely Original, Sports Philosphy, Food for Suits amongst others.

Special thanks to Matthew Bradley for providing a fantastic after-dinner talk.

Check out more of our dinners here.