helena gagern & teddy schaumburg-lippe / embassy ventures

Fabri Cara: There's so many European founders coming to San Francisco and they're coming pretty early in their journey. I think people used to come later on when your company's more established race, like your CSA. And nowadays people are coming before they're even getting started because they want to know what globally the smartest people are doing in their space. And when you move somewhere halfway across the world from home, Even if you have an amazing network back at home, you're starting a bit from scratch, and you're only leaving a beautiful city like Paris or London to come here because of the people in San Francisco, right? That's the reason why we came here in the first place. This mindset, this people. And so you arrive and you ask yourself, Well, who do I meet now that I'm here? Season four, episode nine. Today we're talking to Helena and Teddy, GPs of Embassy Ventures, writing first checks into European founders. ⁓ Landing in the bay from a gorgeous private house in Pack Heights that serves as a home base and culture hub for the best European talent entering the SF ecosystem. This is probably going to be one of the best performing European pre seed funds of all time. ⁓ Sunwood, tell us more about this one. Yeah, Helena and Teddy are building the firm that I think they wish they had when they first arrived to San Francisco from Europe. There's this idea that they keep going back to, which is that every single founder has an inflection person. Someone who changes the entire trajectory of what they're building. And the embassy is designed to manufacture these collisions. They're writing first checks into the founders that they believe in, and the house is strictly invite only. They've turned down VCs offering big checks to place a founder because the quality just wasn't there. And everything that they do is optimized for one thing, which is getting the best European founders in the room with the people who can actually change the trajectory in a better way of. Let's get into it. Hey Helena Teddy, welcome to the Slice Pod, where we uncover the stories of fresh emerging managers across the early stage venture landscape. The two of you are founders and GPs of a $15 million fund, writing checks into European founders landing in San Francisco through the embassy that you guys run in Pack Heights. Helena, do you want to start us off? How did you get here? Take us all the way back. What was your first foray into tech? Yeah. course. And first of all, thank you so much for having us here. It's great to see you again. I actually kind of started six, seven years ago, with exactly this move of European founders coming to SF. That's where my career started. So my first job out of college was helping a German unicorn called Flixbus expand to the US. I'd never actually been to America, but I had this idea of like I really want to go to America and just work there. And so I arrived for the first time ever in America on a Friday and on Monday started my job. And we were like five people in in the office growing the American market. And it was a incredible kind of lesson in terms of what's different about Europe than here and how European companies and founders can also win in the US. From there, I was doing business development, but I really wanted to understand how the actual technology worked. I hadn't studied anything technical at college. And so I went back to London, taught myself how to code, ended up in product management. And from there kind of got deeper and deeper into the tech ecosystem and into the startup ecosystem because as a product manager I was working at a public company, but then I got scouted by an incubator entrepreneur first. So I joined them to build a startup there. And while I actually met my co-founder elsewhere, and I'll come back to that in a second, you know, I learned a lot of things at that incubator around like what is the right environment for startups to thrive and like What are things I really enjoyed and what are things that you know I would have loved to have differently. And my co-founder, she came from Palantir and had been like figuring out what to build next. And we met super serendify at a hackathon, spent two dinners together. We're like, this is interesting. And then flew to Austria, which is where I'm from, spent two weeks locked into a house to try out whether we get on and like test each other and this like village with no people around us. And yeah. That worked out well. And so I then started spending time in San Francisco. And that was straight after COVID. ⁓ and our investors were based out here and we were in crypto and things worked for a while and th things didn't work for a while. We made a lot of mistakes as well, I would say, that I've learned from. And ultimately we ended up shutting down a company and I wanted to go again. I was like just not done at all. And I knew that the place to do that would be here and I would have to relocate full time. I think it was the time where San Francisco started becoming super magnetic again after that downturn after COVID. Whilst I was figuring out what's next, working with a couple of potential co founders, Teddy, who has been my friend for the last ten years and we used to live next to each other in London and all we have a lot of stories, moved to San Francisco too, and we kind of were the closest friends from home for each other here. And so that's where the embassy started and we'll get back into that later. But that's basically the story from The beginning to hear. I love it. How about you, Teddy? What was your first foray into tech? My background was originally in the military. I saw something that aspired to my passions, which was the cross-cultural infection. And I saw a lot of people in the British military that I thought were people that inspired me, you know, with their deep confidence. I noticed that they went to a military academy called Sandhurst and then I went back to Germany and I realized that such an opportunity and the same kind of training wasn't available to them. So I spent Years convincing German and British Army High Command through to politics and ministries of defense, trying to convince them that we need a German-British military exchange, to which I was denied many times. This was one year of trying to do it as a civilian. Then I joined the German military, went through basic training, tried to work my way from the inside out. At some point, the Brits said, Yes, this is a great idea. I went to the Germans, and even though they were the ones who would arguably benefit more from this, they said no. And Eventually I got there. I met a champion who was a general that just so happened to eat, you know, for his birthday at a restaurant in my local town and I convinced him that this was something that we should be doing and he pushed this forward from his side. I learned two things. The first one is you need a champion and they're few in Europe. And the second one is that ⁓ Europe is unfortunately structured in such a way that opportunities are discarded because things haven't been done before. I guess the reason why I got into tech was shortly thereafter I Was starting to ask myself, who are the people that are most able to affect change outside of regulation? And those people inevitably would be founders because they identify problems they solve for them. And the ones that had the largest scale impact were the ones that were tech founders because their products had the largest scale influence on larger masses of people. And the next question from there was obviously, where are these tech founders in Europe? I went on sort of a mission to discover them. I realized that the environment for them was relatively difficult that also culturally there wasn't as much as many proponents of tech founders in Europe as there were, for instance, in the US. And somewhere after COVID in 2023, I went over to San Francisco after I had kind of found different people in Europe and organized residencies. Places where 40 founders, researchers, academics, whatever it is, would come together into one place in Germany and for three weeks co-build and co-create. And that taught me an enormous amount around Creating these containers in which they can facilitate more. And it also showed me that within these walls, you could create a unique type of culture that ultimately amplified their work. That was, you know, not otherwise seen in London or Berlin and so forth. So when I did come to San Francisco in 2023, I noticed this whole city is an ecosystem of people that are propelling each other forward. So the obvious next question was: how can you support the Europeans that are here in town to achieve some sort of success and have the willingness to collectively change things back at home again when they might be more resourceful or when they might have achieved success ⁓ and experienced what it is like working amongst like-minded individuals. Helena and I ran into each other precisely at the same intersection of our lives and and that was the onset of the embassy. And we'll get into more of the embassy, but Helena, I actually want to go back to something that you shared in your story. I'm picking up where you were kind of in search of This third space when you went back home and started building in the web three space, which is borderless by design, it felt like when you couldn't physically be in the US, you were still searching for a place outside of Europe. Did you always grow up thinking that you would leave Europe? And Teddy, same for you, or did you come at this from a a little bit of a different angle? I grew up in a lot of places. When I was fifteen, I I lived in Mexico for a while. I almost went to school in Spain. I switched schools a lot. There's just like I think a bit of like restlessness and searching for what's next. But I never really thought that much about where I would live. I think the place wasn't the defining parameter for where I wanted to be. It was more just following where the opportunities are going. And I think I realized very early in my life. When I was actually still in college, but a death in the family. And for me, what that really brought about was I just realized that life can be super short. And I think I had that realization like maybe a bit earlier, like stronger than others. I was like, I love working. I'm really happy when I work. But but obviously not every work makes you happy. Some is really boring. But I was like, okay, I'm I'm not happy if I don't work. So just sitting around doing nothing is not gonna be the solution for happiness. But also life is short and sitting around in an office at twelve hours a day and not enjoying what you do is not worth it for me. And so I feel like up until the point of the embassy, my life was defined by figuring it out of like what is the thing that I'm put on this planet to do where it fulfills me and where I'm adding value in this world. And I think that that led me to all these different places more so than thinking about whether I should be in Europe or not. I'd never thought three times about what location I'm in, if I'm honest. And the move to SF was just I knew deep down that the the most ambitious and inspiring people are here and there's this mentality of helping each other that I couldn't find in Europe. And so that was why I came here. But I have to admit that when I started coming here straight after COVID, I really didn't like SF compared to a city like London, you know, where there's so much going on and it's so diverse and You know, SF after COVID obviously was was very, very quiet. ⁓ I I wasn't immediately in love. Once I saw it, I you know, that week I had the moment of the people are insanely interesting here and fascinating, and this is the type of people I want to be surrounded by. And that week I was like, Okay, I'm moving. I know that you guys have been friends for ten plus years and have known each other for quite some time, but when was the point where you realized that you were going to build something together? What did you guys see in each other at that point in life that made you think, okay, this is the person that I Something like this with. I mean, the weird thing is that both our paths converged from individual sides, right? Helena was talking a little about her experience in San Francisco. My experience in San Francisco was not too dissimilar as you know, somebody who was looking for people that somebody who always had creative ideas and was trying to push it through and was met with lots of barriers. And there was a lot of yes, but in the way when I was back in Europe coming over here to San Francisco, as soon as you threw an idea into a conversation, the answer was yes and. We've been friends throughout the years. It's like, ⁓ my God, you're also here. You're also here. Yeah, exactly. And then at some point, what we said, like, why don't we do like a dinner? I had been talking to all these Europeans. You're also working with a bunch of European founders. And we're like, well, why don't we organize a dinner? We'll just bring the best of them together. And then the idea at the time was why is there nothing pan-European? Why does always have to be the German or the French ecosystem? It should be pan-European. Because the Germans would definitely benefit of Italian food and the Brits would definitely benefit of a little bit of something of a little bit of inspiration so forth. And so we just put together a list of the coolest restaurants in town and threw together the best founders that we knew. And they loved it. They got really inspired by this idea. There was a WhatsApp group chat. We were a little bit surprised, frankly, by just how much momentum there was behind this idea of just putting Europeans together as a continental community. I remember at some point Helena went back to Europe and she was wandering through the mountains with her mom. And I in the meantime was also sitting here just thinking the whole time, every single time with this question, where are the Europeans at? Talking to Europeans, trying to understand, are you ever going home? What is your vision for the future? Helena texted me almost like simultaneously and was like, I can't get this thought out of my head. This thought that we have like a responsibility towards the Europeans, and I can't get it out of my head. And I texted her back and I said, Yes, same here. And so, you know, these dinners grew and originally it was just like a fun community. We wanted to do a newsletter. We We were gonna call Euro Trash magazine around like what's happening in town and what kind of information are we getting from the community and so forth. And then we co-organized this dinner where two friends of mine that were like Michelin Star chefs were in town, and we were like, Hey, why don't we just like put together the 30 like most reputable people on the bay and organize this kind of wild dinner, which we called boiler room chefs. The idea was that you were embedded in a kitchen. With these chefs and they're like these punk rock guys. And they would kind of like bully guests and have them cut the zucchini. And there was like different floating ⁓ food. And it ended up we had a total turnout rate, a hundred percent. And everybody stayed there on a Monday night until like one in the morning or so. And the next morning, exhausted from the organization of that dinner, and Helena having landed freshly just the night before, ahead of the dinner from Europe, we kind of sat down in a cafe. And I will never forget that moment because that was like when everything reached a boiling point and we sat in this cafe called the Beanbag Cafe on the Visadero. And around us were these pairs of people and they had napkins out and they were discussing their future dreams. And it was almost like, you know, a a restaurant, like a romantic restaurant for co-founders. And Helen and I were in the middle of it. And we pulled out our napkin and we're like, right, I think we got to do something more seriously together. Let's start thinking of ideas. And the next from that napkin, the next week was us sitting in a co-working space on a whiteboard and just mind mapping every word that came to mind with different topics around Europe, around what does something more permanent like this potentially look like? There's like we need to do something, but I think then the idea of the embassy was born fairly fast. And that basically the insight there was there's so many European founders coming to San Francisco. And they're coming pretty early in their journey. I think people used to come later on, you know, when your company's more established to race, like your CSA. And nowadays people are coming before they're even getting started because they want to know what like globally the smartest people are doing in their space. And when you move somewhere halfway across the world from home, even if you have an amazing network back at home, you're starting a bit from scratch. And you're only leaving a beautiful city like Paris or London to come here because of the people in San Francisco, right? That's the reason why we came here in the first place. It's like this mindset, this people And so you arrive and you ask yourself, Well, who do I meet now that I'm here? And we're both to some extent a bit like history geeks. My mother is actually a a historian and I grew up with all of these stories from her around when she was ⁓ our age or even younger, you know, and she was as a journalist going to St. Petersburg in Russia. And she was staying at the embassy with the Austrian ambassador for weeks. And at the dinners she met all the business leaders and politicians from across Europe. And so my image of embassies was like this extremely glamorous place where you would meet the most important people in the world at that dinner. That was the image I grew up with. But the reality is when you first go to an embassy nowadays, in most cases, you know, it's a it's not quite that anymore. It's you're going there to get your passport stamped or something like that. And so we thought that it was a very cool concept that if you're going from country X to country Y and you are interesting in doing great things, That there is this place that represents you where you meet all the relevant people from that country. And we thought, well, why don't we recreate that, but privatized and without any government involvement, and we make it cool and we make it like relevant for tech founders. And so that idea kind of of the embassy, that's how it was born. I love how this is such a natural extension of the two of you. I think it makes so much sense why you guys are building it the way you are. And also I think it would be so iconic if you guys did end up doing the Euro Trash magazine. After that couple week experiment, doing dinners together and meeting a bunch of different founders across Europe, there's the house. And we've been there, it's really special. It's unlike any other place I've seen for founders to really land and meet each other. And I absolutely love the story of how you guys found it. Can you share it with us again? There's actually been two houses. The first house, Teddy found, like literally a couple of weeks after we first had this brainstorm, maybe like two weeks, it was super fast. It was really fast. And he calls me and he's like, Hey, I have a house, seven bedrooms for free in rationale. Because we had sort of like decided that we were gonna do this. We had insisted that the house is to be extraordinary, because otherwise it's not an embassy. And we sort of like went out, we found three sponsors very quickly, and then found our founders and told them when the movement date is, and then we didn't have a house. And so at some point we realized that the house where we did this event, the boiler room chefs, is kind of the perfect place. And so I called them up. The problem was they were, you know, they're close friends and they're amazing and they live in there with their company. So try and get these guys to move out for two weeks. It's probably not the best idea. And I called them and I said, What would it cost theoretically? They're like, We don't need money, no. And so I said, Yeah, but theoretically, what would make it worthwhile your time? And they said, Well, you know We would benefit of some introductions that we know you guys have. And so maybe we can put together a short list of people that you guys introduce us to. And I said, let's talk. And so lo and behold, it also happened that coincidentally there was something that they could have gone to in like India or so that they were supposed to do. So they moved the whole house out. I came in four days beforehand. Like two days. With yeah, two days beforehand with a bunch of warefrow orders and a bunch of task rabbits that went and furnished the whole place because it was mostly mattresses on the floor. And turned it into like a livable space. And then these founders came in for two weeks. And then after these two weeks of us experimenting around how do we make sure that they get more of the things that they currently need, even though we appreciate that they're founders and they know what's best for them. It was such a success that inevitably the broader community and group said, we got to do it again. And so that's when we were like, okay, well, we can't ask our friends to move out of this house again. ⁓ we got to actually find a I looked through Airbnb and put together a wish list of places that would be really nice. We both dreamed of a place on Embassy Row, you know, that that kind of like mimics an embassy. We kind of manifested it because this place that we found here was a place that I got in touch with the owner and she then met Helena, who came over here and charmed her socks off, and fell in love with this vision that we had for these people to have a home in the bay. We moved in and we've had a really close relationship with her ever since. She ended up moving to New York, where she lived across the street from like my mother, who was living there at the time, and then they started connecting and becoming best friends and now it's all family, you know. You guys are creating such a good community around you and always connecting the right people to each other. Going deeper into the embassy as it exists today, for someone who is listening who's never been or heard of the embassy yet, which is I know by design, but what does the house do that lets you see these founders that a Zoom call necessarily can't and what goes on inside the house? It's the house the way it looks, like huge. actually black house, which is crazy, across four or five floors. And it feels like an embassy, as Teddy said. What the house lets us doing is first and foremost, we are still an embassy, although we now have a fund and we invest. But this concept of can we be this hub for great Europeans to come together and when they're new to town be their kind of first touch point still is like at the core of what we do. And so What goes in at the house is very similar to that. So we actually kind of play ambassadors and we invite incredible people for very small things, almost like a salon in Paris in the like eighteenth century, to have great discussions. So when we first did the first pop-up embassy at the at the other house, you know, first ever guest was Carl Henderson, who started Slack. And we just kept inviting these people that can open doors and that really have like a story to share in terms of the the great things they've built. And on the other hand, we would also invite a lot of founders that maybe are not like household names yet, but that are totally on the rise. And if you're in the North San Francisco, you'd know they're they're fantastic for whatever one reason or multiple. And we host very small dinners quite often. Normally we fly over chefs from Europe, which is kind of like a fun thing we've we've discovered is actually quite economical and just way more fantastic. They came over here with their first time in California and they're so excited to just make use of the produce. They would go hiking and find like the right flour and like a wild art to show and then incorporate that into a fifteen course meal. And what that allows us to do is a couple of things from like a, you know, embassy perspective, is it allows us to create an experience where guests really want to stay for a while. We create environments where founders can really meet this person that becomes what we call an inflection person. You have inflection points at the beginning of a company's life or any time in your life really, but most of the time those inflection points at the beginning of a company's life are propelled by people that literally change the course on the trajectory of what you're doing. I think for other people who hear dinner, it's a very different type of dinner that you guys host in the embassy. You do more so like sitting plans. You put founders next to potential customers on purpose and I know you've mentioned seeing how they interact with others at the dinner table, kind of like live diligencing. The embassy is based on the premise that any other embassy is based on it. And you know, if you look at these dinners, much like with salons in the past, the way that an individual is able to communicate with somebody else who would add a lot of value, in this case, maybe investors or partners, ultimately defines, you know, how likely they're going to succeed in the future. And so Our skills here are put to use simply by understanding how people operate. And what we're looking for is we call them opportunity compounders because, you know, in this day and age, being a founder is as sexy as it used to be being a banker back in the 80s. And so the city is not restricted on the amount of extraordinary talent that comes here. There's a lot of brilliant people and everything's moving extremely fast. What we believe is that the people who come here who will ultimately dominate are the ones who are inherently able to make And compound opportunities. So a founder that goes in and meets a customer or an investor or somebody who in any way is relevant to their company is, if they are an opportunity compounder, able to get two, four, five more intros or pathways that they can sort of take. And that compounds, right? That's just like an enormous amount of mass that accumulates if they are that kind of individual that's able to do this. And so we think that these dinners showcase that quite well because you'll see how they interact with other people. You see What the next few days look like as well beyond the dinner, and how they are able to sort of take the trajectories from one to two, three, four, but also across multiple parallels. And I think that there is also something around particularly founders coming from Europe that may have experienced a tougher time building something in Europe during their time, that they find ways around issues extraordinarily well because they've had to do that in the past. And then over here that's just amplified because if you had to accumulate resources. by any hacking mean necessary in order to make your business succeed in Europe, then come over here and throw a ton of opportunities at these founders. They will, of course, make outsized impact based on these opportunities that they're given. You guys have so much intention behind all that you do at the embassy as well and the people that you were curating in one room. And I think it's really reflective of how you both came to America and now you're building what you wish you had in a way. And that's very apparent. I think the best analogy for what we're doing or the best visual image for it is the imagine you're coming to a SF from wherever, somewhere far away, and it's your first time here and imagine Paul Graham as your uncle and he obviously has a beautiful house and you know, happens to have a chef because why not? You get to stay there and during the day you're off on your own. He's there if you need some advice in terms of how to do things, but he's not gonna run a program and tell you what to do every single day. But then some nights he might invite over some of his friends and some great people and you meet kind of these incredible people that you've only heard about online and yourself and they open your eyes for new things. And that's the feeling that we want to recreate as like you come into a private home that's very well connected and where you feel at home, but you also really meet these kind of inflection people. Yeah, 100%. And there's something special about a home setting as well, right? Like the conversations you have around the kitchen. Are different from the conversations you might have if you find yourself in a restaurant that you've never been to before with people you've never met. It can be a little intimidating, but there's something so cozy about having it at a house. Yeah, and that's exactly what what we always say as well. And for example, in terms of the rooms, we have five rooms and most of the time it's early stage found us staying there. But we do let some other people that we think are great additions to the network stay too. So for example, Fabian, one of the lovable founders, stayed here for a couple of nights. And being able to wake up with a person like that and talk to them and really build a relationship versus meet them at some networking event is a total game changer. And so we think like the private home, having rooms, having this like lots of different spaces to retreat to is exactly kind of the space that's that's missing in SF right now. What started as dinners in programming And a bunch of European founders, UX Unicorn founders, turned into a fund. What was the moment that you decided that this needs an investment vehicle alongside it? Were you always thinking that this would be a piece of it, or was it something that you guys started exploring as the times went on? For us, right, the mission was helping the best Europeans win here in SF. And that is still very much true. And so We were thinking about how do we sustain that? Because last year we didn't take a salary like for basically a year in order to be able to provide this for founders. And we never charge a founder for anything, right? This is always free. Because what we want to select founders based on is not their ability to pay, but, you know, their quality. And, you know, we were thinking about different business models and all of them would have threatened founder quality. Doing a fund was the one that was really aligned with the incentives of finding the very, very best people. So it makes sense from the beginning. We held off for quite a while though because we really wanted to refine the model and figure out what our unique strengths and how does that translate into a fund model. We then last year pre-fund had my company go from total inception, there was no company, they were deciding whether they should work together to a six hundred and fifty million variation in five months. And so we then saw like, okay, the model works in the sense that the founders we attract exactly the type of founders that we want to invest into. And when those founders came to us and were like, guys, it is crazy that you are like small angel investors and don't have a fund and are not our like bigger first backers because you added so much value to us. That's when we knew that now was the right time to actually launch the fund. For us at SLICE, we don't really believe in funds that scale in size, but more so the funds that compound. And compounding for a fund like yours would look like a line out the door, not necessarily like a bigger AOM number. The managers we get most excited about are are the ones where demand outpaces capacity and they hold the line anyway. What's the plan for the future of the embassy? Is it more houses? Is it the same house? How are you two thinking about where the embassy goes from here? There is a clear answer that San Francisco as it currently stands and will obviously adapt if the situation changes, is still the top place for tech talent, period. And so the embassy being a house in San Francisco that supports these founders entering the ecosystem is at least to our current standing where we want to remain. What we want to do better is figure out how we can use the value of our community and our inherent skills in understanding people, in supporting our founders better and better over time. What does the future look like? There's lots of ideas in the room. There's many ideas of not embassies around the world necessarily, but more outposts that allow us to accumulate more relevant network in other places that allow us to incentivize some of the later stage people that may not be investable companies abroad to contribute their unique network to this mission and to support our founders. Not necessarily as a feeder or anything like that, but more so that the founders who are already members of our community and who are European can benefit of all the different other resource accumulators that we have around the world. That's kind of where we're going with this. And so we do see some sort of presence potentially emerging in Europe or maybe even other places, represented by what we might call attaches. And those attaches then, you know, are both members of the community, representatives of the embassy to some degree. But most importantly, mentors, supporters, and people who have a network that can further all the ambitions of our founders. That is everything that we're every sort of decision point, every mental model around vision and future is around how can our founders succeed more? How does this feedback into a community that adds value to the European ecosystem? And how can the diaspora as it currently is beginning to form become a bigger powerhouse? across the innovation ecosystem more so than it currently is. Thank you guys so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Really respect and admire what you guys are building at the embassy. It's such a natural extension of who you both are, having gotten to know the both of you. And I'm really excited for where this goes and where it falls. And whatever shift it decides to take, I know that it will be full of taste. So thank you again. Thank you so much. And you've just listened to yet another episode of the Slice podcast, where we uncover the stories of fresh emerging managers across the early stage venture landscape. Next time we're joined by someone who made 80 angel bets before he could even rent a car legally and unsupervised. And ⁓ he just raised his first fund ⁓ to back the AI native generation. Some people call him the heat-seeking missile of Woodside, if I remember correctly. Anyway. Make sure you're subscribed to our podcast on slice.com slash podcast. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast these days. Thank you, Sunwoo, for producing yet another beautiful episode of the show. And for all of you who tune in for every episode. See you next time.