I am early for my brunch with Rana Yared. But she is earlier.
It is, I learn over our hour together, entirely characteristic of the Balderton general partner; an investor who does due diligence on the board members of startups she’s considering investing in; values attentiveness and decisiveness and ensures that her calendar is never so full she can’t jump on a call with a founder who needs her or a founder she needs to get in front of.
Our rendezvous is the Daylesford Organic cafe in Notting Hill, the neighbourhood where Yared lives — and a regular haunt since the American first moved to London with Goldman Sachs in 2008.
“I lived on Queensway when it was grimier,” she says. “This spot used to be a treat for me.”
Nowadays, Yared’s more likely to be here on weekends with her four-year-old daughter. She’s clearly a regular; she asks after one of the waiters as we order mint tea (for her) and an americano (for me).
The next primes
Yared’s bread and butter is fintech — “I love it” — but her most recent investments have been into defence and security, and they’re taking up the majority of her time for now.
In May, she led a €160m Series C into autonomous drones startup Quantum Systems (Balderton’s first dip into defence tech), and in July, a €70m Series C into on-device cybersecurity startup Exein.
Does Helsing (Europe’s other great defence tech unicorn) come up much at board meetings, I ask? No, she says — and I almost believe her.
In Europe there will be a bunch of new primes
“In venture, we think there’s going to be one winner, one European defence tech winner. And I always remind myself that no-one thinks that way in the US, right? And the founders don’t think that way [here].”
“In Europe there will be a bunch of new primes,” she says; companies, like BAE Systems, that have big, direct contracts with governments. “Obviously I think that Quantum is going to be one of them, and I’d have to be fair and say I think Helsing is going to be one of them. After that, it’s hard to know.”
The contracts are already coming thick and fast. “We look at the revenue base that Quantum Systems has reported, and that’s a real revenue base, and it’s growing super fast. It’s not research dollars; they are paid to put materiel into the hands of people in the year that they recognise the revenue.”
Boards don’t run the company
Last time I bumped into Yared, she mentioned something intriguing: before investing into a company, she does due diligence on its board members.
She tells me she’s not sure if anyone else at Balderton does that too but, while at Goldman — where she worked for 14 years — she had a “really bad experience… where I wasn’t lucky enough to be surrounded by great board members” and doesn’t ever want to find herself in that situation again.
It reflects well on the founders if they’ve assembled a good board, she adds. “The best founders resist the urge to have giant boards. Along the way, they make sure that the board matches their moments” — having the balls to part ways with people who are no longer providing so much value.
Never forget: boards don’t run the company. Ever.
They also treat their board members as counsellors, not comptrollers — and use a board meeting “as a wisdom of the crowd session,” she says.
The best board members understand that dynamic too. “Never forget: boards don’t run the company. Ever.”
What else makes a good board member? “Attentiveness,” she says. “Continue to be curious about the industry the company is in even after you’ve made the investment… Read the board pack! Read them in advance. Come with non-basic questions. Be present if the founder needs you.
“Be attentive enough to have a softer touch; sometimes someone says X, but the tone, the manner, something gives you the feeling that you should dig a little bit deeper. If you’re always rushing, or you’re just transactional, you miss that signal… maybe that was the important signal?”
“Then decisiveness, because almost always boards are too slow on making whatever the big decision is, because we hope that three more months changes something, but often you’re not really going to get more data or whatever that thing is…”
Why am I still here?
For her own big decisions, Yared has a process. “Sit down and ask yourself: What is fulfilling to you at this point in your life? Are those criteria met based on what you are doing, and if you were ever to consider leaving, what are the places you would regret not calling?”
It’s an exercise recommended by her first boss, which she’s followed ever since. “This prevents you from something hitting you in the face… and you not going to the most optimal place.”
“So every year in November, away from bonus time and review season, I would open the Smythson notebook that I got when I was like 23, and look at those three questions. And over the years what fulfilled me changed — as it should. And that was the epiphany that I had when I decided to come to Balderton, that really what fulfilled me was spending my waking hours with companies, with founders, and with my own team, helping them to be great investors.”
At the time, that was not what she was getting from Goldman; after making partner, she found herself doing less and less investing.
“The more senior you get in big organisations, you [end up doing] ‘organisational community service’; you’re on this committee and that committee, and I found that most of my day was actually being spent as a partner in Clearing House Risk Committee, Investment Committee, I led recruiting from the University of Penn, my alma mater — and you add all that up and to do the stuff I really, really loved, I was doing it after normal working hours.”
She followed the answers to question number three. “I did go call and spend time with the three names I won’t share, that I had listed as places I would regret not calling.” One of those names was Balderton — but the other names weren’t all other VC firms, she says.
From New York to London
When Yared joined Balderton in 2020, as its first female general partner, and moved back from New York to London, we were living in very different times. The pandemic was raging — and Yared was “super pregnant”.
“I flew on the last day the doctors let me,” she says. Covid shut the embassies for a while, and as soon as they reopened, “I was in line at that fingerprinting spot in New York City, big belly, saying ‘I really need this visa!’”
She joined the firm, went on maternity leave four weeks later, and came back to work after six weeks.
Was that always the plan, I wondered? “Covid made it the plan.”
She and her husband were working from home — and it was impossible to get childcare under lockdown.
“But I think I got lucky; kids are much more interesting at two, and Balderton’s policy is that you can take your maternity leave at any time within two years. So I took it in the last three months before she turned two: swimming every day, playground every day… for me that was high joy in a way that diapers and bottles wouldn’t have been.”
The next generation
I have long given up hope of us ordering any food as the conversation returns to the cafe we’re sitting in.
“I have to be one of the biggest buyers of the organic flour at this store,” says Yared. She and her daughter bake on Saturdays, and any cakes made have to be taken into Balderton’s office near London’s Kings Cross on Monday morning “to make sure it doesn’t impact my waistline”.
(It’s the trajectory her 20-something self envisaged: she told the boss at Goldman who offered her her first job that she needed to think about the offer, because she was considering opening a patisserie.)
I’m liberal with the ‘no’
The handful of times I’ve met Yared before today, I’ve found her a tad intimidating — but 45 minutes into this conversation, I realise that’s probably just because she has a deep voice and is, as she puts it, “pretty straight”.
“I’m liberal with the ‘no’,” she tells me at one point, when I’m digging into how she manages her time.
“For me, the introduction of the kid really changed what was most important to me. I had a higher tolerance for garbage before, and now I’m like, I want to work in a place and be in a world where I incrementally make it more humane and better.”
As one of the few female partners at Europe’s biggest venture firms (Balderton raised $1.3bn across two funds last year), Yared gets asked to be a mentor, and sit on panels, a lot. Responding to requests for mentorship is easy, she says: “You just say to people, look, I mentor this many people, and I want to do it thoughtfully for each person, and I don’t want to disappoint you and everyone else by taking on more than I can.”
Panels are harder — and need to be really high impact to make sense for her.
“85% of my time should be finding the best companies, and making my companies the best companies,” she says.
The rest of her time, she thinks, should be dedicated to her colleagues. “Part of my job is to make the next partner from the team,” she says. (A spot may have just opened up — Balderton partner Colin Hanna announced his departure in July, but the team has yet to decide how to handle it, Yared says.)
“If you care about a firm outliving you as a partner, then you have to train people to someday be partners, and you don’t learn how to pick a great business, how to be a good partner to a founder, how to deal with the financing, how to do all the good and the bad things by osmosis…
“You have to be physically present in the room where it happens. And then you build your heuristic and you start to say, ‘I like this from this person, and this from this person. I’m going to do the following myself when I have the opportunity’.”
The Post-it notes
When it comes to investing, Yared has another notebook trick to keep her on track. If she had her current notebook (from Choosing Keeping Stationery in Covent Garden — they aren't all Smythsons), she says she could show me that there are Post-it notes inside the front cover, which she looks at every morning.
“One is my 2025 investment priority list, because lots of deals are going to hit you in the face throughout the year — lots — but you can sometimes be busy chasing something that’s not important and forget that these are the deals that you think are the winners in Europe.”
On that sticky note are 10 company names; startups she thinks will raise this year, or that she will want to preempt. “I look at it every quarter. I change it in case I need to.”
“The other Post-it is of things that are important but not urgent. It could be something like… May [Habib, CEO] at Writer [the San Francisco-based generative AI company Yared sits on the board of] is going to New York in August. She told me in June. And I want to make sure that I spend the time to get the most recent demo from them, and then to think about the people in New York that as a result of getting the most recent demo I want to make sure that I introduce her to well in advance of her showing up.”
Glancing at Yared’s watch, I realise we’re at time — and she needs to dash off. But before she does, I remember to ask her about something else she’d mentioned last time we met: did she pass her Life in the UK test (a key step towards earning permanent residency)?
She beams. Her Indefinite Leave to Remain had come through yesterday. “I’m here forever,” she says.
And how did she celebrate? “Strawberries and cream.”
The top image accompanying this article was created using ChatGPT.
