Eileen Burbidge has a lot on her plate.
Awaiting her arrival in Lantana, the Australian-inflected cafe just off the Old Street roundabout, I receive a texts apologising for a scheduling mix-up: “I’m such a numpty. I can see your opening line now: ‘She was half an hour late.’”
Agreeing a time and place to meet Burbidge can take perseverance. The number of phone calls and texts this encounter required to arrange this meeting would normally warrant a high-intrigue scoop, rather than brunch.
Fresh from two back-to-back days of Monzo board meetings, she arrives windswept (and half an hour late), dressed casually in jeans, a grey jumper and a blue puffer jacket.
Burbidge tells me she came close to cancelling today’s rendezvous — but managed to delete her WhatsApp messages before I could see them. She pleads forgiveness before our waiter, who smiles in my direction: “Don’t apologise to me, I wasn’t the one waiting.”
Chicago to London
Born and raised in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, Burbidge studied computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the alma mater of much of the so-called “PayPal mafia”, because it was the easiest option her parents presented her with.
“A lawyer, a doctor or an engineer: those were my three options,” she says, ordering a Nasi Goreng — a staple Southeast Asian rice dish — with a side of kimchi. I opt for the huevos rancheros with extra chorizo.
At university, Burbidge was a year below entrepreneur-turned-investor Marc Andreessen, who would later find fame as the founder of OG web browser Netscape and famed Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Netscape’s original iteration Mosaic was built by Andreessen and his colleague Eric Bina as a university project. “My mum actually saved his Time magazine cover so she could say to me: ‘Your schoolmate did this, why don’t you?’”
After graduation, Burbidge fluttered between American tech companies like Verizon and Apple, working as a product marketer on the latter’s ill-fated Newton MessagePad, a precursor to the iPhone that struggled to make ground with consumers.
In 2004, she relocated to London to work for the recently-launched Skype, but despite Burbidge's dedication (she regularly pulled up to three all-nighters a week) cofounder Niklas Zennström fired her around a year into the job.
While there’s no hard feelings, Burbidge admits it upset her at the time. “I think it’s fair to say like a lot of startups, HR isn’t a strong suit,” she says. “And yeah I think it could’ve been handled better. I’m sure I was really emotional at the time because of how much I’d invested.”
The 'Queen of British VC'
After staying in close contact with the Skype team, she helped its founding engineers conduct due diligence for their investment fund Ambient Sound Investments. The role enabled her to make inroads in the investment community at a time when the UK’s VC scene was a small drop in the ocean compared to the startup investment community elsewhere.
“There was only really Index, Accel and Balderton,” she recalls.
By 2011, she had set up her own fund and the UK’s first seed-focused VC, Passion Capital, was born. Passion is behind many of the biggest names in UK tech including neobank Monzo, payments fintech GoCardless and car insurtech Marshmallow.
As a VC, Burbidge has played a hands-on role in some of the companies she’s backed. She was interim CEO at business banking fintech Tide when its CEO and founder resigned, and helped weather the storm at Monzo when founding CEO Tom Blomfield step down and accountants raise repeated “going concern” warnings.
Of her willingness to step in for a company in trouble, Burbidge says: “It’s more than most investors would do but they were all exceptional cases."
Her CV suggests someone willing to get stuck in whenever needed. Outside of her stints at Monzo and Tide, Burbidge has served as both an advisor and ambassador for the UK government, chair of homegrown network Tech Nation — and now leads femtech company Fertifa.
The UK-based healthtech provides comprehensive reproductive health benefits and support for employees through their employers, a cause close to Burbidge’s heart.
“I’ve had terminations, I’ve had miscarriages and also I’ve also had multiple rounds of IVF now while trying to do what everyone else does, which is carry on working,” she says.
Burbidge’s influence and deep involvement across London’s tech industry has earned her the moniker “Queen of British VC” (search the phrase on Google and she’ll appear as the top result).
But for someone with so many impressive accolades, Burbidge is almost offensively self-deprecating, framing her success as the result of being in the right place at the right time: “I’m 100% here because of luck."
Going backwards
In the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, Silicon Valley tech giants like Meta, Google and Amazon have rolled back DEI initiatives in apparent attempts to ingratiate themselves with the returned US president.
Weeks before Burbidge and I meet, Trump has gone so far as to claim DEI initiatives were responsible for a deadly aircraft collision over the Potomac River that killed at least 67 people.
“What’s happening in America is crazy,” she says, tucking into her crimson red side of kimchi. “Not only does it feel like we’re going backwards, it feels like we’re being deliberately hurtful,” she says, describing Trump's comments as “genuinely unconscionable, irresponsible, hugely offensive and inappropriate”.
Passion Capital has earned a reputation as a progressive VC firm, prioritising inclusion and the diversity of founders. Burbidge tells me this was not intentional.
“We didn't set out to do that,” she says. “It wasn’t as if we thought ‘Oh, it’s really good that one of us is a woman or that one of us is an ethnic minority.’”
A full-time partner on four of Passion’s funds, Burbidge didn’t join the firm when it set out to raise for its new fund last year after deciding to step back in 2021. The firm subsequently hired three new partners as her replacement and earlier this year announced they hit the first close of their new fund.
Passion’s new leadership team is made up of four male partners, a change of guard from when it became London’s first female GP-founded fund at its inception.
“I would’ve loved it if the Passion brand would have continued to reflect a leadership position on that front but I’m not part of it so it is what it is” she says.
“I’m sure they’re gonna do a great job.”
Going solo
Before we leave Lantana, Burbidge tells me she’s planning to set up her own solo GP fund. If the plan comes to fruition, Burbidge’s fund would add to the growing number of first-time solo GPs raising capital at the moment.
We wrap up our brunch and pay for the bill, but her trademark snarl of self-deprecation comes roaring back: “Maybe this wasn’t juicy enough. Just thinking about it, wasn’t I quite boring?”
Four weeks later, I open my inbox to find a 1,000-word email from Burbidge, hoping to make clear a few points she hadn’t been able to articulate between forkfuls of kimchi. It turns out a tummy bug, subsequently passed onto her two young children, was largely to blame for her not feeling her best.
Burbidge says she wants a “do-over” now she’s feeling back to her old self. Even as the leader of a company focused on workplace support for reproductive health issues, she admits to maintaining a certain reticence around her own experience.
“At 53 years old, I'm very much perimenopausal,” she writes. “However, even with my role at Fertifa which is all about workplace support for reproductive health topics, it's interesting to me that when I thought my being unwell could potentially ‘just be hormonal’ or relating to perimenopause, I didn't feel comfortable to say that out loud (to you or anyone else).”
She adds: “I have no qualms admitting I had a bug which anyone, gender aside, could get — but that I felt sheepish about talking about something which ‘only’ women (51% of the population) will inevitably go through, whether they experience symptoms or not.”
Burbidge emphasises how proud she is of her work Passion Capital, and sounds optimistic about the firm’s future under the stewardship of cofounder Robert Dighero. “I'm still very tempted to stay in venture in order to be able to still invest 'professionally' and with some scale, and potentially raise a solo GP fund,” she says.
“I'm lucky because I've already had LPs indicate that they'd want to invest and back me, founders who have offered testimonials time and time again, and great entrepreneurs to whom I get introduced to invest and join their cap tables.”
