Kitty Mayo was planning to spend a month in spring relaxing on the beach in Sicily, shouldering past fellow tourists in cobbled alleyways and sipping Italian wine, on a month-long break from her role as an investor at Entrepreneurs First.
But a phone call from Harry Stebbings, the founder of VC firm and media group 20VC, put all that on hold. He offered her a job as head of Project Europe, a startup accelerator aimed at unearthing and championing the best of the continent’s tech talent.
Mayo cancelled her vacation, accepting a role that would catapult her into the public eye overnight.
Project Europe, an early-stage fund backed by around 200 entrepreneurs and VCs, was announced in March to great fanfare — and some cynicism. Its mission: to help European founders build, and crucially, scale tech companies.
Mayo, a relative unknown in the wider tech sector, was unveiled as CEO of the new venture.
Sitting across from me on a raining June morning at the Daisy Green cafe in Marylebone — one of a chain of Australian eateries seemingly very popular spots for Sifted brunch guests — Mayo is characteristically chirpy about her upended travel plans.
“The timing was kind of perfect,” Mayo says. “I was already looking for my next thing, thinking of setting up my own fund or leaning harder into the talent side of things, and then Harry reached out.”
The whole process from first contact to being offered the role took weeks — and a couple of calls and dinner with Stebbings. “It was pretty quick”, she says with a grin. Sicily would have to wait.
From the classroom to EF
Mayo didn’t have a typical route into tech. She studied French at University College London before taking up a job as a teacher at the Michaela Community School, dubbed “Britain’s strictest” and covered widely in UK media.
It was a role that saw her leave after a term in which she lost weight due to stress, but Mayo, as she does throughout our conversation, reaches for the positives.
“It was absolutely amazing in many ways, the kids went on to phenomenal outcomes,” she tells me, as we pour over the menu in the shabby chic, pastel-painted basement. “And it was a culture of radical high ambition for kids who didn't necessarily have people who set high ambitions for them or expected.”
But there was a lot of pressure on teaching staff, many of whom were under 30. “Every single lesson I ever taught, there's someone sitting at the back of the classroom giving me feedback,” she says. “You’d get criticism on two sides of A4 paper every single lesson taught.”
She retrained as a software engineer after taking a coding bootcamp course at Le Wagon in 2019. It was there she met Entrepreneurs First founder Alice Bentinck, who Mayo interviewed in a fireside chat.
“I thought she was phenomenally cool,” she tells me. “I just wanted to work for her whatever she was building.”
Mayo’s first role at EF involved sourcing founders for the programme. “I spent days just going through Linkedin and actually getting kind of obsessed about it. You can learn so much from someone’s online profile.”
After 18 months on the recruitment side of EF, Mayo moved to work more directly under Bentinck on the product that is Entrepreneurs First’s cohorts. The waiter emerges and we order. Mayo goes for the avocado on charcoal sourdough and me the house granola.
“YOLO career move”
The conversation turns to Mayo’s second short stint in a role — leaving EF to take up a head of growth role at alumni company Rally.fan, which at the time was building a web3 infrastructure platform helping creators and brands mint NFTs.
“It was around the time of the Web3 boom, it was a real YOLO career move,” she says. “I really rated both founders and was looking for something new.” The bright lights of being on the “frontline” of tech appealed after spending time doing "ancillary back office roles” at EF.
It didn’t last. “I was trying desperately to figure out ways that I could care about it, because I love art,” Mayo tells me, before adding: “There was a world in which I was going to be an artist.”
Mayo still goes through intense periods of painting portraits, she says. “I’m bad at being a hobbyist. I’ll paint a lot and then get too frustrated at only being able to do it at a limited level.”
Mayo left Rally after six months — and EF invited her back. “Interestingly it helped me realise I love the work of architecting and don’t really mind about having the glory.”
At EF Mayo helped launch a cohort for people coming straight from university, before broadening her focus to help running other cohorts, mentoring individual teams and helping them generate ideas.
“It’s an amazing organisation,” Mayo says, adding there’s a “glossy” idea of VC where you build a good brand and then just swoop in and do deals. “What you learn from EF is that some of the highest value work is in building these very deep relationships with brilliant people at an early stage.”
Project Europe
Mayo’s most recent move made her a household name among early-stage founders in Europe.
Project Europe is backed by 200 European entrepreneurs, including founders of Klarna, Mistral, Synthesia and ElevenLabs, alongside investment firms like 20VC, German VC Point Nine and New York investor Adjacent.
The €10m vehicle is supporting founders under 25 by providing mentorship and investing in 10-20 of them a year, offering €200k in exchange for 6.66% equity.
But what was EF — which also focuses on helping founders develop startup ideas and gives pre-seed funding to the best — missing that meant there was space for Project Europe?
Mayo bristles at the question. “I mean, all these things can coexist. Something I am slightly frustrated with is this Europeanism of trying to figure out the conflict between things [...] Shooting things down and creating these impossibilities with everything that’s being built.”
EF and Project Europe, she says, are both needed in the European ecosystem. The former exists to help people who know they want to build companies but don’t have the network or resources to do so.
“Project Europe exists for people who are not pre-idea, but are probably too fixated on their one thing to do an EF cohort.”
Mayo points to an example of a person she’s currently considering backing. “She’s been building computer brain interfaces for robotic control, and she’s been obsessed with this since she was 13 years old.”
That would make it difficult for her to do an EF cohort because the pool of cofounders who could be involved with a project like that would be very small, says Mayo.
And there is a world where Project Europe would invest in companies coming out of EF, she tells me. “There’s no scarcity of great talent in Europe, it’s not like we’re fighting tooth and nail.”
It was February when she got the first outreach from Stebbings. “We had a couple of calls, had dinner and talked it through. Harry is a very high commercial person and he builds quickly. The degree to which he was all in on this aligned very well with what I was thinking of doing.”
Mayo was at the time considering launching her own fund. “I wanted to be able to do something very intensive, around people who have phenomenal ideas and are destined to either build transformational technologies or burn out in a blaze of glory.”
The fact the fund had “such a swell of support” from the European ecosystem, Mayo says, influenced her decision to take up the role.
Backlash
But not everyone got behind the fund, and Project Europe drew a sizable backlash on social media.
Some investors and founders queried whether Europe needs more seed funding — many in the sector point to the biggest gulf with the US tech sector as the lack of growth stage capital. Others questioned how different the model was from other accelerators around the world and criticised the age limit.
“I got less support than I was expecting from the wider ecosystem,” she says, before darting back to the positives and acknowledging that some people were "phenomenally helpful”. “But some of the most prominent posts about Project Europe were knocking it rather than supporting it.”
Some of the loudest criticism came for the lack of gender representation among the partners, investors and mentors in the fund. Just five of the initial 150 individuals LPs announced were women and two of the 10 partners in the fund are women.
“Understandably, there was a large amount of frustration from female investors and female builders that they continue to be underrepresented in these spaces,” Mayo says. “But the thing I found somewhat galling was that people seemed to miss me in the ‘run by men, for men’. I was like: ‘I’m running it and I’m a woman’.”
Project Europe did move to remedy the situation. Out of the 200 investors in the fund today, 27 are women. But why was it so difficult to get women involved from the start? I ask.
“Candidly, these networks depend on who’s in the WhatsApp chats,” she tells me. “Because the team started with quite a strong male presence, that has network effects.”
Getting Mayo involved brought a more women-focused network she says. “Most of the people I spend my time with are my female friends in the space, so I have access to totally different networks.”
Scaling Europe
There are broadly two schools of thought around the future of European tech among investors.
One says startups will always struggle to build companies that reach global scale in the region, losing out to a US market which has far less commercial fragmentation and far more capital.
The other is the techno-optimists view: that it’s just a matter of time before European startups crack scaling and more funding pours into the region.
Mayo, unsurprisingly, is firmly in the latter camp. In many ways, the Project Europe chief is the archetypal tech evangelist: relentlessly positive and forward-looking, with a penchant for entrepreneurs who are willing to devote all of themselves to solving a problem.
“I believe quite strongly that the late stage funding will come when there are enough high quality companies to attract it,” she says. “I do firmly believe in the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality.”
We’re approaching the end of our hour and Mayo politely says she has to dash to an interview for the first cohort of Project Europe founders.
“I actually stack my diary with interviews,” she says. When we meet, she is the only employee at the fund, meaning she does as many as 25 interviews a week.
Those calls have bore fruit. In July, Project Europe announced its first six portfolio companies, ranging from robotics to AI agents. Mayo’s also got help, in the form of a fractional COO and chief of staff.
Their overarching goal? “Harry always says: build 10 companies with 10k employees in 10 years.”
They’re not unusual goals to hear from ambitious, unerringly optimistic investors. So far, in Europe, it has been unusual for an early-stage fund to deliver those kinds of results.
“My personal ambition is to look back in 10 years and see transformational technologies that have become commonplace in our lives,” Mayo says. “And that can trace their roots back to Project Europe."
The top image for this article was generated using ChatGPT.
