What have you learned in 2018 and what are your predictions for tech in 2019, be it in the fields of Medicine, Energy, Data, Business or Government?
2018 has been all about backing ‘belief’ in every area of tech. Ambition in Europe is running high driven by some exciting ‘unicorn’ exits and that ambition means VC is becoming increasingly capital intensive. One the one hand that’s good – we are finally backing our entrepreneurs with enough capital to be successful on the international stage. On the other hand, there are some negatives – it’s as if all the lessons about being capital efficient from just a few years ago have been forgotten.
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My co founder Tim Boughton and I took the very risky decision not to raise any money until we’d proven the product market fit. This meant living off savings for two years to avoid selling a significant percentage of the business before we’d built it. 
How does influencing a business from the inside (Birchbox) differ from the outside (Beringea)? 
How is Elvie contributing to Femtech for women?
When I was working for a law firm, I represented a lot of venture capital firms, start-ups, and big multinationals. This made me realize two things: first, that I wanted to become an entrepreneur, and second, that I was really frustrated that lawyers didn’t have good technology at their disposal to do their jobs better. My idea was that if you could train a computer to understand the language of lawyers—to understand legalese—you could have a very big impact on the industry. 
Never did I imagine my search online for a squash court would result in running a global software company. About 10 years ago I was searching online for a squash court near my house and found it virtually impossible to find any information on Google. When I finally found details of a court, they couldn’t take bookings or payments online, or even over the phone; you had to turn up in person to book and pay, to go away, and then to come back another time to play. As you can imagine this was extremely frustrating and I knew there had to be a better way, especially when the UK was bidding for the Olympics and trying to make it “easier for people to engage in sports”. 
