Topic: Venture Capital

Eileen Burbidge

Eileen Burbidge is a Partner at Passion Capital, the pre-eminent early-stage technology venture fund based in London. She brings extensive operational experience to her investment activities gleaned from business and product roles at Yahoo!, Skype, Apple and elsewhere. On behalf of Passion, Eileen serves as non-executive director on a number of fast growing SMEs including Monzo Bank, Digital Shadows, Marshmallow and Butternut Box among others.

Burbidge started her career in Silicon Valley, working for some of the world’s most prestigious tech companies, including Apple, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems. In 2004 she moved to London to become one of Skype’s earliest employees. In 2011, as a founding partner of Passion Capital, Burbidge was part of the team that built the pre-eminent early-stage technology venture fund based in London. At Passion, she serves as board director for Digital Shadows, Focal Point Positioning, Prowler.IO, Butternut Box and other portfolio companies.

Eileen Burbidge is also a member of the board of Dixons Carphone, the FTSE 250-listed consumer electronics retailer. Eileen was awarded an MBE in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to Business. She also holds a BSc Engineering degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Burbidge was also formerly chair of financial technology start-up Tide, one of the first digital-only finance platforms in the UK to provide current accounts for businesses, and an early investor and director at consumer challenger bank Monzo; where she is now Board Director.

In 2018, Dixons Carphone appointed Burbidge as an independent non-executive director of the Board and a member of the Audit Committee, and she joined the Transformation & Innovation Advisory Board for UniCredit in early 2019.

In addition to Passion Capital, and as described by Fortune Magazine as “The Queen of British VC”, Eileen Burbidge is one of the UK’s biggest Tech personalities and one of London’s most influential venture capitalists. She is the UK Treasury’s Special Envoy for Fintech, appointed by the Chancellor; Tech Ambassador for the Mayor of London’s office and served on former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Business Advisory Group as well as Chair of Tech Nation for 5 years, stepping down in 2020.

Arnaud Bonzom

Arnaud Bonzom is a former Venture Partner at 500 Startups where he was focusing on helping Southeast Asian entrepreneurs to succeed. He is a frequent speaker at several international conferences including Slush, Tech in Asia, Rise and Web Summit.

Arnaud is active as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD and has co-authored a report with INSEAD on how the largest organizations are engaging with startups which achieved press coverage across 28 countries and generated more than 120 speaking engagement invitations.

He has been invited by Accenture, Airbus, Allianz, Amazon Web Services, BMW, Deloitte, INSEAD, MERCER, NUS, Standard Chartered, as well as the Estonian, German and the Singaporean Governments, among others to share his input on Corporate Innovation and Startup Ecosystem.

His extensive work in the startup ecosystem received more than 160 citations in prominent media such as Forbes, Bloomberg TV, and Les Echos. His research is also quoted by leading organizations including Bain, SAP, BNP Paribas, and Orange.

His main research interest is in Startups and Innovation.

He is also the co-founder of Map the Money, an organization that helps entrepreneurs to raise funds in Southeast Asia. As well as the author of The Asia Funding / M&A Newsletter and the Singapore startup ecosystem and entrepreneur toolbox.

Earlier in his career, Arnaud was involved in setting up and growing new businesses including for INSEAD as Assistant Director of Corporate Partnership Development. Prior to that, he worked at Business France as Trade Advisor in New Technologies, Innovation and Services.

Arnaud holds a Masters Degree in International Marketing and Business Development at SKEMA Business School as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Mathematics at the University of Versailles.

Sandro Salsano

Sandro Salsano is a self made italian born billionaire businessman and philanthropist.

He was dubbed by Forbes the Warren Buffett of Central America on its cover in march 2019.

Sandro is President of Salsano Group, a private conglomerate investing in real estate, global private equity and technology.

He is Chairman of Salsano Family Office and Trustee of Salsano Shahani Foundation.

He is a graduate of Bocconi University and also studied at Oxford, Harvard and Princeton University.

He was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2014.

Forbes included him as the 6th richest person in Central America on its 2019 billionaires list with a net worth of 1.3bn usd.