#200 - From the Financial Times to firstminute: how journalism led Michael Stothard to VC

This week’s guest was Michael Stothard, an early-stage VC investor at firstminute capital, a $400m seed fund investing across Europe backed by a network of 130+ unicorn founders. Before firstminute, Michael spent more than a decade as a journalist, most recently as founding editor of Sifted.eu, and before that as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. At Sifted, he helped scale the company from an idea to a media platform with a team of 70 journalists and engineers producing world-class, in-depth coverage of the European technology landscape. At the Financial Times, he was senior correspondent and bureau chief in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm and New York. Having spent time on both sides of the fence, as both an investor and journalist, we were fascinated to understand Michael’s story building Sifted from the ground up, acting as the FT’s foreign correspondent in Spain during the turbulence of the Catalan independence movement, and how he works with companies in the firstminute portfolio on improving their messaging, and getting their stories heard. We also covered his thoughts on the Gen-AI space, and what he’s excited about for the months to come.