Nicole Anderson: From FinTech venture building to sustainable investing

On this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VdL interviews Nicole Anderson, Founding Partner at Redsand Ventures, who supported Sabine’s acceleration programs over a 5-year period by providing those startups with proposition design and go-to-market strategic thinking. These two skill sets are crucial for gaining customers and accessing capital. In this episode, they discuss Nicole’s journey from a FinTech venture builder to a sustainable investor. KEY TAKEAWAYS I have sat now, effectively, in almost every seat around the table when it comes to looking at what investible ventures look like, feel like, and what success should and could be. Thankfully, I’ve had to go through the toughest schooling to make venturing successful and break through some of the barriers in financial services. It has always been a big aspiration of mine to break down the barriers of consumerism and finance. The path I’ve been on is a perfect platform for learning how to access capital, because there is money to be allocated in the world. There always will be. Still, it’s only when you’ve taken the journey yourself and been involved at the grassroots that you understand fundamentally what needs to be done. You can immediately see the true impact of the investment. I’ve finally got to the point in my life where I’m bringing it all together. I’m just a do-er, really, and I’ve always done things the hard way. Building ventures is very, very tough, and all the lessons that came out of those eight years prepared me for one thing: The biggest success factor in a venture is firstly knowing your market and not assuming it’s going to remain static. Secondly, thinking ahead of the market and remaining absolutely relevant with your value proposition. This requires a really strong degree of paranoia, which then cascades down into how your business model evolves. Never make any assumptions that things are going to stay the same, or that you know your consumer/customer more than you think you do. Thirdly, everything fails without money. Money will always find a good opportunity, but never underestimate the runway you need to grow and scale. We are not a VC or private equity fund; we’re a private equity structure that uses very innovative project financing techniques to deploy financial instruments across a varied portfolio and absorb quite a lot of risk for that portfolio. By the way, we’ve engineered the allocation of money. We don’t invest at a very early stage, except in very strategic areas, but most of our work is in the growth phase of a venture, and we’ve moved well out of financial services. I identified 5-6 areas – all verticals or industries – that I believe in. My goal is to build a stellar portfolio with one major investment in each one of them in order to make a significant impact in selected countries/regions; that’s the strategy we’ve taken. BEST MOMENTS ‘Like anything in life, the best opportunities come to you rather than you chasing them down. Often, what you think you want is not actually good for you.’ ‘I knew that if I was going to be successful, I needed to sit on the money myself and be master of my own universe. By hook or by crook, I was going to do what it took to find ways in which to build my own investment structure, so I set up a fund.’ ‘The real frustration of many entrepreneurs is that their innovation, which is often in the area of green innovation, was being misunderstood. I wanted to fill that gap.’ ‘We’re in an evolution phase. Anyone in the spectrum of grassroots investing right up to multi-fund structure is in the adoption phase of some kind of strategy linked to sustainability and ESG.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Nicole is a venture builder and investment advisor (corporate venture, VC, family office, and token/digital asset). As a multiple-time technology entrepreneur (CEO & Founder) and an innovation thought leader, she has gained an in-depth knowledge of crypto technologies, blockchain, and green finance. Passionate about technology business models that are challenging the status quo and providing greater inclusion for people globally and having a positive impact on our environment, she has focused her lens on the intersection between emerging technologies and emerging markets, both physical and virtual. Her company Redsand Ventures, works with corporate visionaries and professional investors who are unfaltering in their execution of the green economy. It sits at the intersection of disruptive business models and sustainable real estate as an investment opportunity. Redsand Ventures has built and exited over 10 disruptive financial technology ventures in the last 7 years. Voted Innovator of the Year, 2017 by the South African Chamber of Commerce, Top 100 Women in FinTech 2016 by Innovate Finance, and included in the Power Women of FinTech 2015, 2016, and 2017, Nicole is also active in the London and European start-up acceleration, incubation and growth arena working as an advisor and mentor to Level39, Startupbootcamp FinTech, London Tech Advocates – Women in Tech and FinTech workstreams.  Nicole serves as an industry thought leader and has featured on numerous panels and speaking circuits. She is a contributing author to The FinTech Book, exploring the role of corporate venturing as a catalyst for innovation in FinTech. She is also a co-editor of the InsureTech Book. Both books are published by Wiley. She has an Honours Degree in Information Systems and Economics from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and graduated from the Institute of New Economic Thinking, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York specializing in the Economics of Money and Banking, and a Green Finance Professional from the Chartered Institute of Bankers. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet. 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