Investing in game-changing technologies across Europe and the US, a profile of Common Magic
I’m a London based solo GP running Common Magic, a fund investing in products with community at their core (think; Figma, Github, Hugging Face) in Europe and the US.
The fund’s based on my background as an operator and angel investor in the same domain. I’ve built communities in tech companies for the last 15 years (and for free long before that); I led community at Qype until our exit to Yelp, started and scaled the Local Guides team on Google Maps, ran startup space Campus London at Google, and advised scaleups Protocol Labs, Zoe and many more on how to build ecosystems around products. Because of my time building early-stage founder communities, I had the opportunity to begin angel investing. My checks were tiny so, given the best founders will always pick their cap tables, I wanted to make it easy for them to pick me. That’s why I began selling myself as an angel who could help with community strategy and narrative as I’m also an ex-journalist. 40 angel investments later, it became clear to me that many more companies would leverage community to cut through the noise, stay close to customers and win, and that a small fund could win - spot companies earlier, help them excel - if it had unique operational ability.
Common Magic invests in products with community at their core, where the success of the product rests on the success of its ecosystem. As an angel, I made about 40 investments that were on thesis for the fund ranging from developer tools to crypto infra to consumer health subscription. So the fund is horizontal versus vertical; I rarely look at or invest in consumer social, D2C or hardware (I’m just not the right fit) but beyond that I’ve invested in multiple sectors where a bottom-up GTM can create a moat.
