Mike Reid

After 13 years in 3i private equity & VC and five years with the UK’s largest gas company, I founded Frog Capital bringing a high engagement Operating Partner led approach to investing in European software scale-up’s. 

Personal background

By the age of 14, I’d lived in Kenya, Nigeria, UK, Thailand and Australia, and commuted back and forth between Melbourne (Aus) and school in Oxford (UK) six times a year as an unaccompanied minor. Rapid, unpredictable change amongst a wide range of cultures was and still remains relatively ‘normal’ to me.

Career Experience 

My first experience of entrepreneurship was ironically within the UK’s largest gas company (British Gas) (previously state owned), where I became a senior part of a new internal startup tasked with selling over $1bn of property in a managed fashion. Whilst not majorly creative, it taught me the importance of focus, speed, clarity, proactivity and teamwork, many of the values that live within Frog today. My 13 years at 3i gave me not only a track record but experience of all stages of private equity, from start-up’s to mature, profit-making buyouts as well as investments in the US and China and most of Europe. It was here that I saw the opportunity in growth equity, especially in software, and how I came to launch Frog Capital.

Frog Capital

Scaling innovative organisations from 50 to up and beyond 500 people is seriously hard. I passionately believe senior scale-up leaders need and deserve excellent, proactive and professional growth investors through this phase. Many market it, few do it well. We’ve designed Frog, bottom up, to be the best partner a team could choose. Shorthand for ‘we’ve made most of the mistakes before’.

After a period of having one single investor, we launched and run two funds both of €90m. So far, we have had six profitable exits (including Evotix where I worked closely with Matthew Elson and Martin Fincham) and one loss with a strong outlook for the remaining eight companies. Due to challenges in the fundraising market, we halted our third fund raise as getting new investors was very difficult. So we are technically in run-off with funds to support our operating partner team whilst also in discussions with various organisations on either one-off deals or helping them succeed in a complex but very important part of the market.

Personal life

Married to Clare with three sons ranging from 25 to 18 living in East Sheen, London and Studland, Dorset.