Dozens of executives from European tech startups have backed a new venture firm based on the premise that people who grow billion-dollar companies know which founders can do it again.
For years, criticism of European venture capital has been structural: too few firms willing to write big checks and too little operational experience on the other side of the ledger. A new fund announced this week seeks to address the second part of that problem.
Operator circlea fledgling venture firm launched with the backing of dozens of senior executives who have founded and scaled European tech companies, including Enzo Wälchli, former chief commercial officer of Swiss robotics giant ANYbotics, joining as general partner.
The fund’s thesis is that operators, people who have experienced the particular chaos of growing a European tech company to exit Series B, are better positioned than career VCs to identify which founders have the tools to build at decacorn scale.
The exact size of the fund was not disclosed at the time of publication.
The shift from operator to VC is not new in the US, where firms such as Andreessen Horowitz built their early reputations in part on the trust of former founders and executives in partnerships. In Europe, the model took longer to gain traction, partly because the output ecosystem producing experienced operators at scale was younger, with Europe’s first generation of decacorn emerging only in the last decade.
What Operator Circle is betting is that this generation is now big enough to matter. Executives backing the fund bring direct experience from companies dealing with the specific challenges of scaling in fragmented European markets: multilingual sales, multiple regulatory compliances, and an improving but still inefficient talent ecosystem in every sector that doesn’t match the depth of Silicon Valley.
Whether operators make better investors than analysts is a thesis that the data doesn’t cleanly support either way, with many large operators making mediocre investors and vice versa. What the model provides is close-range pattern recognition: the ability to recognize organizational stress fractures that appear in 200 employees, not 200 employees, and find founders who think about these problems before they occur.
The launch of Operator Circle is betting that the right guide through it looks less like a partner in a suit than someone who has already climbed.
