Changing the game with Wilson Casado - Kylie Frazer

Reading Kylie Frazer’s bio may get you a slew of interesting information, including her amazing work at Flying Fox, the venture capital agency she co-founded that helps Australian startups hit it big abroad and interest in bringing empathy to early stage investment.

What you don’t get from her bio is the “uncool” confession that Kylie also loves being a lawyer and that even while practicing law, she was trying to humanise client/firm relations in terms of making the exchange rewarding for both sides.

As we’ll see, this is a pattern for Kylie, one that she perpetrates with good humor and a genuine passion for seeing the founders she funds succeed.

And, as we get to know her, we’ll learn quite a bit about angel investing from her perspective.

The Women Behind Flying Fox

“I wasn’t looking for a female partner, I was looking for the best partner”, Kylie remarked about coming together with Rachel Newman for co-founding the Flying Fox, a sentiment that now extended to her yet undisclosed third partner who was confirmed to be a female.

Kylie made a point, however, to remark how women were still shamefully missing from decision making spaces, both in investing and beyond, and that unfortunately, companies like hers were still a minority in the market.

Her views on such matters are worth taking note, as they show what can happen when we let problematic thought patterns get in the way of good intentions.

This becomes clear in her comment on how investors would always hand her female founders to work with based on nothing but her gender, with the underlying premisse that she, as a woman, would only invest in other women.

Getting a woman’s profile on the table solely because they’re female is just as much of a mistake as not doing it for the same reason. Inclusivity is about different people working together in unison, not in enclosed bubbles.

Worms For The Economy (and the planet)

Being an angel investor, Kylie had the chance to work on several trailblazing projects, and though she refused to tell me her favorite one for professional reasons, we still got to hear about the startup that was turning worms into money for the environment.

The company was called “Go Terra”, and it had several contracts in Australia for waste management which they tended to by adding an organic factor into the process: Worms.

Nature’s little janitors are employed to have their fill of food and organic waste and wound up having so much food that they would eventually die of gluttony, but worry not, they had a happy and fitting end as the chubby ingredients in pet food products.

The founder for Goterra, Olympia Jager, eventually got the Australian of the Year Award for her company’s work, showing not only what founders are capable of, but also the potential of companies like Flying Fox, that help them get off the ground.

Sharing Is Caring

Something else that’s unique about Flying Fox is its policy regarding sharing their carry with founders, something so unique that it gets to the point of being mindblowing in terms of what it means for the sector.

The initiative arose out of Kylie and Rachel’s desire to walk the talk when it came to being “founder friendly", and to create an environment where founders could help each other while still being rewarded for their efforts.

Sure, most venture partnerships are based off founders mutually supporting each other because that’s just how it tends to work in early stage investments, but being a good lawyer, Kylie wanted their intent to be represented in their structure.

This makes Flying Fox the first company of its kind in Australia, one that hopefully starts a trend of less greedy investment partnerships and funds.

Helping Founders

The first thing an investor should bring to the table for their founder according to Kylie Frazer?

Cash.

Sure, you can be a great advisor for founders and bring in great intelligence, but a founder will only know where to put you in comparison to other investors if they know how much you’re bringing in.

Angels are also essential for downstream capital investment strategies, that is to say, helping founders find more long term regular investment, which may come from anywhere in the world and helping them access these investments.

A large part of fulfilling this task is related to aid founders in their decision making in order to position them for earning these investments from abroad through proper long term strategies.

Conclusion

It’s hard not to smile while chatting with Kylie, not just because of her upbeat and welcoming personality, but she speaks as someone that’s had years of experience in angel and early stage investing and constantly uses them to break the glass ceiling.

Kylie’s fun, but she’s also got both feet firmly in the earth while her eyes are set in the future, and both of these are essential characteristics of a good investor and driver of innovation.

And the best part? She does this for the sake of a more human investing landscape.

So, for today’s thought exercise, I'd like to propose the following question: How can you make your business or sector more empathetic? In what ways has it failed to be so?

And if you want to learn more about angel investing and early stage entrepreneurship, remember to check the other episodes of Changing the Game, as we have several interviews with members of Perth Angels and other groups.