Capital is as important as the idea
Dr Victor Christou follows on from part one of his podcast, he tells his story beyond Opsys and discusses his philosophy behind investments made today. Victor spent time at Oxford Capital Partners and later at Wellington Partners before embarking on his future at Cambridge Innovation Capital. CIC is Cambridge University’s preferred investor for it’s spin-out businesses and also the wider Cambridge technology and healthcare cluster. He gives us his insight into which investments he tends to avoid and which he is best at supporting. He manages a fine balance between his entrepreneur and the investment, by engaging in a necessary mix of support and scepticism.
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Victor is Chief Executive Officer at Cambridge Innovation Capital
Victor has considerable experience on both sides of the investment table. In recent years he has focused his attention on technology investing. Immediately prior to CIC, Victor was at pan-European venture capital investors Wellington Partners, where he was a Venture Partner in the Tech Team. Before that Victor founded Opsys, an organic electronics business focusing on OLEDs and was a member of the team that sold Opsys to Cambridge Display Technology (now owned by Sumitomo Chemicals). Victor has a BSc and PhD in Chemistry from Imperial College, London and was a Sloan Fellow in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. In the early stages of his career, Victor was an academic at the University of California at Berkeley and then at the University of Oxford, where he was a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College. Victor was the Royal Society of Chemistry Entrepreneur of the Year in 2002.
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