Hussein Kanji

Partner

A proud New Yorker, Hussein is now renowned as one of Europe’s most influential tech investors, appearing on Forbes’ Midas List Europe in 2023. His career has included senior roles at Microsoft and over a decade in Silicon Valley’s startup ecosystem. He holds an MBA from London Business School and did his undergraduate studies in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University.

Years in the tech industry

29

Years in Silicon valley

8

Previous Companies

7

Number of IPOs and acquisitions

7

Serendipity has always been a recurring theme in my career.

I founded Hoxton not because of any particular desire to start a fund, but because no other venture fund in Europe would hire me after I left Accel.

I was absolutely convinced someone could make a killing backing European entrepreneurs. That meant the only choice was to set up a fund.

I also never planned on doing venture in Europe. I had interviewed in my 20s with a venture capitalist in Palo Alto for an associate job. He very kindly explained the gap in my experience was proper big company experience, and I should do that in order to set myself up to be invited into a partnership years later. As fate would have it, nearly a decade later, when I moved to London, he connected me to the team at Accel the very first week I arrived. I started consulting with Accel and in pretty short order, joined the team. In a repeat of history, I ended up juggling Accel and school. I did a much better job the second time around.

I moved to London from Seattle. As a startup guy, I thought I’d last only a few months at Microsoft, but I had a surprisingly good time. I ended up in the company’s leadership development program after my first year, and spent four years coping with Seattle’s ridiculously low speed limit.

My roles at Microsoft varied, but to give you a flavour of the job, my last role was a directive from the top-down to help make our business units more acquisitive. My work led to a sum total of zero M&A. Big companies are still big companies.

I spent most of my productive years learning (and often failing) to build interesting companies. I spent my freshman summer at Stanford at a web design studio and accidentally brought down Hotwired (the online arm of Wired Magazine), which happened to sit a floor above me.

I also met a bunch of folks working in the nascent web ecosystem. I was asked to join a team that was founding Studio Verso. One of our first projects was writing what became a pretty influential book on web design back in 1995, where we used the newly formed table tags to create invisible grids a decade before the standards bodies got around to making CSS a standard. I did my best to juggle a full load at Stanford with a regular commute via Caltrain to South Park. It wasn’t easy.

Studio Verso led to a role in the advanced technology group at Sun Microsystems, which had assembled some of the most interesting software minds but ignored them because Sun was selling bucketloads of hardware at the time. Sun doesn’t exist anymore.

I then founded a networking startup and learned how not to do everything, including catching one of the greatest market corrections tech has every had – the dot-com bust. Licking my chops, I went to work for a friend at Radiance, which had developed techniques to move video files efficiently – five years before Youtube. Sadly, that didn’t go so well. The company was eventually sold to Comcast. The founder told one of the angel investors I was good, and I ended up helping commercialize what became Safe-View, which is that big round body scanning machine you see at every airport next to the X-ray machine. With hindsight, at all of these places, it was astonishing the talent I ended up hanging out with. It’s remarkable how interconnected the Bay Area tech ecosystem is.

I never planned on a career in tech. Way back in the day my dream was to maybe become a journalist. The only thing my mom asked me not to be was a schoolteacher, because the pay is so low and society takes them for granted. But I always wanted to find something that allowed you to be both fuzzy and techie. Fuzzy is a Stanford term for anything in the humanities or social sciences. Venture seems like a great mix of the two.

Outside of work, I’m an avid snowboarder, something I picked up in earnest in Seattle. For a number of years, I owned a small bakery chain in London, which is one of the reasons I got introduced to Will at Deliveroo when he was doing his MBA. Like most New Yorkers, I couldn’t comprehend life outside of New York City. Tells you how much you know when you’re a teenager. I’ve been in London for over 17 years. I live in Bloomsbury with my wife and toddler boy. My wife is also American and also has a circuitous route to London, after she paused her PhD. We met in London, got married and have one little boy. She has smartly become a dual national, but I stubbornly refuse to swear allegiance to a king, so I remain (just) a proud American.

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