Mina Mutafchieva - Dawn Capital

Mina Mutafchieva

Partner

Mina builds lasting relationships with founding teams innovating in fintech, e-commerce software, and the future of work across Europe. She’s led our investments in Eigen, AccessFintech, LeanIX, Lokalise and CluedIn, and involved with our longer standing partnerships with Templafy and Showpad.

Internally, she’s refined our investment processes and upgraded our team development tools – helping to take us to the next level as a team and partner for our founders. She is passionate about helping founders think through scaling their team and culture and making sure people, product, and strategy move in lockstep as companies scale.

Mina brings 10 years of experience from strategy consulting at McKinsey and growth private equity at Palamon Capital, and specialises in enterprise sales and strategy, helping companies to focus their product development and go-to-market efforts, as well as scale their sales and marketing organisations.

She holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a First Class degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

Sectors

Connect

In conversation

Why B2B software VC?

There is definitely a lot for me to unpack here! The easy answer is because I love it. Software is almost infinitely scalable (and now more so than ever) and the pace at which innovation and disruption are happening is absolutely breakneck, which makes it a thrilling (and sometimes intimidating) place to be. I grew up in the midst of creative destruction —... the 1990s in Bulgaria were a genuinely crazy period — the world was turned upon its head and few things were as they were before, but many good things grew out of the chaos. It may seem dramatic to draw parallels between the collapse of communism in Bulgaria and the disruption that cloud deployment and rapid decline of software development costs have brought upon the tech sector, but I will do it anyway! The broader point is that we are in the middle of an accelerating tectonic shift in technology, which is completely changing the fabric of our society. This can make it as daunting as it is exciting. B2B versus B2C is very much a personal preference as it is recognising “where the money is” — if you look at the most valuable companies in the world today, I would say that only Apple is a B2C company. Microsoft is obviously a B2B giant and Amazon, although it has an extremely strong consumer brand, is actually making most if not all of its money from its B2B divisions. B2B companies and brands take longer to build, but are ultimately hugely resilient due to the stickiness of business customers and, for the best of them — the power of the queen of SaaS KPIs — high net dollar retention.

Most exciting moment at Dawn?

Always the last competitive deal that I won. And the promotion to Partner, obviously!

What do you think is the most interesting trend in the industry, and why?

I spend a lot of my time in B2B fintech and e-commerce. B2B e-commerce volumes are 5x the size of B2C e-commerce, yet the experience remains extremely unfriendly for users, especially for SMEs. A lot of trends are converging to bring huge disruption to this tech stack — rapid digitalisation spurred on by Covid, continued innovation and fragmentation of the... payments landscape — so business users are now expecting to have a slick B2C-like experience, too. Combined with the fact that the current tech stack supporting most of this has either been custom built in-house or is at least 10 years old, which is ancient in tech terms. So it is a space I am watching closely.

And the quick fire round…

Book you’d recommend

A classic that I re-read all the time: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Best piece of advice

From my father when I was about 15 — “If you only knew how little other people care about what you do, you would live your life with a lot more courage and determination”. I give this advice to everyone.

Best and worst thing in a deck

Best: a killer answer to the question “Why does your product deserve to win?” Worst: A ridiculously overstated TAM — makes me question everything else in the deck.

Favourite SaaS metric

Net dollar retention — it encapsulates so much of what you need to get right in a successful SaaS company — lower churn, choose the right pricing model, work out your flywheel within the client organisation, continue to innovate on product and get your customer success right.