Over the last two decades I have helped startup and early-stage investment firms build and grow their businesses.Starting in the industry at a family office backed venture capital firm, I worked as a Financial Controller helping investment management teams backed by the VC firm to, budget, plan for growth, structure tax for profit extraction and control their expenses and cash flow, I also made a significant contribution to the exit process. These firms grew their assets under management from tens of millions to billions and included firms with revenues over £100m.I moved into the world of professional services to have more direct client management experience and ultimately be involved in winning new business. My clients were firms using an outsourced finance model and those in the pre-authorisation stage. We would provide finance and accounting services plus help through the FCA authorisation process. I also had a speciality with the individual capital adequacy assessment process (ICAAP).Having a solid foundation in the corporate finance side of the investment industry I moved into a Head of Operations role to learn more about the insides of these firms. I joined a manager that was a dozen or so people managing £500m and left when it was 50+ people managing £3bn+. I supported the onboarding of new strategies by expanding the instruments traded from long only equities to include rates derivatives. Setting up the trading, settlement, clearing, valuation, custody, risk management and regulatory compliance systems. I had an important relationship management role with the fund administrator and key vendors like the portfolio management system and Bloomberg, delivering improvement projects and managing incidents.Two notable projects included switching fund administrator to save the manager and investors money and the setup of a Delaware LLC feeder fund to give US ERISA investors access to one of the firm’s strategies.I acted to identify and mitigate risks to the business, being responsible for cyber security and setting the operational control framework to ensure successful trade flows and accurate fund NAV production.As delivery of investment management services is driven by data, I worked to bring modern development practices to the firm’s data. Using cloud-based infrastructure in Azure I brought devops principles to the firm’s data warehouse and data pipelines. I also drove adoption of containerisation and Kubernetes on the firm’s python/pandas based data analytics code.My experience spans across finance, operations and technology.