Why the Penguin?

Why the Advantage Early Growth Fund has adopted a penguin as its mascot

We have enthusiastically adopted the penguin as the fund’s mascot and we often get asked why - so we thought we had better explain!

It all started because the green AEGF logo was designed to look like an egg. To illustrate the printed brochure we looked for some egg-related pictures and remembered seeing one with a Penguin sitting on its egg.

We then found lots of photos of Emperor Penguins sitting on their chicks to keep them warm and it’s all escalated from that!

We chose the photo of pair of penguins with chicks because our investments are always a partnership with a private investor and it also symbolises the way we need to nurture our investments!

Someone asked us if we had chosen a penguin because they are the only creature that can survive an Antarctic winter; the male emperor’s huddle together incubating their eggs without any food for six months! We have to confess that we hadn’t thought of that; we just thought they were cute!

More importantly the penguin symbolises our new approach to venture capital (which is often referred to as “vulture capital”). Our philosophy is to focus on long term relationships and invest in your success. This ‘win-win’ approach is based on our belief that “there is enough out there for us all to be successful”. We believe that we should help to make the “cake” as big as possible so that our share is valuable, rather than grabbing as much as possible to start with! An investment should be a partnership and if you resent your partners from the start you will always be looking for a way to gain an advantage over them. To succeed we must create the conditions needed for mutual trust because we cannot micro-manage all of our many investments and trust is a very efficient way of managing. We hope that when you make your fortune, you will still appreciate the way we helped when you needed it and that you will want our business to succeed as well by returning a hansom profit on our investment. Meanwhile as Ronald Regan once said “Trust but verify”..... so we still have to do our due diligence!

We hope we are heralding a change in the way venture capital operates and is perceived by entrepreneurs, but that will only happen if the fund is successful and returns an attractive profit overall. The need for high levels of trust makes our ability to form a good working relationship with the management teams of investee companies a critical part of our investment decision process and in some cases we will have to decline otherwise perfectly good investment opportunities.

Its dangerous out there so remember the penguin motto: “Penguins never swim alone”!

(a quote from the animated film "Madagascar")