SaxoTV

Julie Meyer: How I made it big

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Saxo TV's Lea Jakobiak sits down with award winning entrepreneur and Chairman of Ariadne Capital, Julie Meyer MBE. 

Julie Meyer is an American who has lived in Europe (Paris and London) since September 1988, building global leading technology-enabled firms, shaping the financing of entrepreneurship and helping founders to build & define their industries. She founded Ariadne Capital in August 2000 to bring the "Entrepreneurs Backing Entrepreneurs" model from her native California to Europe as no one was doing this in Europe at the institutional level at that time.

Julie is known for tackling system-level problems and backing entrepreneurs who do so as well. In 1998, she saw the need for a people & investor network across Europe, and built First Tuesday for the market, selling in July 2000 for 20 times her seed investment. She is an advisor to and shareholder in Matternet, the drone company as well as a Board Director to Vestergaard, the humanitarian development firm. She advised Monitise, a global leader in mobile money, from 2004 until 2012. She has backed explosive growth companies like Espotting in 2002, Zopa in 2005, SpinVox in 2006, BeatThatQuote in 2009 (sold to Google), Taggstar & Quill in 2012.

She has been named one of INSEAD's Top 50 Alumni, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, World Economic Forum Global Leader of Tomorrow, TIME Magazine Digital 50, one of WIRED's 100, one of London's 1000 Most Influential People (Evening Standard) and one of the Top 30 Most Influential Women in Europe. Julie is also one of the BBC's Online Dragons in the award-winning Dragon's Den Online, and is also currently setting up a "Dads and Daughters" foundation to support and extend her thesis that women's identities are shaped - for good or bad - by the messages they receive from their father's as children and young adults. She is on the Board of Directors of INSEAD, her business school. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Humanities and English Literature from Valparaiso University, near Chicago, US in 1988, having spent her junior year in Cambridge, UK, in 1986. 

In 2011, she was asked to be on the Secretary of State's Entrepreneurs Panel. In 2012, Julie received an honorary MBE, for her ‘services to entrepreneurship’. Julie’s first book ‘Welcome to Entrepreneur Country’ was published in June 2012.