Kind Consumer - Disruptive Inhalations Technology Startup

My Reflections on the Role

The Mission

I was lucky to join a start-up like Kind Consumer at such an early stage of the business and also my own career. We developed a genuinely innovative, first-to-world technology addressing the tobacco epidemic which causes over 8 million deaths per year. Lots of start-ups claim that their product have the potential "change the world" in our case this was a very real possibility.

The Evolution of the Project

When I started at the business we occupied two small rooms in a short-term office space building in Kings Cross London. The technology was still at the drawing board phase with some early patent work in progress. By the time I left the role the greatly expanded business had taken in over £30m in venture funding, were engaged in a commercial agreement worth over £100m with BAT, received regulatory approval for an innovative product and were on the cusp of launching into market and creating a brand new category.

My Exposure to Key Decision-makers

Funding and Commercialisation

I worked closely with the CEO on the funding and commercialisation workstreams for Voke. I was involved first-hand in the venture fundraising process from pitching all the way to term sheet negotiations and shareholder management. I also worked on the commercial and legal negotiations with British American Tobacco to secure what would ultimately be a licensing agreement worth over £100m in development and marketing spend.

Corporate Strategy

Through my responsibilities of Company Secretary I was present at all Board meetings during my tenure and was able to learn first hand from individuals who had been at the highest levels within FTSE100 companies and financial institutions. This part of my role was probably my favourite as I was able to learn how individuals who have run multi-billion pound operations think and formulate their decisions on complex problems often with limited information.

Technical and Regulatory

Being part of a well-funded startup allowed us to rapidly expanded the technical team and I was fortunate to work closely with the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Product Officer in assembling the expansive dossier and building the systems which were ultimately successfully in gaining regulatory approval for the Voke product. This sort of process is usually performed by pharmaceutical giants with thousands of people involved across the project, in our case we had a small, hard-working team who were all gain both a depth and breadth of understanding which is rare to have access to.

Next Steps

I was fortunate at Kind Consumer to be able to sell some of my vested EMI options in a secondary share sale as part of our funding raising process. This gave me the capital to go into culinary school and following that found and build Hawkker.