Space Tech, wine club, and an array of investing
Nathan Hill has been on the board of UK Business Angels Association and is an serial entrepreneur. He started his career at Oxford becoming a physicist, which incidentally he was “rubbish at”. However, this set back did identify his gift as a salesman. The start of Nathan’s entrepreneurial career saw him launch Qi3. It is heavily involved in everything to do with space, but he saw that smaller businesses were unable to afford his services. Nathan offered it to them for equity and so launched his Angel career. Over the following years, Nathan has made 15 investments with 25x and 37x exits as well as some failures. In this podcast, he talks about the lessons learnt in his exciting career including launching Honest Grapes, an online exclusive club providing exclusive wine, events and experiences.
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Nathan is a serial entrepreneur and technology investor. He trained in physics before focusing on a commercial career in Germany, Japan and the US, where he worked as a Managing Director at Oxford Instruments. He established technology commercialisation firm Qi3 in 1999, and angel investment syndicate Qi3 Ventures in 2010, with investments now in nearly 20 cleantech, semiconductor and medtech businesses. He is a member of Cambridge Angels and London Business Angels. Through Qi3’s Space Technology activities, he is a Limited Partner and Advisory Board member of the world’s first Space Technology Venture Fund. With a career commercialising sensors, instrumentation, superconductor, semiconductor and carbon-based materials, Nathan’s passion is for the realisation of excellent technology into successful business propositions.
Not content with investing alone, Nathan started another new business in 2014, this time an online wine club. Honest Grapes provides selected artisan wines for collecting, investment and drinking to its membership. It has won several awards, including the Independent’s Indybest Online Wine Shop. The business model is a hybrid of online ecommerce with social media, highly personalised service and tasting events.
Produced by Mark Cotton, Twitter.
Podcast links:
Qi3 - a specialist service, providing sales, marketing and business development support to technology companies, enterprises and government. .
Honest Grapes - inclusive club providing exclusive wine, events and experiences.