June Angelides on women in technology

Opening doors for women in technology

June Angelides has built a career across multiple arenas. She’s an early-stage investor with Samos Investments; an entrepreneur who started a coding school for mothers; a mentor to up-and-coming founders and investors; and a sought-after public speaker. She was named among the most influential leaders in tech by the Financial Times in 2018, and in 2020 received an MBE for services to women in technology. Her skill set is varied, but there is a distinct throughline across her career. Angelides has a clear-eyed view of shifts in the way we manage and structure our working lives – and she cares passionately about ensuring that everyone can unlock their potential in a rapidly changing world.

Angelides’s own career began to diversify around 2015, while on maternity leave from Silicon Valley Bank. Working with its Early Stage Banking team in London had given her a front-row seat in the fast-paced process of launching start-ups, and she was inspired by what she saw. “I was seeing how quickly you could bring these ideas to life,” she says. “And I guess I wanted to challenge myself.”

It was during this period that she decided to pursue an idea of her own. Born in London, raised in Lagos and from a family of entrepreneurs, Angelides wanted to learn how to code – but she couldn’t find any coding schools she could attend in person with her baby. “Because, of course, nobody thought that mums might want to learn to code…” So, Angelides decided to start her own. In June 2015, she founded Mums in Technology, a child-friendly coding school for mothers. Four months later, it was welcoming its first students. Fuelled by her desire to democratise access to the growing opportunities she was observing in the tech world, Angelides partnered with global tech companies through Mums in Technology and helped hundreds of women launch careers in the sector.

It also represented a big personal step for Angelides, building her profile as a public figure and ultimately earning her an MBE. “I learned to speak up, to find my voice,” she says. “Mainly because I knew that I was doing this so that others would have an opportunity.” But being able to build an MVP (minimum viable product) for a new app was not the only hurdle holding back women and underrepresented founders, and Angelides observed the challenges many experienced in securing investment. Mums in Tech was founded to address a skills gap in the sector; when it ended in 2018, she already knew the next problem she wanted to tackle: access to capital.

Making venture capital more representative

Since joining Samos Investments in 2018, Angelides has been working to address this through venture capital. She has seen the way female founders get treated differently by investors. “Men and women are often asked different questions.” With men, there’s a tendency to talk about “all the good stuff” that might happen, whereas with women it’s “figuring out how it might fail.” All-female founder teams in the UK received just 2% of total equity investment in 2022, according to the British Business Bank’s Small Business Equity Tracker 2023. Angelides believes greater accountability can help address this imbalance. She says Samos was one of the first venture capital firms to track the diversity of its investments and how they progress. For her, this is not about fulfilling quotas, but about understanding whether people are being assessed equally.

For Angelides, it’s the entire ecosystem that needs to be more representative. It’s one reason why she runs a venture capital mentoring group. “I think it can be quite opaque in terms of knowing how to get in,” she says. “A lot of people were coming to me asking me how to get into VC. So, I just decided to democratise that information as much as I could.” When she started out in venture capital, it was rare to see other women, particularly at partner level, but things have improved significantly since then. Over the past decade, the share of UK VC firms with no women on their investment teams has more than halved, according to Diversity VC’s 10-Year Impact Report. Other initiatives have also emerged to help close the gender gap. Angelides is on the advisory board of The Tech Bros, a women-led venture fund and accelerator backing female technical founders. “Their whole mission is to really take on this Silicon Valley ‘bro culture’. It’s all women-led businesses, technical founders… dispelling this myth that women can’t build hard things, that it’s not just beauty businesses that we build.”

Navigating the rise of portfolio careers

This year, Angelides has turned founder once more with The Portfolio Method, which was rebranded as MyPholyo in July. The AI-powered platform is designed to help professionals build and manage portfolio careers using data rather than instinct, giving them a clearer view of their income streams, rates and opportunities. Angelides believes that non-linear careers, built across multiple roles and income streams, are becoming increasingly common, but much of today’s financial infrastructure was designed around one job and one salary.

Just as Mums in Tech responded to a sea change in start-up culture, MyPholyo responds to this shift in the way people work. It was built in response to a workshop she ran on the subject at which many people shared how much they struggled to manage their energy, remain visible and demand the right rates for the job. Having navigated a portfolio career herself, long before such careers became commonplace, Angelides drew on her own experience to develop the platform. For her, the key is identifying a common purpose that connects different professional roles and opportunities. “Before you say ‘yes’ to anything, you need to think about whether there’s a throughline.”