ThatRound’s Co-Founder Matt Thomas interviews Lisa Brook, Director of The Investors Panel
2025’s new reality for founders
If the current UK funding climate proves anything, it’s that stamina now matters as much as story. In 2024, total equity investment in the UK slipped by 2.5% to £10.8 billion, the lowest level since 2018¹. Founders who once expected to close a round in six months are now routinely taking far longer, as investors deepen due diligence and deal cycles stretch across 2024–25.
Lisa Brook has lived through both the boom and the squeeze. An engineer-turned-entrepreneur who helped launch GHD straighteners before founding and exiting multiple businesses, she now runs The Investors Panel, matching early-stage founders with aligned investors. Seeing hundreds of pitches each year has given her a clear view of what’s really going wrong.
“Founders think the problem is money,” she says. “But it’s usually clarity. If you can’t explain what problem you solve and how you’ll scale, investors can’t say yes — even if they want to.”
From hair straighteners to high growth
Brook’s career didn’t start in venture, but in a Marconi workshop, as one of the first female engineering apprentices in her intake. She went on to roles at IBM and into product development for the Guinness family, before co-founding a global hair and beauty import/export business that became one of the earliest distributors of GHD irons.
That business, she says, was her real education in risk. She grew it from a spare room to multi-million-pound turnover — and then lost it almost overnight when GHD was sold and her handshake agreement disappeared.
“It was a huge lesson,” she recalls. “We’d built everything on trust. No shareholders’ agreement, no safety net. When they sold, we had twelve months’ notice to wind everything down.”
It’s why her first piece of advice to founders today is deceptively straightforward: sort the paperwork before the headlines arrive.
The investor’s lens: what’s changed since 2020
At The Investors Panel, Brook, co-founder Jeff Jones and their team work with founders from seed through Series A, spanning sectors from edtech and healthtech to life sciences and cyber. From that position, she has watched the funding environment shift in real time.
“Five years ago, if you sent a decent deck, someone would look at it,” she says. “Now, it’s like applying for a job through an algorithm. If you don’t have a warm introduction, you don’t exist.”
This squares with the broader data: the British Business Bank’s Nations and Regions Tracker 2025 reports 44 equity deals per 100 high-growth enterprises in London, compared with just 14 elsewhere — a stark reminder of how access still clusters in established networks².
Brook’s answer is human rather than technical. Her firm maintains active, direct relationships with hundreds of investors, updating profiles manually as sector appetites and preferred business models evolve. “It’s not about volume,” she says. “It’s about fit. If I send an investor something irrelevant, they’ll stop reading everything we send.”
The myth of speed: why raising now takes twice as long
Brook reckons that a well-prepared raise now takes nine to twelve months end-to-end. “Founders think it’s six weeks,” she says. “It’s not. Even when you’ve got term sheets, you can lose three months just getting everyone to sign.”
It’s hard to track exactly how long rounds take to close, especially at the earliest stages, but her view aligns with figures showing that the time from launch to Series C has nearly doubled in the UK since 2019, to 9.6 years³.
For founders, the practical takeaway is simple: treat fundraising as a long game.
“Work out your burn rate properly,” Brook advises. “If you’ve got six months of runway left, you should have started fundraising three months ago.”
Communicate clearly — and avoid these red flags
The biggest problem Brook sees isn’t a shortage of capital; it’s poor communication. “A lot of decks still don’t answer the basic question: what problem are you solving?” she says.
She highlights three recurring red flags:
- Over-engineering the pitch
“Some founders bury investors in jargon. If they can’t explain it to me in 30 seconds, the investor won’t get it either.” - Vague financials
“Numbers need to make sense. If you show revenue without explaining customer-acquisition costs or payback time, it’s smoke and mirrors.” - No exit plan
“If you say, ‘I never want to exit,’ that’s fine — but don’t ask for investor money. They’re looking for a return within five years.”
This gap between presentation and reality is widening, she says, because the tooling has improved faster than founders’ understanding. Polished decks are everywhere, but that polish can mask weak fundamentals. If a founder can’t clearly talk through their numbers, competition or pipeline when investors probe, “a fancy deck won’t save you.”
When to pivot, and when to walk away
Brook’s sharpest insights come from her own failures as well as her exits. After the GHD fallout, she rebuilt several companies, some through to acquisition, others to closure. The hardest moment, she recalls, was simply admitting it wasn’t working.
“Sitting alone in an office and admitting, this isn’t working.”
She often refers founders to a parable from Who Moved My Cheese? — the mouse that starves because it keeps returning to the same spot for food long after the person who once fed it has moved on. “Founders do the same,” she says. “They keep thinking, it’ll get better so I’ll wait it out. Sometimes you have to stop digging.”
Yet she’s clear that failure itself is not the enemy. “The hardest job is actually to turn around and sit there in the cold light of day in your office and think, I’ve got to close this.”
Founders, she argues, need to become much better at talking about the lessons from businesses that didn’t work out — especially the difficult ones.
“It’s not shameful to close a business,” she says. “The only failure is not learning anything from it.”
Quality over quantity: rebuilding investor confidence
On the quality of deal flow in 2025, Brook is blunt. “Investors complain they’re drowning in bad decks. They’re not wrong.”
British Business Bank data shows early-stage deal volumes dipping in 2024, while average round sizes rose — a sign that investors are concentrating capital into fewer, stronger opportunities¹.
Brook’s experience mirrors this. “Investors want proof, not potential. They’ll wait for traction before they even book a meeting.”
That pressure has forced founders to sharpen their fundamentals. She mentions one edtech client who recently closed a £1.1 million round after three years of refining their model. “They survived because they updated investors every month — what changed, what improved. Momentum is everything.”
Despite the headwinds, Brook is far from gloomy. “The money’s there,” she insists. “It’s just more discerning.” Recent deals she’s worked on suggest investors haven’t vanished; they’ve simply recalibrated how and when they deploy capital.
The latest numbers back that up: UK venture activity rebounded in Q3 2025 to $9 billion — the highest level since 2022⁴ — bucking the downward trend seen in Q1 and Q2 2025, and following a muted 2024. “If your numbers stack up and your story makes sense, you’ll still get funded,” Brook says. “Investors want to back conviction, not perfection.”
Actionable tips for founders
Brook distils her experience into a handful of practical rules:
- Clarity first. Nail the problem you solve before you open Excel.
- Build relationships early. “Investors invest in people they already know,” she says. Warm introductions aren’t optional; they’re strategy.
- Know your burn. Map at least 18 months of runway; start fundraising when you hit nine months, at the latest.
- Prepare your data room. “If an investor asks for information, you should respond within 24 hours, not two weeks.”
- Accept the new timelines. Fundraising has slowed sharply since 2020; plan for longer cycles.
“Founders think the problem is money, but it’s usually clarity.”
For Brook, every cycle — boom or bust — boils down to the same human constant: belief, balanced by realism. “You need confidence to start a company,” she says. “But you need humility to know when to ask for help.”
In a market where capital is concentrating and investor patience is finite, her message is refreshingly grounded. Founders can’t control macro conditions, but they can control how they prepare, communicate and respond.
“Don’t wait for the cheese to come back,” she says with a smile. “Move faster. Move smarter. Just make sure you know where you’re going.”
Key takeaways for founders
- Start building investor relationships months before you raise
- Keep pitch materials simple and aligned with your numbers
- Understand your burn rate and fundraising timeline
- Don’t treat failure as final — reuse what works, learn from what doesn’t
- Prepare for due diligence before the first serious investor meeting
References
