Early Life and Education

Early Life

Meyer spent her early 20s in Paris from 1988 to 1993 where she taught English, modelled and set up her own consulting firm where she had clients including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 3Com and Hewlett Packard. From 1993 to 1996, she worked for Andy Cunningham at Cunningham Communication, Inc. in Boston where she consulted for Motorola on the PowerPC Alliance In 1997, she took her M.B.A. at INSEAD and in 1998 she went to London and co-founded the networking forum First Tuesday.

First Tuesday

In 1998, Meyer started working in London for Tom Teichman’s NewMedia Investors (now Spark Ventures) where she helped advise companies including Lastminute.com, WGSN and Arc Cores to build their teams, raise capital and establish themselves internationally.
 

In October 1998, together with journalists Nick Denton former WIRED UK Editor, John Browning, and investment banker Adam Gold, Meyer started organising networking events for new media entrepreneurs and business people on the first Tuesday of every month. It then became known as First Tuesday. Under Meyer's direction, First Tuesday expanded into 17 cities across Europe. The Wall Street Journal (Europe edition) covered the international launch to 17 cities on the 7th of September 1999.
 

First Tuesday was sold to Yazam on the 20th of July 2000 for $50 million despite raising over $130 million.

Ariadne Capital

After Meyer left First Tuesday, she set up Ariadne Capital in August 2000, an investment and advisory firm, with £550,000 of her own capital and the backing of 62 leading entrepreneurs who wanted to build the ‘Entrepreneurs backing Entrepreneurs’ model for the financing of entrepreneurship in Europe, which didn’t exist at the time. Ariadne invests in enabling technology start-ups at the late seed stage. Ariadne has claimed to have advised on millions of investments and backed explosive growth firms: Espotting (now MIVA), Kashya (later sold to EMC), Skype (later sold to Ebay), Monitise, Spinvox, Zopa.

 

In 2011, Ariadne Capital acted as sole financial advisor to BeatThatQuote on its sale to Google.

 

Ecosystem Economics™, Media Success, Other Work
Ecosystem Economics is the Investment Methodology that Meyer has developed since 2005 through her work with her portfolio companies.[dubious – discuss] It is a system and network economics thesis explaining how enabling technology firms helps non-traditional firms build digital revenues and compete with tech platform firms.

 

EntrepreneurCountry Global

EntrepreneurCountry Global (founded by Meyer in 2008) is a discovery platform which connects large non-technology, traditional businesses who want to engage with enabling technology, high-growth start-ups in order to build digital revenues. EC Global expanded across Europe in September 2013.

 

Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund

In September 2009, Meyer announced the first Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund. She is the Managing Partner of the target £50 million fund which invests in ‘Digital Enablers’ - those enabling technologies and tools which create ‘Ecosystem Economics’™ for their partners when applied to them. Amit Pau is a Partner in the fund with Meyer.

Limited Partners include Irwin M. Jacobs, Founder of QualComm; the co-founder of BetFair, Andrew Black ; Felda Hardymon, Partner at Bessemer; Jon Rubinstein - Apple Inc., Palm, Amazon.com; Russ Shaw - Telefonica, Skype, Tech City; Sabeer Bhatia - Founder of Hotmail; David Rowe - Founder of Easynet; Nigel Wray; Andre Hoffman; John Redford, co-founder of Element 14 sold to Broadcom.

 

Media Career and Other Work

Dragon's Den Investor and Top 20 Business Book Author

Having originally been asked to be one of the founding dragons in the BBC’s Dragons' Den in 2005, in March 2009 Julie Meyer became a dragon in the BBC’s Dragon’s Den Online where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of potential investors known as ‘dragons’. She filmed 4 times and made 4 investments, and the online edition appeared on TV as well.

The show was hosted by BBC Radio 1 breakfast newsreader Dominic Byrne.

Other media work

Meyer has appeared as a business commentator on the BBC (on shows including Newsnight, BBC Breakfast and BBC news online, Bloomberg and CNBC. She writes for Forbes, Linkedin Influencer Program, CityAM, the Financial times, and the Spectator.

 

Julie Meyer has pioneered the understanding and analysis of the industrial framework and methodology - 'Ecosystem Economics'™ - previously published in Economia, the Sunday Telegraph and the Guardian. She was the first to apply this to the post web 2.0 world. Ecosystem Economics™ refers to the network-orientation of all business in the next phase of industrial development. The winners, according to Meyer and Ariadne Capital, will be those companies who organise the business model in their ecosystem for all parties in the transaction. Ariadne seeks to accelerate the momentum of fast-growing technology-based businesses. Meyer and Ariadne use "Ecosystem Economics"™ to refer to how to launch and grow new businesses where the alignment of multiple entities in the marketplace are required to ensure success. "Ecosystem Economics" is a trademark of Ariadne Capital.

Book: Welcome to Entrepreneur Country

Welcome to Entrepreneur Country, written by Julie Meyer and published in June 2012 by Constable & Robinson and a Top 20 Business Book at WHSmith in the UK, describes the essence of the new social contract that is emerging.

 

Julie's thesis is that prosperity is driven by harmonious interdependence, and the enemies of those people and organisations who don't care about outcomes (hyper independence), a state which infantalises its people (feudalism), and individuals who argue for their limitations and seek dependence.

 

Meyer's message is that the Goliaths must become platforms, and incentivise consumer data proactively in order to build Ecosystem Economics in their businesses.