Natalie Connor - Founder - Elevate

Breakfast with founders (and all-round legal legend!) 🥐 Yesterday I met with Natalie Connor

Natalie is the founder of Elevate.; VP of Legal at Crowdcube and absolute serial legal-neur. Elevate is a wellness community and curator of transformative retreats for women.

We met earlier last year at a Curve Club dinner and it was about time to catch up again!

We spoke about:

- The rise of wellness. As humans, we know so much more about our bodies today than we did even 5 years ago. We have a heightened awareness towards what we put into our minds and bodies and the impacts of physical activities can have on both!

- The science of wellness. It's easy to jump in an ice bath and feel great, but truly understand what is happening physiologically can really help get you into understanding the top 1% of refining your mental performance and experiences.

It's easy to jump in an ice bath and feel great, but truly understand what is happening physiologically can really help get you into understanding the top 1% of refining your mental performance and experiences.

- Retreats! Natalie has set out to create really high quality retreats for women with a huge focus on functional medicine; movement mechanics; and mindfulness. I hear there are still a few spaces in the upcoming ones and the wonderful Caitlin Rozario will be coaching too!

We then spoke about:

- The world of private investments, secondaries and all the complexities of it. The markets have changed and the time to major events like IPOs have lengthened. We discussed the impact this also has on employee share options and therefore the commitment impact this can have on employees. Let alone of course, the educational piece of understanding what on earth your options even mean!

- VAT 😂 will leave that one there. 

- Angel investment and building a strong board. It seems that the vast majority of founders aren't aware of the impact of a really good board vs. the ones that have been assembled as a checkbox governance exercise.