Hussein Kanji

Serendipity has always been a recurring theme in Hussein’s career.

He founded Hoxton not because of any particular desire to start a fund, but because no other venture fund in Europe would hire him after he left Accel.

He was absolutely convinced someone could make a killing backing European entrepreneurs. That meant the only choice was to set up a fund.

He also never planned on doing venture in Europe. He had interviewed in his 20s with a venture capitalist in Palo Alto for an associate job. They very kindly explained the gap in his experience was proper big company experience, and he should do that in order to set himself up to be invited into a partnership years later. As fate would have it, nearly a decade later, when he moved to London, he was connected to the team at Accel the very first week he arrived. He started consulting with Accel and in pretty short order, joined the team. In a repeat of history, he ended up juggling Accel and school. He did a much better job the second time around.

He moved to London from Seattle. As a startup guy, he thought he’d last only a few months at Microsoft, but he had a surprisingly good time. He ended up in the company’s leadership development program after his first year, and spent four years coping with Seattle’s ridiculously low speed limit.

His roles at Microsoft varied, but to give a flavor of the job, his last role was a directive from the top-down to help make their business units more acquisitive. His work led to a sum total of zero M&A. Big companies are still big companies.

He spent most of his productive years learning (and often failing) to build interesting companies. He spent his freshman summer at Stanford at a web design studio and accidentally brought down Hotwired (the online arm of Wired Magazine), which happened to sit a floor above them.

He also met a bunch of folks working in the nascent web ecosystem. He was asked to join a team that was founding Studio Verso. One of their first projects was writing what became a pretty influential book on web design back in 1995, where they used the newly formed table tags to create invisible grids a decade before the standards bodies got around to making CSS a standard. He did his best to juggle a full load at Stanford with a regular commute via Caltrain to South Park. It wasn’t easy.

Studio Verso led to a role in the advanced technology group at Sun Microsystems, which had assembled some of the most interesting software minds but ignored them because Sun was selling bucketloads of hardware at the time. Sun doesn’t exist anymore.

He then founded a networking startup and learned how not to do everything, including catching one of the greatest market corrections tech has every had – the dot-com bust. Licking his chops, he went to work for a friend at Radiance, which had developed techniques to move video files efficiently – five years before Youtube. Sadly, that didn’t go so well. The company was eventually sold to Comcast. The founder told one of the angel investors he was good, and ended up helping commercialize what became Safe-View, which is that big round body scanning machine you see at every airport next to the X-ray machine. With hindsight, at all of these places, it was astonishing the talent he ended up hanging out with. It’s remarkable how interconnected the Bay Area tech ecosystem is.

Hussein never planned on a career in tech. Way back in the day his dream was to maybe become a journalist. The only thing his mom asked him not to be was a schoolteacher, because the pay is so low and society takes them for granted. But he always wanted to find something that allowed him to be both fuzzy and techie. Fuzzy is a Stanford term for anything in the humanities or social sciences. Venture seems like a great mix of the two.

Outside of work, Hussein is an avid snowboarder, something he picked up in earnest in Seattle. For a number of years, he owned a small bakery chain in London, which is one of the reasons he got introduced to Will at Deliveroo when he was doing his MBA. Like most New Yorkers, he couldn’t comprehend life outside of New York City. Tells you how much you know when you’re a teenager. He’s now been in London for over 17 years. He lives in Bloomsbury with his wife and toddler boy. His wife is also American and also has a circuitous route to London, after she paused her PhD. They met in London, got married and have one little boy. She has smartly become a dual national, but Hussein stubbornly refuses to swear allegiance to a king, so he remains (just) a proud American.