Mark Tluszcz

Career

Tluszcz spent the first 10 years of his professional career at Arthur Andersen, ultimately becoming a partner in its business consulting practice before running its European venture capital fund. During this time he personally invested in a number of businesses including the Frederick Brewing Company which listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

In 2000 he founded Mangrove Capital Partners with Gerard Lopez and Hans-Jürgen Schmitz. He was the first investor in Skype, a telecoms business founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström - who were at the time known for founding Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file sharing application. On 14 October 2005 Skype was acquired by eBay and Tluszcz was named as one of the most respected technology dealmakers globally by Forbes magazine.

In 2006, Tluszcz backed cloud-based web development platform Wix.com. He persuaded Wix.com not to sell when it was offered $400m and the company went on to float on NASDAQ in 2013. Its valuation as of August 2016 was $1.5bn. It remains the largest tech IPO to come out of Israel.

Tluszcz's firm looks at 2,000 startup deals a year but invests in just six. It has made approximately 100 investments into early-stage technology companies predominantly in Europe and Israel since it was founded in 2000. The company has raised four funds and has $750 million in "assets under management". In 2016 it had seven or eight startups in its portfolio enjoying rapid growth and worth over £100 million.

Controversy

Tluszcz drew controversy in April 2015 when he stated that the majority of 'unicorn' companies (those claiming to be worth over $1bn) were in fact 'fakies'. Later in the year the technology industry experienced a significant correction with many highly prized companies seeing their values slashed.

In April 2016 and amid growing excitement in the fintech sector, Tluszcz attracted controversy again by writing about a 'fintech mirage' in an article published by the Financial Times which advised investors to ignore the hype about fintech, called for greater regulation and raised concerns about the peer-to-peer lending sector. Weeks later peer-to-peer lending platform Lending Club revealed on its earnings call that the CEO had been removed for unethical behaviour. The company's stock crashed 50%, seeing its market capitalisation fall by $1.5bn over the following two weeks. He also predicted that app-only banks may struggle to gain the trust of consumers and grow their customer base.

Tluszcz has also expressed doubts over the business models of Gig economy companies such as Uber and Deliveroo which have been accused of not paying adequate wages and taxes. He predicted these businesses will have to go through massive structural changes driven by individual countries’ laws. The Taylor Review in the UK found that while flexibility in the workplace was important and had contributed to record high employment, it also found that flexibility arising from the gig economy was too often one-sided. He was quoted on Forbes saying "“We go through these periods in venture capital. A massive trend takes off and everybody backs it, and then you wake up in five years time and you think ‘God, what boneheads we were.’”