Malcolm Ferguson, who recently joined Molten's secondaries team after more than a decade building Octopus Ventures, shares what drew him to the role, why he thinks secondaries are the most exciting opportunity in European venture right now, and the lesson he tries to pay forward every day.
What attracted you to Molten?
Molten has been a cornerstone of this industry for 20 years, and it benefits uniquely from having a listed fund with patient capital. That allows us to take a genuinely long-term view on investments.
What's particularly compelling is Molten's strategy of investing into other people's funds, over 80 of them, representing more than 3,000 underlying companies. That gives us an incredible platform to build something exciting in the secondaries space.
Right now, there's a real gap: founders and European companies lack a strong solution for selling secondary stakes. The challenge with secondaries is twofold. First, you need founders to trust you as a new partner. Second, you need quality information so you can engage with them thoughtfully before investing significant time.
Molten's portfolio of category leaders addresses both. Founders want to be part of a community where they can aspire to the level of their peers, and that opens doors. For us, building the secondaries strategy at Molten was the obvious choice.
What are your main responsibilities at Molten?
I’m a Partner in our secondaries strategy. To provide context: Molten operates across three investment areas. We invest into funds that target the earliest stages of a company’s life, we then invest directly into companies as they enter their scale up phase (both from companies graduating from our fund investments, but also outside of that) and finally (the secondaries team) covers the later stages of a company lifecycle where we help address the fact that companies are staying private longer.
My role is to work with founders at that stage to help them address liquidity challenges across their shareholder base, and in doing so bring those great companies into our portfolio.
What investment trends are you seeing this year, and what are you excited about now and beyond?
One striking trend: companies are staying private much longer. In venture's early days, the 80s and 90s, founders typically went public four or five years after their first investment. Today, it's 15 to 20 years (or more). The reason is simple: private markets have deepened considerably. Companies can raise growth capital, scale significantly, and remain private.
But that creates a real problem. If you start a business at 30 and wait 20 years for liquidity, you're 50 before you see the economic benefit of your work. That doesn't work.
This trend is accelerating, especially now. With no IPOs happening and exits stalled, we're seeing indigestion in the ecosystem. We need to solve that, so founders can keep taking the necessary risk with their companies (by taking some of their value off the table), employees can have the financial security to found their own companies, and for angels and funds to reinvest into the next generation of startups. The virtuous cycle continues.
On the opportunity side, technology shifts are opening doors. Incumbents usually win because of scale, brand, trust, and resources, but they're slow. Technology changes break that pattern and create windows for innovation.
The biggest one is AI. The challenge, and the fear, is that the largest AI businesses like Anthropic are capturing disproportionate value. Founders are asking: where is it safe to build? We're focused on where sustainable moats exist: regulation, complex workflows, deep industry knowledge, and hard-to-access expertise. I think we'll see more specialist companies emerge.
Do you have any specific investment themes you'll be focusing on?
Our thesis is to back category leaders across Europe. We're less focused on specific sectors and more focused on identifying the best-in-class companies and founders.
Here's the reality of venture: as an investor companies each year, but you only say yes to the best 10 or so. Of that group, typically only one or two actually generate the outsized returns necessary to justify the risk inherent in early stage investing. This small group of companies drive all the performance in the asset class. Imagine if you could go back in time and invest only in those one or two companies each year. That's essentially what secondaries let us do: identify the one or two exceptional companies each year and invest in them, just a bit later.
How do you start a relationship with a potential company to invest in?
Molten as a firm, and us as individuals have been operating in the venture ecosystem for many years. As a result, we have either worked directly with or are connected to most of the other venture capital co-investors in the market.
We map and monitor the entire universe of companies which have reached the relevant stage, and we either already know them or their existing shareholders (perhaps as an investor in their funds or as a co-investor), such that we are in a position to engage once a company has a liquidity issue it needs to address.
The founders of Europe's most successful companies are time-strapped and in high demand. They need to understand why they should engage with us. That's where we help them see that our process is low-friction, we can solve real problems, and we're useful partners post investment.
From your previous roles, what are you excited to bring to Molten?
I spent 11 years at Octopus Ventures. I joined when the firm managed £100 million in assets and scaled it to £1.5 billion during my tenure. That taught me a lot about building and scaling an investment business.
Molten is a mature firm, but we're building a new strategy within it and I'm excited to help scale it. I also served on the boards of dozens of companies, which gave me firsthand insight into the challenges they face as they grow. That experience complements Steven's founder background and Nick's investor perspective.
We've each experienced this problem from different angles, we've observed it, and now we're working to fix it within Molten. That's what drives us.
What is one thing in your personal life that you're proud of?
Without question, my family. I've been married eleven years to someone I met at university, and she has supported me through a gruelling investment banking career and now venture capital. We have three children, all kind, curious and interested in the world. Each is very different, and they complement and challenge each other every day. What I'm most proud of is being able to juggle a demanding but hugely fulfilling career while staying present for them as they grow up. That balance isn't accidental, and I don't take it for granted.
What's the one piece of advice you've been given over the course of your career that has stuck with you?
The most lasting lesson came less from advice and more from example. I've been lucky to work for managers who invested real time in helping me learn and develop, and who weren't afraid to deliver a hard truth when it was needed, always from a place of compassion. What stuck with me wasn't a single line. It was how much being approachable, taking the time to help someone improve, and genuinely caring about their personal and professional growth changes things. It makes people better at their jobs, better colleagues, and far more likely to do the same for the next person coming up behind them. That's the part I try to pay forward.