June Angelides MBE on living a portfolio life

In a room packed with women in technology, at the everywoman in Tech forum, venture capitalist, founder, and women-in-technology advocate June Angelides MBE took to the stage to tackle the persistent myth that ambitious women must choose one path and stick to it. Drawing on a career that spans venture investing, board roles, founding the UK’s first child‑friendly coding school for mothers, and policy advocacy, she challenged the audience to see themselves not as overextended professionals, but as “portfolio” talents.

June Angelides MBE opened her keynote by rejecting the premise that busy women cannot do more. “I think we know, as busy women, you can always add one more thing,” she told the audience.

An issue in the industry is not women’s ambition or anything they are doing wrong, but who holds the power in the rooms where capital and technology decisions are made. Only around 13% of decision-makers at UK VCs are women, which means that often times the people writing the cheques don’t see themselves in the problems. Of course, female founders can be found across a diverse range of industries, however, looking closer into femtech, caretech, and maternity tech, the vast majority of these founders are women.

So often female founders within these fields face rooms that don’t represent them, or understand the struggles. Too many times, founders in these fields are told the issues they are solving are “too niche”, however, when half of the population is likely to face these issues, it turns out the innovations aren’t too niche, they just aren’t being pitched to a room of people that will face those same problems.

“The technology being built right now will shape the next 30 years. The decisions being made in boardrooms and investment committees right now will determine who benefits and who gets left behind,” she explained.

So, taking a portfolio view of your life is an important step to take.

Living a portfolio life

The central point Angelides made was not really about startups or investing. It was about recognising what women are already doing, and choosing to be more intentional about it.

“I think many of us are already running a portfolio life,” she said. “We’re just not calling it that.” What she had done, she explained, was not invent something new. She had simply become more deliberate, and started getting paid in equity and opportunity for the value she was already creating.

Her own career illustrates the logic. She started at Silicon Valley Bank in 2011 and, on her second maternity leave, decided to learn to code. Finding that existing courses lacked the in-person, community dimension she needed, she brought fifteen mothers and fifteen babies into a room at ThoughtWorks. It was, in her words, chaos, but it also became the foundation of the UK’s first child-friendly coding school for mothers. She ran 12 cohorts over three years, teaching 250 women to code. When she hit the limits of what she could do without capital, she moved to the other side of the funding table – not abandoning what she had built, but adding to it.

Advisory work as a starting point

For those in the room not yet ready to start a company or write a cheque, Angelides offered a lower-stakes entry point: advisory roles. Two to four hours a month, she said. A phone call, an introduction, a strategy session – the kind of problem-solving that might take a founder weeks to unlock on their own, done in an afternoon by someone who already knows the answer. In return, equity. “In the beginning it might seem like a small percentage,” she said, “but in venture capital, when that company exits, it’s not going to be small at all.”

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Putting capital where conviction lives

For the more adventurous, she turned to angel investing – framing it not as a financial play but as a form of agency. She made her first angel investment at the age of 36, putting £2,000 into a company called Blue Money, founded by a woman from Starling Bank who were building savings circles for diaspora communities. She did it as part of a syndicate, which kept her individual risk manageable while giving her access to due diligence and experienced co-investors.

“I wanted to put my capital where my conviction was,” she said. Her conviction, consistently and deliberately, is in female talent – which she describes as the most underfunded and undervalued opportunity in the market. “I choose to invest in female talent because I believe it is the most underfunded and most undervalued opportunity in the market right now, and I intend to be on the right side.”

The portfolio is not an accident

Angelides laid out the logic of her own working life. Her investment work makes her a better founder. Her founding experience makes her a better investor. Her board work makes her a better adviser. Speaking gives her visibility, which opens doors for all of the above. “This is not a happy accident,” she said. “That is a portfolio, and you can build one too.”