- Born to American parents, Simon grew up in Italy and England.
- After attending Oxford, Simon found himself doing audit work at Price Waterhouse.
- While leading a technology re-engineering effort at Reuters, Simon found time to publish a guide book for Czechoslovakia – in four languages.
- Joined to lead Fidelity Ventures’ London office in 2000.
The son of American-born parents, Simon grew up in Florence where his father studied to be a Renaissance art historian before establishing Europe’s leading museum guide publishing house and the world’s largest archive of photographs of artworks.
“My father was a true entrepreneur and built his business from scratch, originally developing the photographs in his bathtub. He created a world leader from nothing, employing people around the world and building a resource that is still essential to art lovers today.”
At age 13, Simon was sent to boarding school in London to improve his English and get a broader education. Later he attended Oxford, studying politics, philosophy and economics.
"I came out of Oxford clearly unemployable and knew that I had to learn the basics of business." As a result, Simon went to Price Waterhouse where he was "paid to get trained."
“I spent my three years at PW mostly doing IPOs, audit work and investigations. Over that time, I became increasingly interested in technology and I eventually left for Reuters.”
Although he started in Reuters' internal audit department, Simon was exposed to the business at large and soon identified the need to rebuild Reuters' IT infrastructure.
“I remember camping out in the European CIO’s office until he gave me the opportunity to get more involved. Before I knew it, I was the lead on a major rebuild of the technology assets and was only given six months to complete the project.”
Simon shored up support to buy some time and nine months later, completed the major rebuild. As a result, he was promoted and given the opportunity to tackle prickly technology issues across the Reuters platform in Europe. At the same time, Simon also served as deputy CFO for the Italian business. But as if that wasn’t enough, Simon also joined forces with a former college roommate to create a travel guidebook for Czechoslovakia that was printed in four languages and is still in print and flying off the shelves today.
“That was a lot of fun and I enjoyed a 400x return on my investment in just six months.”
"I recieved a call from a headhunter for Fidelity. I found that the platform had done very well, the team was not 'full of themselves', and we had a shared desire to invest in sensibly priced, real businesses. As a result, I climbed aboard."
Simon Clark,
Partner, Fidelity Ventures
After successfully solving many of Reuters European technology issues, Simon set his sights on the United States. Given his success in Europe and the poor state of affairs domestically, Simon was appointed the US implementation head -- a position that allowed him to post significant “wins” such as a reduction in the error rate from 92% to 1%.
“In 1994, life became civilized again as most of the technology woes at Reuters had been solved. That’s when my former manager from Italy called to pitch me on a new opportunity—the creation of a new media division and small venture capital fund.”
Based in New York, Simon’s “techie” status put him front-and-center in Reuter’s venture activity, where he gained exposure to the likes of Yahoo, Excite, VeriSign, InfoSeek and US Web while building reuters.com.
It was here that Simon became interested in internet startups and joined TheStreet.com, one of the early financial news start-ups. It wasn’t long before Simon found himself writing the business plan, taking responsibility for all the operational components of the business, and eventually leading an effort to raise capital during a time when no one was investing in dot coms.
“After getting to know rejection very well, we raised $10 million from veteran venture investor Fred Wilson and soon thereafter, the company started to hum.” After the company went public, Simon led the effort to build out their UK presence, all the while being encouraged by his backers to consider becoming a venture capitalist.
Enter Fidelity Ventures. “Out of the blue, I received a call from a headhunter for Fidelity. I found that the platform had done very well, the team was not ‘full of themselves,’ and we had a shared desire to invest in sensibly priced, real businesses. As a result, I climbed aboard.”
Biography
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