Kylie Frazer
Co-Founder & Partner, Flying Fox Ventures
A corporate lawyer turned founder turned syndicate builder, now half of a rare all-women general partnership.
Kylie Frazer began her career as a corporate lawyer working on large-scale M&A and capital-raising transactions. She left law to found a business that failed quickly, then started a second that succeeded, and began investing after exiting it.
In 2017 she established Eleanor Ventures as a commercial syndicate structure. In 2021 she merged it with Rachael Neumann’s Working Theory Angels to form Flying Fox Ventures, backing early-stage Australian and New Zealand founders.
Flying Fox aims to be the first institutional cheque into a company, has built a portfolio of more than 50 companies including Goterra, Heaps Normal, Mr Yum and Safewill, and runs a female-founder-focused program supported by LaunchVic.
How she invests
Writing the first institutional cheque is a specific and demanding position. There is no earlier priced round to reference, so the valuation is negotiated from scratch rather than anchored — and the investor is supplying the validation that later rounds will price against. Frazer’s route to it is unusual in a useful way: M&A law is training in reading deal documents and negotiating terms, which is precisely the part of angel investing that most first-time investors are least equipped for.
What an individual investor can take from it
Entry price does more to determine the outcome of an early-stage position than almost anything else an investor controls — more than the founder, and far more than the sector. It is also the term first-time angels most often accept exactly as presented, on the reasoning that the round is small and the valuation is a formality. It is not a formality. It is the basis on which every subsequent round either dilutes or rewards you. Read the documents, or pay someone who will.
Where the lesson stops
Negotiating entry price assumes you have leverage, and at the earliest stage an individual angel usually has very little. In an oversubscribed round the terms are take-it-or-leave-it, and the meaningful decision is whether to participate at all rather than at what price. The discipline that remains available is the one to actually use: knowing the price at which you would decline, and declining.
Co-runs one of Australia’s rare fully women-led VC funds.
Sources
Facts here reflect public reporting at time of writing — roles and fund affiliations change; verify current details directly with Flying Fox Ventures.