Andrea Arnau

Personally and through a vehicle, at once

Arnau invests both individually and through CPT Investments, of which she is chief executive. Running both routes in parallel is a deliberate arrangement rather than an accident of bookkeeping.

A company can hold positions across time, take on partners, and outlive any individual decision; a personal cheque is faster, needs no approval and suits situations too small or too early to justify the structure. Investors who do both typically use the personal route for opportunistic, relationship-driven deals — which is essentially what a televised pitch is — and the vehicle for anything that needs formal governance behind it.

What a venture studio actually does

Arnau advises Rokk3r, a venture studio, and the model is worth distinguishing from a fund because the two are routinely confused. A fund invests in companies other people have founded. A studio builds companies itself — generating the idea in-house, assembling the founding team, and supplying operational support from the start — and therefore takes a much larger ownership stake than an investor would.

The trade is control and equity in exchange for doing far more of the work and being able to run far fewer companies at once. It sits between founding and investing, and it exists because at the earliest stage the scarce input is often not money but the people and operating machinery to turn an idea into something fundable.

If this made the sector interesting rather than the celebrity, start with how to begin investing — and, if private companies are what caught your eye, how angel investing actually works.