Sarah Otter

Sarah is a Vice President based in London. She invests across sectors but has a particular weakness for fintech and B2B infrastructure.

I grew up on a small farm in a 100-person village in eastern Germany, surrounded by fields and more sheep than people. With no phone signal and very patchy internet, this meant two things: I spent most of my childhood enjoying the outdoors and I developed a slightly unhealthy fascination with technology I couldn’t access. In a place where most people stayed for generations, I also became obsessed with the idea of exploring what else was out there - other places, other cultures, other ways of building things.

Moving to London for university (albeit with some culture shock!) was the fastest route to finding out for me. I studied finance and eventually ended up in investment banking. At 20, I was convinced this was the front-row seat to understanding how companies grow and why some ideas scale while others don’t. I quickly realized that facilitating transactions and advising on strategic moves felt more like watching from the sidelines. So I joined Worldpay in a product role to be closer to the engine room. While I learned a lot about payments (an industry I’m still fascinated about), I also learned what scale looks like from the inside: process-heavy, structured, slow. The more time I spent inside a large organisation, the more I realised it was the earliest, most uncertain phase of building something that I wanted to be part of - which is what eventually brought me to MIT for my MBA.

It quickly proved to be the right move and it was at MIT where I really fell in love with early-stage building. I tried a handful of projects myself that never quite worked out, helped classmates wrestle with early startup questions and spent most of my time around people building from zero. I loved the early problems more than the later ones: figuring out what matters, what to ignore, and how to get the first version into the world without overcomplicating it.

My biggest takeaway from that time was that the moments I felt most energised were always when I was helping someone else get a bit closer to their goal. Early-stage investing at Creandum is the best version of that for me - I get to show up early, when most things are still undefined and the questions matter more than the answers, alongside founders doing the difficult, ambitious work of building. Whether that's pressure-testing an idea over a first call, helping think through a tricky hire, or just being a sounding board when a founder needs to talk something out — those are the moments I love most about my role. 

Outside of work, I try to spend as much time outdoors as possible - trail running, hiking, skiing, surfing and lately my newest obsession: training for a triathlon.