Simon Barnes is an Assistant Dean and Professor at Warwick Business School. He teaches and writes on venture capital finance and leads the WBS Founders Hub at The Shard in London where start-ups are launched and scaled. Prior to joining WBS, Simon had a 25 year career in and around the venture capital industry starting in 1998 with Atlas Venture in London. Prior to joining Warwick Business School he was Co-founder and Managing Partner of Circadia Ventures LLP which managed venture capital funds in the fields of food sciences, nutrition, biotechnology and healthcare. He has a first class MA in Natural Sciences and PhD from the University of Cambridge. During his science career, he spent three years as a NATO Research Fellow at the Rockefeller University in New York and was a Principle Investigator at the National University of Singapore where he worked on plant molecular biology. He holds an MBA with Distinction from Imperial College London.