Mark Beeston positions himself as both a founder and VC, having built Illuminate from scratch after previously founding both a fintech infrastructure business and a car dealership, which he uses to relate to portfolio CEOs as "one of them" rather than just an investor. He has created his own "Beeston's Grease Gun rule" about VC time allocation, warning that the "squeaky wheel" often doesn't correlate with the best opportunities, and runs an internal "Numpty Award" for errors to normalize mistakes so his team can learn from them. Mark Beeston positions himself as both a founder and VC, having built Illuminate from scratch after previously founding both a fintech infrastructure business and a car dealership, which he uses to relate to portfolio CEOs as "one of them" rather than just an investor. He has created his own "Beeston's Grease Gun rule" about VC time allocation, warning that the "squeaky wheel" often doesn't correlate with the best opportunities, and runs an internal "Numpty Award" for errors to normalize mistakes so his team can learn from them.