Developers salaries, are there any good accelerators in Europe and €10bn+ European companies.
#20
This is the 20th edition of Sunday CET, a weekly curation of what we found interesting in the European investment tech landscape.
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1. More money in the market
2. How others are doing it
3. Interesting bets
4. Data, research, observations
5. What others think
1. More money in the market
🇬🇧 Atomico announced closing its fifth fund at $820 million, to invest at Series A and beyond.
🇩🇪 Bitkraft Esports Ventures, based n Berlin, closes in on at least $140 million for its second fund.
🇵🇱 OTB Ventures, a venture capital fund specialised in investments in technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe, announced the launch of its Series A/B technology fund, with €92.4 million in commitments.
🇮🇱 Grove Ventures announced the closing of Grove II with commitments of $120m to support early-stage deep technology startups in Israel.
🇬🇧 CapitalT launches fund of €40 million to invest in early-stage European software tech startups.
🇩🇪 Da Vinci Capital Technology Fund III received a €30 million investment from German development finance institution DEG – Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH.
Bonus:
Swedish boutique investment bank Stella EOC to become part of GCA, an US global investment bank.
2. How others are doing it
🇬🇧 A guide to the UK’s Tech Talent Visa (Global Talent) by a fellow immigrant and visa alumni
🇮🇱 I’ve gone plant-based for a month, here’s my experience
🇪🇸 FC Barcelona launches its own cryptocurrency aimed at its fans - Barça Fan Tokens.
🇮🇪 Europe's first fast food delivery service by drone will start in south Dublin in a matter of weeks
🇸🇪 Task Rabbit, owned by IKEA, launched in Barcelona. Jobin is the local competitor.
🇬🇧 Citymapper launched a club option asking for $100/year and hopefully this is just the start for adding serious stuff justifying quite a big money ask.
So far, the features they provide for club members are rather emotional and intangible, there is no utility whatsoever.
I am a big fan of the club model - i.e. paying a subscription for getting access to special stuff, especially related to lifestyle, as long as you get the utility rightly aligned with the $$ value.
And while I am not sure that building a city guide is best on top of a map app, I am rooting for Citymapper, as they compete against the cyborg, Google.
Google has been trying to make a business in this space for 15 years, unsuccessfully.
Dinosaurs like me still think that Zagat-like products are the way to go for tackling this market, if done right by using tech.
Google actually bought Zagat in 2011 and based on it tried to clone Yelp for 7 years - they failed, as in the publishing business, user-generated and/or tech will always be beaten by well written content by specialists using the right tech. Tell that to engineers…
Apparently, since hiring a new CFO in 2015, all Google’s bets are on making Google Maps a profitable city guide product, which now looks solid. So go-go Citymapper!
Bonus
Two unrelated announcements (1 + 2) with big $$ put to work for eating Linkedin’s lunch from different directions. It is exciting, we’re living interesting times!
Developer salary spreadsheet compiled from tweets - spreadsheet + HNews
Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen and another partner at the firm, Chris Dixon, are seeking to stay ahead in the hypercompetitive world of early-stage investing by putting their personal money into microfunds.
How Founders Fund work:
* FF has seven investing partners, three of whom are general partners. That latter group is Thiel, Keith Rabois, and Brian Singerman.
* For deals under $1.5 million, any two investment team members can cut a check. This includes general partners, partners, and FF's five principals.
* For deals between $1.5 million and $5 million, it takes one partner plus one general partner.
* For deals between $5 million and $10 million, it's one partner and two general partners.
* For deals over $10 million, two partners and all three general partners must approve.
* The same rules apply whether it is a brand new deal or a follow-on investment for an existing portfolio company.
Reno is the top destination for tech founders leaving Silicon Valley
In a cutthroat business, you can compete or you work together - The Information and Bloomberg are testing a digital subscription bundle which offers access to both publications, streams, newsletters, more, for $499 per year
3. Interesting bets
🇦🇹 Austria
VR Deep Training provider | €1 million | High-Tech Gründerfonds, MAD Ventures
health platform that acts as an intermediary between customers of private health insurance companies | $1 million | Seedcamp, Speedinvest, Pacific 8 Ventures
🇧🇪 Belgium
developer of AI products and services for self-driving cars | €1.2 million | PMV, Noshaq, The Faktory
🇩🇰 Denmark
a social network based on organisational charts | $11 million | Founders Fund, Sequoia, Balderton
🇪🇪 Estonia
music industry data analytics startup | $300k | Techstars, Bellone Invest, Webinfluence Group
🇫🇷 France
operator of a platform for party organisers | €2 million | Newfund, Venrex
luggage storage network | €2 million | Fa Diese, Expon Capital, angel investors
🇩🇪 Germany
developer of an employee messenger app | €3.6 million | LEA Partners, Cavalry Ventures
business travel management startup | Battery Ventures
🇳🇱 The Netherlands
Predictive hiring technology to never make a bad hire | €1 million | InnovationQuarter, 4Impact
🇪🇸 Spain
digital marketplace for the agri-food business | €1.1 million | Lanai Capital Partners, Plug and Play, Gate 93
🇬🇧 UK
carbon dioxide separation technology company | $16 million | WAVE Equity Partners, Chevron Technology Ventures, Marubeni Corporation
custodian for digital assets | $8 million | Target Global, MMC Ventures
developer of a platform linking products on shop shelves at local bricks and mortar shops in real-time to nearby customers searching in Google | £2 million | YYX Capital, angel investors
digital coach for managers | £350k | Crowdcube
developer of a no-code Subscription Commerce platform | £325k | angel investors
4. Research, data, observations
🇪🇺 SoftBank is involved in 6% of all VC flows in Europe
🇮🇪 The next decade of Irish startups will look nothing like the last
🇪🇺 Big Tech will have to share data under EU proposals. EU thinks this is a matter of national security, industrial strategy, digital sovereignty and overall democracy - Brussels aims to break monopolies of the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Related fact - there is no big European company that stores EU consumers data at the same scale as the American counterparts.
🇪🇺 Politics is always way behind the tech: EU released an AI white paper. Their TL:DR version is below. They don’t seem to get it at all.
🇪🇺 The automobile era is waning in Europe, and not only in cities.
In many European cities, bikes are now popping up everywhere the way cars did a century ago, albeit from a similarly tiny base. Walk (or cycle) around London, Paris or Barcelona and you’ll see bike lanes in places where you’d never imagined them before.
Next month, there’ll be more. Lisbon just announced it is banning most cars from the city centre. In Seville, cycling has increased elevenfold in recent years, says Manuel Marsilio of Conebi. Biking keeps getting safer: Oslo (which aims to be carbon neutral by 2030) and Helsinki each recorded zero cyclist deaths last year.
🇪🇸 Spain’s government has approved a 3% digital services tax on earnings from online ads, deals brokered on digital platforms and sales of user data by tech companies with at least €750m in global revenue.
The obvious target: Facebook, Google and the likes - the announcement comes after a similar move by France that prompted threats of retaliation from the US.
🇪🇸 Encore: The Spanish antitrust watchdog opened a probe into whether Amazon operates as a mail service in the country and whether as such the company has to comply with specific rules.
The CNMC, as the regulator is known, seeks to find out whether Amazon has to abide by rules on labour, tax, privacy and immigration as other mail services do in Spain.
Bonus:
Why so many of the world’s oldest companies are in Japan - the country has 33,000 businesses at least a century old.
Guess who else is running a virtual medical clinic? Amazon. For its Seattle employees, for a start.
Marketplace 100 is a ranking of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies.
5. What others think
🇪🇺 An anonymous opinion of a founder explaining why startup accelerators suck in Europe. He is not wrong, most of startup accelerators are simply not worth it, and, in most cases, are probably useful for beginners nowadays.
Conventional thinking says that, at worst, an accelerator will help crystallise the story you want to sell to the investors and practice for delivering it in a 5 minute, on-stage format. At best, you actually run into interesting people, who can help with mentoring or even invest in you.
The under-rated experience of an accelerator is meeting other fellow entrepreneurs, from whom you can sometimes learn more from than from the program per se, and build friendships, partnerships or future biz. You know, kinda finding your like-minded people tribe.
But in general I can see why most accelerators are simply considered to be a waste of time, money and equity. They are not painkillers but rather vitamin providers, at best.
Plus, in Europe, the market of startup accelerators is very fragmented, very local-oriented and heavily subsidized by EU and government money, so no sustainable economics that’d force them to be competitive. Their model is selling real estate as *free* working space, while scouting for local investors and reselling services for Amazon, Google and the like.
There is very little differentiation - go ahead and open up any accelerator webpage, you will read the exact same promises and standard benefits (it is actually the same with most of institutional investors, but that is a different story as they have discovered and are active on twitter and medium for building pr).
As long accelerators are not done by doers but by talkers, it will be hard to build a good program and… YC will remain the best (after 15 years) and will have no counterpart in Europe.
This is actually a great question - what is the best European startup accelerator? Anyone?
I still remember the first years of Seedcamp, which has since pivoted to an early stage VC fund, probably for better economic reasons. (I was actually on the very first Seedcamp batch in 2007).
As always, this can be a problem or a great business opportunity - however, if I were to build a startup accelerator today, I would do a vertical-based one.
🇪🇺 What 3 companies in Europe (any stage) do you think will surpass €10bn+ in valuation in the next 10 years? Lots of interesting answers.
🇪🇺 European entrepreneurs are obsessed with profits - this should actually read startup investors in Europe are rather risk averse and obsessed with early stage profitability. :D
In all honesty, the startup culture in Europe is shaped by its investors’ DNA and approach - yes, that is one reason for which Americans coming to directly invest in Europe is going to be beneficial for founders.
🇬🇧 An oldie but goldie overview about how the venture business works, and a good reminder that if you are founder looking for VC money you need to understand the unit economic and model of the guys you ask money to finance your cool ideas.
🇫🇮 Some of the most common legal details that startups need to be aware of before investors start doing due diligence (Maki VC)
🇬🇧 Good thread with opinions about the difference between tactics and strategy.
Bonus
The future is here, but unevenly distributed - the future of education
Happy Sunday!
Thanks for reading 🙌
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