Hello and welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET.
Here’s what I got this week.
Interesting deals
🇮🇹 Claris Ventures closed its maiden fund at $30 million.
🇳🇴 A Norwegian startup is building a DTC selling clothing for tall people.
🇸🇪 And a Swedish one is doing a DTC for shaving razors and beauty products for women.
🇫🇷 There’s two French startups that sell food supplements and raised this summer: Cuure (€1.8M) and Nutri&Co (€4M).
🇨🇭 Threema is a mobile chat app using true end-to-end encryption for security - 8 million users, 25% of which work in around 5,000 organizations. They just raised.
🇩🇪 Phantasma Labs, which does software for self driving cars and was incubated at EF, also raised.
🇩🇰 More DTC made in the Nordics - Soundbok, which is an YC alumni, raised growth money from Jägermeister and Heartcore.
🇪🇸 A bunch of Spaniards put together a business that provides finance growth for SAAS operations with cash tied up in future monthly payments.
The trick? There’s none - they just don’t take equity for it. They’re not investors, they are entrepreneurs.
Some VCs have been selling this type of financial product for some time - quickly coming to mind are Indie VC in US and Forward Partners in the UK (launched a couple of months ago).
The development of an alternative, better funding ecosystem for the private market has been happening for some time in US (Europe as always is a laggard) and is very well described by Alex Danco in a seminal article. Another interesting and related trend to keep an eye on is what Nivi and Naval started over at AngelList with the Rolling Funds (here’s a good argument why they’re a thing).
Back to the Spanish doing this business, they have the devel in Madrid, the sales office in Cambridge (US) and just raised money from a select number of investors from the Valley.
Observations, research, data
🇪🇺 Have you ever noticed a rich man getting old in a bad way? That’s more and more what Apple looks like.
France, Italy, and the United Kingdom have added digital services taxes of 2–3% which Apple now forces developers swallow them from their margin.
The UK government about the said tax:
Who is likely to be affected:
Large multi-national enterprises with revenue derived from the provision of a social media service, a search engine or an online marketplace to UK users.
But, guess what, it’s become a practice as Google and Amazon are doing it too.
🇬🇧 Amazon has deleted approximately 20,000 product reviews, written by seven of its top 10 UK reviewers.
There is a HUGE underground economy for posting fake reviews, and not only for Amazon but also for other digital properties such as traveling and going out.
This is made with the tacit acceptance of the asset owners - Amazon’s act of taking them out was likely made only for saving face as they were caught in the act.
And on unrelated news related to Amazon:
Amazon is hiring 'intelligence analysts', who should work on 'sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company' and spy on 'organized labor, activist groups, hostile political leaders'.
🇬🇧 Revolut is looking to hire up to four people for an in-house M&A team
🇸🇪 There's a local anecdote that if an outsider builds something successful in Sweden, one of the Wallenbergs (family office) representative will come knocking at the door.
Over at N9 we have a report about the background of the most important family offices from Sweden.
🇸🇪 Sifted has a highly speculative article about a possible correlation between Oatly’s decline in popularity and Blackstone’s street rep (Oatly’s new shareholders).
The argument goes like this:
Blackstone are Trump donors
+ they are also investors in a Brazilian company accused of deforestation
+ Oatly’s former investors were from China and some Swedes were bothered about it a few years ago
+ quote of one guy complaining that the milk is high in sugar for a product that is branded as healthy
= decline in Oatly’s popularity
Here’s how I look at it: there’s actually a strong correlation between popularity and the sales of a consumer product. If what’s above were true, sales would be down, not up, what’s on paper actually matters.
But it makes for a good background story, there was also something in Vice about it.
🇬🇧 Here’s a headscratcher:
The app-based bank Monzo is introducing new fees for customers who take out cash or order replacement cards.
That means one simple thing: shareholders are pushing for profitability not for growth. But… is this how you compete with the old dudes from the last century running the banking systems nowadays?
🇬🇧 Atomico Angels is hosting monthly Pitch Meetings for founders - apply here if that’s your thing. You also have Seed Stage if you operate an UK-based startup and are looking for pitching opportunities.
Speaking of Atomico, they just made available the survey for the annual State of European Tech report, 2020 edition.
🇪🇸 Interesting interview with Typeform’s co-founder David Okuniev, and company CEO, Joaquim “Kim” Lechà, about how the company started and their current customer/product playbook.
🇷🇺 Uber and Yandex are spinning off the self driving car unit out of the JV they assembled a few years ago - the JV operated ride-haling, food delivery and self-driving cars and was supposed to be IPO-ed last year, which didn’t work out.
Now Uber wants to cash out so they came up with a financial scheme for the divestiture.
🇸🇪 The Swedish manager of the German retailer Lidl said that they don’t need and won’t do online sales as things are going well with the sales made via physical stores.
🇩🇪 Germany ❤️ Elon (link):
the German government will help in whatever way needed to get Tesla's Berlin plant up and running
🇨🇭 You can now pay your taxes in Bitcoin and Ether if you live in Switzerland.
🇮🇸 In Iceland you can buy gold bars from the grocery stores.
🇬🇧 Everybody asks you to pay for a subscription nowadays, the coffee edition:
Pret a Manger offers 'all you can drink' for £20 a month, to have up to five drinks a day.
🇫🇷 Entrance to Ecole Normale Superieure this year was based entirely on a blind, written test that didn’t reveal the candidates’ identities. An oral exam that usually accompanies the written test had to be canceled because of the pandemic.
Surprisingly, of the 72 people admitted to the section, 77% were women (55) - significantly higher than the 59% average over the past five years.
🇳🇴 Weird stuff is happening in Norway, probably because of bureaucracy and self-sufficiency rather than bad intentions, and which a professor from Oslo University calls exploitation of the worst kind by immoral capitalists.
🇨🇭 Weird stuff also out of Switzerland - ‘Esoteric star, teenage pseudoscience queen’ Christina von Dreien has made a series of worrying statements on everything from Covid-19 and 5G to European identity.
🇵🇹 Health authorities in Portugal are allowing the country’s Communist Party to let 16,500 people into its annual open-air festival.
Weird times we’re living.
Other stuff
PayPal joins the “buy now pay later” party - they launched a new installment credit option for PayPal users called “Pay in 4.”
The name itself explains what the service offers basically, it’s the ability for customers to pay for purchases, interest-free, over four separate payments.
It’s available in US-only for the moment. There’s a bunch of those in Europe and the market here is heating up.
Here’s a slide by slide commentary of a VC pitch deck used for raising money from LPs. The following slide caught my attention:
Techcrunch operates exactly 13 newsletter products, none of them advertised on the first screen of the homepage (their website is as bad as Crunchbase btw). Do what you want with this information :-)
Behind every corporate coup is a mastermind. At Nissan Motor Co., that was Hari Nada, an insider known for his aggressive tactics and fondness for Marlboros, French cuff shirts and strong cologne.
How a Powerful Nissan Insider Tore Apart Carlos Ghosn’s Legacy
All over the world, from the US to Germany to the UK, some people decide to disappear from their own lives without a trace – leaving their homes, jobs and families in the middle of the night to start a second life, often without ever looking back.
In Japan, there’s companies doing business out of helping you with that.
A Saudi Prince's Attempt to Silence Critics on Twitter - An ongoing investigation reveals how Mohammed bin Salman's team allegedly infiltrated the platform - and got away with it.
Happy Sunday!
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