Hi guys - welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET!
Still a light period in Euro happenings, though my workload is unusually high for the month of August. One more week and we’re officially in the fall of 2020.
Stay cool and safe, until next week,
Dragos
Money and market bets
🇩🇪 Razor
🇬🇧 Riff
🇫🇮 Spark Sustainability
🇨🇭 Centi
🇸🇪 Adnavem
🇫🇷 Vybe
🇳🇴 Eyr
🇺🇸 Hour One
Observations, research, data
🇹🇷 You know what else seems cooler than London’s Weezy GTM promising to deliver groceries within 15 minutes from 10 am to 10pm?
Turkey’s Getir promise to bring them to your doorstep in 10 minutes day or night in Istanbul.
Almost like zi Germans. :-)
Seriously though, it’s just an innocent joke to preface a great read on how the Turks put together such as service.
And, btw, Getir raised $38M back in January to expand in Europe from, among others, Mike Moritz (of Sequoia fame) through his private investment firm Crankstart.
And since we’re at it, you know what’s even more cooler than 10 minutes grocery deliveries? Delivery of Asian groceries like fresh kimchi and Japanese desserts. In the US, that is.
🇪🇺 You can understand better a startup ecosystem by also looking at what kind of investments the non-local investors made in the local companies. The Nordic edition - one of my deliverables of this week.
🇮🇱 In the venture business, like in management consulting, you get rep by contributing knowledge to the industry. That is the main driver, in lots of shapes and forms, and also why Twitter is inundated by VCs hot takes mainly aimed at other VCs (founders don’t really have time to waste following VCs on Twitter) and everybody and their mother is an essay-writer nowadays.
Anyways, there’s also good stuff, such as Angular’s contribution, a report on VC investment trends across Europe & Israel.
Pretty rigorous work, still remember emailing Gil back in 2016 asking about his methodology.
🇳🇴 Max Samuel, an American working for Thiel Capital in Los Angeles, moved all the way to live in Oslo and work as a partner for the local VC SNÖ Ventures.
🇪🇺 Anybody can be an investor, the Euro family office edition.
🇪🇺 The video game startups on Tencent’s Europe list
🇩🇪 Axel Springer wants to build a virtual car wash network in Germany.
They do it is by using a white label app made by a Finnish company. Pretty interesting.
🇫🇷 Calacanis trolling the French. Love it.
🇪🇺 Trafi just raised series B.
There’s two mobility-as-a-service Euro companies you should know about: MaaS (Whim App) from Finland and Trafi from Lithuania. Both very well funded and both backed by strategic Japanese investors.
Other startups that I know of - Free in Germany, Gaiyo in Holland, iomob in Barcelona plus one in the works in Madrid by the public transport operator, EMT.
Bonus read: a good paper comparing MaaS country-specific offerings between Germany and China.
🇬🇧 Ben Evans has put up a bunch of great graphs supporting the obvious thesis of the ecommerce demand surge augmented by the pandemic.
And if there’s demand, there’s supply - media companies are seriously getting into e-commerce as an alternative revenue stream. Due to - you guessed it - the pandemic environment.
🇩🇪 Germany to extend coronavirus furlough scheme to 24 months. Europe’s on the upward trajectory of the second corona wave.
🇪🇺 Guess who are the new entrants at the EU’s court party of protecting its citizens from mass surveillance on the Internet? Oracle and Salesforce.
🇬🇧 McKinsey was paid £563,400 (£19k a day) to submit a document that outlined the “mission and vision” of a proposed new organisation in charge of the test and trace programme. There are online websites generating those nowadays. For free.
🇧🇪 Last month, the Belgians finalised the building of what they say it is the first printed house in Europe.
Other stuff
Wordpress joins the plethora of big names being locked out of the App Store.
On topic, if you had to to read only one article about Apple, Epic, and the App Store, this should be it.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal joining the growing chorus of companies pushing for more favorable terms on Apple Inc.’s App Store. The party gets bigger.
Uber and Lyft are on the edge of closing down in California (they just bought some time) which is a paradox considering that Travis Kalanick launched Uber exactly because in California it was bloody difficult to get a decent transportation ride - you could either hail a taxi in the street (very hard to get one) or hire an expensive private limo service.
More education - what's college bundle?
- skills & training
- adventure for young adults
- dating service
- sports complex attached to a hedge fund
- credential
- how employers delegate personality testing so they don't get in trouble for itThe times X years of your life spent in school justified by a piece of paper to put in your resume are fast sunsetting. Lambda School just raised $74 million, btw.
In 2015, I went out to fundraise as a first-time founder. I was recently graduated and had been working on my startup for a year full time. Here's everything I did wrong.
Awesome visualisation of the trending searches by state between 2018 to 2020.
Happy Sunday!
Thanks for reading 🙌
Created every Sunday by @drnovac. Please share it with your networks and encourage your colleagues to sign up here - thanks!