the times we live in
#65
Hello and happy Valentines Day for people celebrating it!
Here’s what I have for this Sunday.
Euro intel
❄️ Powder:
🇫🇷 Eurazeo
🇳🇱 Finch Capital
🇫🇮 Open Ocean
🇬🇧 Conservation Venture Studio
🇫🇷 Big Idea Ventures
🔥 Interesting deals:
🇬🇧 producer of animal-free fat
🇩🇪 reusable packaging-as-a-service
🇳🇴 SAAS weather analytics
🇨🇭 NoDB data platform
🇬🇧 SAAS for capital raising
🇩🇪 mobility aggregator app
🇪🇸 urban hubs-based logistics service
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🇸🇪 Kry hired JP Morgan on a €200 million fundraising.
🇫🇷 Car manufacturer of high-end hydrogen vehicles raised €5 million.
🇪🇺 Alven, Point Nine and Kima exited from Sqreen, where they entered via a $2.3M seed deal in 2016. Sqreen last raised $14 million Series A in 2019.
👓 Reports:
🇪🇺 Hot early stage marketplace startups from Europe.
🇪🇺 The investors backing Nordic fintech startups + fintech unicorn wannabes.
🇫🇷 The French tech revolution.
🇪🇺 The 2021 European Capital Report.
🇪🇺 Promising very early stage edtech startups from Europe.
💸 Active this week:
VCs: High-Tech Gründerfonds, Mundi Ventures, Capnamic Ventures
Angels: Kai Hansen, William Tunstall-Pedoe, Kevin Hartz
Euro strat
🤓 Observations:
🇫🇷 Notable story (don’t be misled by the clickbait-ish title) about the French VC Marie Ekeland of 2050 - she seems to try doing things differently and stand out from the crowd, particularly in an Euro VC industry mostly stuck in the 2000s thinking.
Marie’s story is the story of every startup founder - a vision of a better way of doing things combined with a different DNA, in order to make a dent.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter that much if the model she creates becomes successful - usually idealists don’t get too far unless they compromise. But Europe badly needs this kind of people with this kind of energy. The contribution will impact the ecosystem, which will adapt, and eventually copy, what’s new and works.
Any average VC will tell you that the odds of sizable returns favor outliers.
2050 seems such an outlier, their approach is different, risky and idealistic and this is exactly how ecosystems evolve. It’s likely that big changes are a result of a different and fresh approach rather than doing what everybody else is doing.
Don’t buy the “tear down the VC system” premise the article is selling since it is not a zero sum game and winning against an establishment means building something better not destroying what already exists.
Initiatives like Marie Ekeland’s 2050 or Daniel Ek’s Materia Prima will make an impact in the next generation of venture-backed startups.
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🇩🇪 Speaking of innovation, Rocket Internet is doing a SPAC also, of course.
One year later and 400 SPAC IPOs already executed in the US since last summer, Europe finally wakes up and smells the coffee. Because that is what innovators do. :D
Idly wondering when the EU heads will chime in saying that it is anti-something and needs regulation.
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🇮🇹 Amazon launches a 15-minute grocery home delivery service…. err, I mean, they just launched Amazon Fresh in Italy (available to Prime members only).
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🇪🇺 The food delivery startup frenzy led to a shortage of warehouse inventory.
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🇫🇷 The reasoning of French investors for backing yet another 15-minute grocery delivery startup: they’re first movers in Paris and, well, they’re French.
By no means, we shouldn’t take the risk to leave this incredible market to foreign players.
There’s a chance that they will end up in the hands of foreign players anyways when they will look for the liquidity event.
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🇬🇧 Casual observations on UK VC ecosystem:
1/ There’s an emerging set of superangels who can match VC offers and win
2/ US firms are getting involved earlier and earlier
3/ The amount of Hopin-induced FOMO on anything with COVID tailwinds is *intense*
✍️ Other notes
🇫🇷 Good food for thought w/ lots of arguable assumptions for a back on the envelope macro VC calculation.
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🇫🇷 On the same macro VC topic, but from a different direction - welcome to the everything bubble.
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🇩🇪 Germany to become the first country in the world to regulate Level 4 autonomous driving.
Level 4 autonomy includes the ability to navigate, steer, accelerate and brake without the presence of a driver.
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🇸🇪 Meanwhile in Sweden, Volvo is testing new audio technology that aims to prevent what experts say could be an unfortunate side effect of self-driving cars: motion sickness.
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🇸🇪 Also in Sweden, we have a bit of a food shortage situation here.
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🇫🇷 Vivendi plans to list 60% of its share of Universal Music Group on the Euronext market in Amsterdam by the end of the year. The minimum target value for the company is 30 billion Euros.
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🇫🇷 French labor law actually forbids companies from making their employees eat lunch at their desks. Well, not any longer.
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🇵🇱 Independent broadcasters and newspapers in Poland have suspended their news coverage in protest over a planned new advertising tax.
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🇬🇧 Small UK businesses are drowning in post-Brexit red tape to trade with the EU.
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🇬🇧 Also in Britain - Bank of England says that 2020’s 9.9% contraction was the biggest blow to output since 1709, when the economy tanked 13% due to the “Great Frost”—the coldest European winter in the last 500+ years.
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🇪🇺 Asian companies are pouring billions into Eastern European factories.
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🇫🇷 A Paris court has convicted the French state of failing to address the climate crisis and not keeping its promises to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.
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🇳🇴 University in Norway responds to Will Ferrell and GMs Super Bowl ad
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🇫🇮 In Finland, returnees and foreigners say they struggle to find work with foreign qualifications and experience due to recruitment bias.
It is a recession, I guess, and this happens more often than not in many other European countries.
A Swedish friend who’s a headhunter told me that if your name doesn’t resemble Swedish it will automatically be disqualified to further screening. It is what it is.
Shitty situations don’t get the best out of people and the Covid context accentuated the nationalism, which lately seems to prevail to reason and common sense. And you cannot only blame it on politicians, it’s just how things are and people feel, we’re on that cycle of the history now.
Otoh, the same Covid made it much easier for tech startups and corporates alike to hire from a larger pool of candidates regardless of their locations.
A barrier has been crossed - this is a huge irreversible trend and, sooner or later, we will increasingly see only particular cases of local jobs remain subject to local recruitment discriminations, it is just a matter of time.
These are the times we live in.
Charts of the week
The reforestation situation
Are you a cat person or a dog person?
Other stuff
The deals
Thrasio raised (another) $750M, makes $1.5 million in Revenue Per Day.
Tovala sells an oven that cooks everything from “toast to roast” and scans food items to identify them. Raised $30 million.
The ad industry is preparing for a big year of M&A as private equity circles.
The media
Disney has 146 million streaming subscribers, second only to Netflix (204). Its total revenue of $3.5 billion is a little more than 50% of Netflix.
It took Netflix 9 years to reach 95 million customers. It took Disney 14 months.
28.5 million of Disney+’s 94.9 million subs are basically free in Asia as part of Disney+ Hotstar service, with mgmt saying 30% of subs from Hotstar bundle.
That’s how great PR works.
Why your favorite magazines are morphing into books.
Good thread about the ad industry from the one and only Edward Norton.
Bloomberg Media on pace to be a $100 million in subscription revenue while ad revenue climbs 15% in 2020.
Yet they just laid off people.
The cyborgs
Facebook is building an Android-based smartwatch.
What Apple doesn’t want you to know about the App Store
Apple: The Hyundai/Kia Gift
AT&T installs fiber for a 90-year-old after his WSJ print ad complaining of slow internet service speeds goes viral.
Coca-Cola company trials first paper bottle.
The end
Today most people in the world can expect to live as long as those in the very richest countries in 1950.
Happy Sunday!
Thanks for reading 🙌
Created every Sunday by @drnovac.
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