The Corona Black Swan edition
#22
This is the 22nd edition of Sunday CET, a weekly curation of what we found interesting in the European investment tech landscape.
Writing this from Boston, where I’m attending the MIT Sports Analytics Conference. Things seem calm over here, in spite of Coronavirus developments - there was even a 60-people situation related to a local biotech event.
MIT SAC is a US-centric conference, as sports tech is getting a lot of forms and shapes, involving business models using new technology, and which has started to get legs just a few years ago, especially in sports like basketball, baseball or football. A notable non-American exception is soccer - I talked to a few people from FC Barcelona and Ajax, they do some really cool stuff using the data.
Also met a few European founders (vive la France) but most people here are Americans and everything is about what is happening on the US market.
Interestingly enough, not too much talk about tennis (100 million players / 1bn fans market), which is part of the next wave of verticals disrupted by software and tech in general. Sports is a huge market, in the middle of a big tech transition and far from getting at an equilibrium, so now it is a good time to make the bets. We certainly made ours with BestShot, the writing’s on the wall. :-)
People here are well aware of the coronavirus and are being careful about it but life goes on, I guess. It is going to get worse before it gets better, the general consensus is that corona is an unexpected trigger for a general economic crisis everybody expected sooner or later.
As I am on the road and since the business chatter seems to be dominated by the flu, I will try a different, lighter format with this edition. Will see how it goes after that.
Research, data, observations
🇪🇺 European proptech trends 2020
🇬🇧 Health tech founders need to stop handing over so much equity
Fwiw, this applies in general, not only to health tech. This is a VC-centric perspective, which basically starts from the idea that the management team (founders) needs to be incentivized appropriately with equity for being aligned with good execution. Also, as a new shareholder, restructuring the cap table is more expensive than diluting the founders and other investors to get at the table. And not worth it more often than not.
The other side of the table says that founders building companies don’t optimise for investors’ business model but for sustainable development or business survival. The latter combined with lack of experience will often lead to messed cap tables, which investors tend to avoid in spite of an interesting opportunity.
Truth is, if you are a founder who anticipates using risk capital down the road, your cap table is as important as your team and as your business fundamentals.
🇪🇺 Where should we build our US headquarter? Not Silicon Valley.
🇪🇺 Coronavirus Tech Handbook - a crowdsourced resource for technologists building things related to the coronavirus outbreak, initiated by The London College of Political Technologists.
🇪🇺 Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia Group, and Tripadvisor have come to a data-sharing agreement with the European Union, meaning that for the first time reliable information about the short-term rental market will be made public via the EU’s statistical office Eurostat.
🇪🇺 The European Central Bank statement, translated
🇪🇺 Airlines are running empty "ghost" flights during the coronavirus outbreak because of European rules forcing operators to run their allocated flights or risk losing their slots.
🇷🇺 VR headsets made by a Russian company to help milk-producing cows relax and produce more milk.
Bonus:
I assume that by now everybody read this - Coronavirus is the black swan of 2020.
YC is doing the Demo Day online, Stanford canceled all lectures & in-person classes for the remainder of Winter Quarter
Top reasons why fast-growing startups go off the rails (or “BlitzFail”)
Australian motel charges guest $50 extra for negative review, then $50 more for the administrative work of following up negative reviews.
Life stats - what’s happened since you were born
Layoffs. Shutdowns. Uncertainty. After a decade of prosperity, many hot young companies are facing a reckoning.
Good resource for those who manage people
Two results that stand out from the Verge Tech Survey 2020:
1. No one has any idea that Facebook owns Instagram
2. Google and Amazon remain utterly beloved
You run a company in SF. Will at least one person have coronavirus?
Assume:
SF population: 884k
SF cases: 200
Company size: 1000
Doubling time: 7 days
If the company is similar to SF's population, the risk of having at least one case is ~20% this week, ~36% next, and so on.Plug in your own numbers here.
More money in the market
🇪🇺 RTP Global announced a new $650M fund to be deployed from offices in New York, Moscow, and Bangalore
🇪🇺 Frontline Ventures raises $80m fund for US software firms entering Europe
🇵🇱 OTB Ventures joined the Draper Venture Network (DVN), a global alliance of 22 independent venture capital firms across 5 continents
Interesting bets
🇦🇹 Austria
a data privacy startup that has built a synthetic data platform which surfaces personal data for privacy-friendly AI | $5 million | Earlybird, 42CAP, Push Ventures
🇫🇷 France
startup creating anonymous group chats built on top of Snapchat’s platform | $8 million | Thrive/A.Capital
digital debt-collection company | €1 million | Cameleon Invest, AngelSquare Fintech, angel investors
🇮🇹 Italy
provider of a platform optimizing the workforce management in production and logistc plants | €1 million | angel investors
🇩🇪 Germany
fast-track visa provider | BMP Ventures
🇵🇹 Portugal
provider of tech-enabled physical therapy to its members | €8.1 million | Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Green Innovations, Lachy Groom, Vesalius Biocapital, Faber Ventures
recruitment marketplace | €2 million | LC Ventures, Jacobo UG
SDK developer providing end-to-end control over the network | €1.3 million | Armilar Venture Partners, Portugal Ventures, Ideias Glaciares
🇬🇧 UK
manufacturer of a device that allows construction workers to view Building Information Models on-site to 5 millimeter accuracy | €5.7 million | Amadeus Capital Partners, Hoxton Ventures, Adara Ventures, J Coffey Construction
provider of on-demand ‘artificial voices’ | €2.3 million | EQT Ventures, Entrepreneur First, AME Cloud Ventures
personal finance tracker | $2.5 million | Connect Ventures, Ithaca Investments, Tiny.vc, Aglaé Ventures
developer of viral voice-activated games for Amazon and Google devices | £500k | RLC Ventures, angels
Happy Sunday!
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