The one that's short and sweet
#56
Hey guys,
Not a great week for me this one - swamped in tons of projects and behind many tasks, including catching up with what’s newsworthy. Will keep this one short and sweet.
Euro strat
Powder:
🇬🇧 Round Hill Ventures
🇮🇱 Ibex
🇫🇷 2050
🇸🇪 Blq Invest
Observations:
🇮🇹 Square invested in an Italian mobile payments processor + an Italian bank bought a Danish payment processor to challenge the top spot of the Dutch from Adyen, which is the most valuable European payment company.
🇪🇺 And if that is not enough, there’s another startup run by a Russian who wants a seat at the table and just obtained a Luxembourg Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license for processing payments.
🇳🇴 Opera joined the Emerging Payments Association EU as founding member a couple of months ago. Here’s why.
🇪🇺 Sifted did a bunch of lists of startups, scaleups and unicorns.
🇬🇧 Related: TC published a gossip that there’s another grocery e-com wannabe in stealth raising $20 million out of London.
🇸🇪 While most VCs in Europe are management consultant sorts, Mattias got a different type of guy in his team. Watch out for Moonfire, they’re going to be special.
🇳🇴 Who will be Norway’s first unicorn?
🇪🇸 Telefonica revamped its startup accelerator, brought in 3 companies - one from Madrid (hi David), one from Barcelona and one from China.
🇬🇧 Snap has acquired Voisey not for what it has achieved, but for what it can be.
🇪🇺 Istanbul and Bucharest are on top of population growth in Europe between 2014-2019.
🇧🇪 Brussels wants to buy up farmland from surrounding regions to help feed its 1 million + population with locally-sourced food. A food belt that is.
🇪🇸 The Short-term Rental Market and Airbnb at a Milestone
Other stuff
It’s a great time to be a founder, but how do you know if your idea is any good? VCs have opinions.
People writing about Substack like they were writing about blogging 15 years ago. Wired’s turn this week.
Playing on Hard Mode by Ben T.
PS5 is biggest console launch in history, demand is unprecedented (a friend of mine is selling them on Ebay at 3X their price - now that’s entrepreneurship :D)
Bandcamp is getting into the livestreaming game with the launch of its own ticketed livestreaming platform.
Most Shazam-ed songs, best books and best movies of 2020.
Folks couldn’t do house chores like vacuuming because AWS went down.
Microsoft Flight Simulator looks cool.
Happy Sunday!
Thanks for reading 🙌
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