Hello from the sunny Stockholm, where we’re enjoying a few beautiful, 16 degrees days of September.
This week is about VCs needing to take care of their business, GTM questions, Volkswagen and the French.
Enjoy!
Interesting deals
🇬🇧 Crista Galli
🇮🇱 Hetz Ventures
🇫🇷 Sagard
🇫🇷 La Bouche Rouge, which does plastic-free cosmetics DTC, raised €2.5 million
🇫🇮 Disior, which has a software that turns CT and MRI images into mathematical models, raised €1.7 million.
🇮🇹 Mailbrew, which does SAAS for media, raised money from Earnest Capital
🇭🇷 Croatian game devel studio sold for at least $100M
🇪🇺 Two electric bike producers announced raising capital this week: VanMoof and EGO Movement
🇪🇺 Also this week two employee engagement startups raised - Supermood & Happy Signals - and another one was sold for $30-ish mil - Actimo.
🇬🇧 Balderton announced 5 deals in the past 4 weeks: three new (Kbox, Demodesk, Riff) and two follow ons (VanMoof and Labster).
🇩🇰 Also 5 by Heartcore in the past 5 weeks - 4 new (Weezy, Finematter, Soundboks and Layerise), 3 of which from its home country, Denmark.
🇪🇸 The most active investors from Spain in the first half of 2020.
🇪🇺 International VCs active this year in the Nordics.
Observations, research, data
🇬🇧 “A finance-person turned tech operator-person based in London” (probably a former VC who jumped ship) and without the balls to put a name to his opinions asks why founders don’t speak out about bad VC actors.
It is a rhetorical question, of course - we touched upon this before:
These individuals will never be named publicly because this is a relationship business. Founders don’t want to burn bridges and investors are friends with each other. And deal sharing opportunities are more frequent and important than “that time I screwed a founder because I coronavirus panicked” situations. It is part of their job.
Another way to look at it would be that the equity sales event is episodic in a company’s life, it is not the main thing. It is rather a distraction and a sometimes necessary evil - once you’re done with it, you focus on the business, not on being friends with investors because you need to ask them for money. Investors are just one of the stakeholders in founders’ ecosystem together with customers, employees, suppliers and competitors.
And, listen, if you go to the market and the guy who sells you apples fucks you over, you just move on and find another guy who sells apples. It’s as simple as that. Changing their mind is not your problem, it is their problem - it is likely a benefit in disguise as you don’t want this kind of character in your company to begin with. It’s a test they failed, next.
And that is why the incentive of calling out the bad apples should come from the investment community rather from startup founders, as
a) this is investors’ industry and you are what your industry rep is.
I have yet to meet a founder who is happy and excited to start talking to investors for fundraising reasons. Anxious, stressed and freaked out are more appropriate attributes and there is a strong corellation between those and the industry rep.
b) investors usually work together and they can correct bad behaviour easily if they want to;
c) more often than not, investors cover each other asses;
d) bad investor behaviour is usually considered an “accident” by their peers, “there’s always a next deal”.
🇬🇧 Meet Yoyo Chang, from York, UK:
At only 20 years old, CEO Yoyo Chang co-founded KodyPay in the final year of High School. Hoping to build a career in investment banking, Chang had started to invest in the stock market at the age of 13. With returns of over 80% in Q4 2016, he led his school team to first place in a national investment competition.
However, in 2018, Chang first made a foray into the payments industry by self-investing £120,000 to start up KodyPay. Chang is currently working alongside co-founder Jack Howell whilst studying at the University of York.
He just raised £1.8 million for his startup. I guess it’s safe to assume that this guy will never apply for a job at Rocket Internet. :D
🇸🇪 Food for thought - if you built a product that is at par or better than Tesla, would you position it against Tesla?
Or, differently put, what GTM strategy would you choose and why?
i) “just like Tesla but better”
ii) standalone brand calibrated to the value proposition
🇪🇸 The merger of CaixaBank, Spain's largest domestic bank, with Bankia creates an entity with combined assets of around $787 billion, ahead of Santander and BBVA, both of which have a more international presence.
🇩🇪 Volkswagen is close to selling its Bugatti supercar brand to Croatian electric-car maker Rimac Automobili
🇩🇪 Also Volkswagen plans to take a 15% stake in Sixt.
Sixt is a German car rental company with about 2,100 locations in over 105 countries. Sixt SE acts as a parent and holding company of the Sixt Group, which is internationally active in the business areas of vehicle rental, car sharing, ride-hailing and leasing (Wikipedia)
🇫🇷 Lemonade announced that they will start operating in France, following the Netherlands’ launch earlier this year, and Germany in June 2019.
🇫🇷 Erika Batista left The Family and now runs Beondeck’s European development.
🇸🇪 Guess who said that:
I suspect the definition of audio will grow over time
Yup.
🇸🇪 Spotify says Apple bundle that combines music with other services helps make Spotify’s antitrust case, and “threatens our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect."
Related: Amazon Music announced the launch of podcasts in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan, across all tiers of service at no additional cost.
🇳🇱 The curious case of Dutch Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Portugal
🇬🇧 Good coverage of how Entrepreneur First did their business during pandemic.
🇩🇪 From an e-commerce report made in Germany
Excessive shipping costs are responsible for 62% of order cancellations
Second reason: too long of a delivery time: 41%.
35% of online shoppers left the online shop during checkout if shipping was not free for orders of 150 euros or more.
🇫🇷 Good read on the sustainable fashion market
🇬🇧 Related to that - MPs urge government to fix 'throwaway' fast-fashion trend, as they want to create more sustainable fabrics and boost textile recycling facilities.
🇫🇷 LVMH declared that its $16.2 billion takeover of Tiffany was effectively dead, citing a highly unusual request by the French government to delay the closing of the deal.
The foreign ministry asked LVMH not to close the deal until January — well after the transaction’s late November deadline — as France looks to “dissuade the American authorities” from imposing threatened tariffs on luxury French goods.
🇪🇺 An excellent piece summarizing the European state of the affairs visavis non-Brexit and Brexit issues:
Listening to that remark, it struck me that if you want to hear British-style understatement these days, you need to go to Germany. The political atmosphere in London is hysterical and insular. It is the Germans who are thinking globally and whose maxim now seems to be: “keep calm and carry on”.
🇩🇪 In Berlin private schools charge parents according to their income. Those who make more pay double.
🇨🇭 Zürich-Barcelona night train by 2024
Other stuff
Sony (Playstation), Microsoft (Xbox), and Nintendo are each pursuing very different strategies so comparing their console sales is irrelevant - the console war is over.
Apple at a Crossroads: An Interview With M.G. Siegler
The Entertainment Value Curve: Why TikTok is On Fire 🔥 and Quibi Isn’t
Amazon’s first five climate fund investments include Redwood Materials, Rivian
Supreme’s Lipstick for Fuccppl Drops
Arriving in one shade of "SUPREME" red to match the classic box logo, the new make-up product has been vouched for by Pat McGrath's muses ChinqPink, Linux, and Cardi B who said "Oh my god, I love it, I wanna stick it up my p*ssy".
Each Atlassian and Wix announced creating a corporate venture arm.
Instagram founder Kevin Systrom has had preliminary talks about becoming TikTok's new CEO
Tile's new service will offer up to $1,000 if it can't find your stuff
An American dude is alarmed by the dramatic swings in stock prices and makes a case for a tech bubble burst.
Book recommendations from Elon Musk, Uber’s first employee, Warriors owner and more
Happy Sunday!
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