The one with Glassdoor for VCs and the media opportunity.
#51
Hello and welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET.
Here’s what I have prepared for you today.
Euro strat
Powder:
🇫🇷 Brighteye Ventures
🇩🇪 Neoteq ventures
🇦🇹 Round 2
Highlights:
🇫🇮 Wolt added one of Delivery Hero’s founders as investor in the company
🇳🇴 Softbank invested in Kahoot.
Bets:
🇫🇷 serverless platform developer
🇩🇪 B2B marketplace for advertisers and podcasters
🇫🇷 network of eco-responsible grocery stores committed to the fight against food waste
🇩🇪 SAAS for eye control instead of mouse interaction
🇩🇪 Zalando bought a Swiss body scanning tech startup
🇸🇪 Automile, which develops telematics software and was backed by $50 million in VC money, was acquired by a Norwegian competitor.
Other stuff:
🇬🇧 There’s a new attempt of building “Glassdoor for VCs”.
Quick thoughts:
I don’t believe in the thesis of startup founders public shaming the investors, even anonymously - I explained here why. The founders alternative today is direct reference asking and checking - easier, direct and more useful.
The review-based business, especially user-generated, is easy to game and difficult to scale. The more complicated the system to prevent the gaming, the higher the friction to add in the content.
Here’s another angle of it: what would a founder do if a VC asks her to write a review as part of the funding package they provide? Would it be honest knowing they have to work together for the following years? Not unrealistic, probably you all read about worse things happening.
The private investors market is quite small and by definition VCs are a difficult genre of customers - how will Landscape make (the big) money?
Glassdoor makes money from job ads btw - users come for the reviews and stay for the jobs. Will Landscape go this way and build yet another job site?
And because when contrarian it’s also nice to suggest a constructive solution: if this flies at all, a) I see it rather as a small op, and b) if the VCs are really aligned to use this avenue for cleaning up their business, they can get involved directly, make it a non-profit and all chime in with $ supporting it as an industry organization.
Not an easy case.
🇩🇪 Eventures was the first institutional in Segment, acquired by Twilio for $3.2bn. They got 80X in return.
🇫🇮 Supercell's founders spun off from their foundation a gaming company with social education purposes.
🇬🇧 The Kleins being smart again - London Business School and LocalGlobe set up two new courses covering the full spectrum of investment roles in the venture ecosystem.
The VC business drivers are about knowledge contribution and rep building, this is a great way to do it.
🇬🇧 Speaking of knowledge contributions, Accel created the Euroscape of 2020: video + presentation.
🇩🇪 Daimler and BMW want to sell their joint parking app business Park Now which they merged in 2019 including the services Free Now, Park Now, Share Now, Charge Now and Reach Now
🇪🇺 IAB Europe’s ad tracking consent framework found to fail GDPR standard.
What this means - while users want privacy, IAB encourages publishers to use tech that not only doesn't respect privacy but also is illegal.
Media has become a sick industry because of the digital advertising model, which is mainly dictated by the tech suppliers aka Google, Facebook and the likes.
It’s so bad that media properties have become mostly unusable because they throw down the users throat popups, over and under layers as well as a bunch of spying cookies in the name of providing content for free.
It is a chain reaction started from the money payers: advertisers command control of their budget through tech, the tech providers have a mechanism that does that (and more for their own business model) and publishers need to comply or will not get the budgets. Not having the ad budgets, media will cease to exist.
We are in the middle of a transition towards a model that includes a sub-based model but that is a hybrid, sub-optimal one, because sub money is still not enough and media cos need to deal in ads compromise.
To make things worse, because of higher regulation scrutiny, ad tech suppliers will increasingly start paying to access the properties, perpetuating the compromise and the horrible front end experience of the media assets, controlled by the tech tracking needs.
Unless you as a media are in control of your tech stack and of the conditions under which you will handle advertising, it will be a tough spot for building a healthy media business.
Or, there is an alternative: you go all in for subs and quit* advertising altogether. You know, similar to taking to test the ultimate metric of media: if it suddenly goes away tomorrow, will anyone miss it? Will anyone be less functional at job?
The bold ones took their fate in their hands and started going sub-based only, providing a clean UX and not allowing cookie trackers - think of Substack as a preview of the next gen media companies based on a DTC model.
And that is one of the reasons for which why I am bullish on the media today, it is still trapped in an old paradigm thinking and the business potential for building a new one is huge. All those problems are opportunities in disguise, we only need entrepreneurs to make it happen, the change will not come from within.
*not quit-quit, but do it smarter :P
Euro insights
🇪🇺 This week I made a presentation to a bunch of investors about a 2020 review of the Nordic startup investment.
🇪🇺 Also this week, there’s a podcast out where Enis Hulli and yours truly talked a bit about the European and the US investment and startup ecosystem.
🇳🇴 Choosing a VC: The stuff people don’t talk about
🇪🇺 The European Quantum Computing Startup Landscape
🇬🇧 If you aspire to make a career in the VC business, somebody took the time to create a guide for you.
🇳🇴 Things I learnt from Norwegians:
Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 100-year time horizon, and it remains in the atmosphere for well over 100 years.
It rarely gets a mention, with most focus being on carbon dioxide, methane, and even cooling aerosols like sulphur dioxide.
Euro bits
🇬🇧 Transferwise’s Q3 reflected in its CEO tweets.
🇬🇧 Revolut is close to applying for a bank charter in California.
🇫🇷 SOSV’s Benjamin Joffe joined as founder in residence @ Entrepreneur First in Paris.
🇬🇧 Inventing an enemy is usually a sign of lack of a strategy:
Boris Johnson’s government is drawing up plans for a radical new law that would give ministers power to unravel foreign investments in U.K. companies - potentially casting doubt on deals that have already been concluded - to stop hostile states gaining control over key assets.
🇩🇪 German Amazon employees at seven warehouses went on strike during Prime Day.
🇬🇧 1,000+ UK startups collapse due to COVID-19.
Meanwhile, applications for new U.S. businesses are rising at the fastest rate since 2007.
🇬🇧 Otoh, American (and Indian and Russian) techies apply in droves for work in the UK. Europeans are leaving though, based on anecdotes from my UK friends.
🇬🇧 UK credit rating downgraded by Moody’s. This would normally be a big deal, now it’s just part of the Brexit mess.
🇬🇧 Also in the UK: Sex banned indoors for Tier 2 couples living apart, Number 10 confirms.
🇸🇪 A parking spot downtown Stockholm can cost as much as $100k.
🇪🇺 EU prepared a hit list of 20 large internet companies, potentially including Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet's Google, that will be facing new and tougher rules aimed at curbing their market power.
🇫🇷 Despite the overall passenger car sales in France decreasing a few percent in September, the plug-in electric car segment more than tripled to 18,588 (up 207% year-over-year). Passenger cars noted a market share of about 10.6%.
🇩🇪 A Düsseldorf woman died when a ransomware attack against a hospital forced her to be taken to a different hospital in another city.
🇳🇴 Norway to provide COVID-19 vaccine free of charge to Norwegians
🇫🇷 Paris School of Business launched a platform for entrepreneurship for refugees in Europe, currently offered in France, Ireland and Germany.
🇪🇺 Concern is growing in the European Union that Donald Trump might refuse to recognize the election results if he loses. Preparations are underway for the worst-case scenario.
🇬🇧 Snap has launched its first persistent, shareable augmented reality experience on London’s Carnaby Street.
Speaking of which - have you checked the latest version of Snap’s glasses? They pretty cool.
Graph of the week
Reads
Fund Secondary, Company Secondary - Buy the Winning Ticket at Halftime
In New York the restaurants are charging a Covid-19 recovery fee.
Shopify is reportedly working on an integration with YouTube that could see the video-sharing platform become an e-commerce hub for parent company Google.
The world’s largest chess play website has closed more than 85,000 accounts for cheating since March.
There is a study out showing that not only is climate change eroding one of the most vibrant real estate markets in the country, it has quietly been doing so for nearly a decade.
The virus does not act in isolation, like a lone villain dispensing pneumonia and organ failure with even-handed cruelty across the population. Rather, it has accomplices, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, that compound the damage.
The deadly impact of the pandemic is not caused by the virus acting alone but interacting with chronic disease like diabetes, obesity, heart disease and high blood pressure — all against a background of inequality of poverty. We can’t fully control the infection without addressing those factors
Happy Sunday!
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