Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc

High-conviction investing - with Ophelia Brown, co-founder and partner at Blossom Capital. Blossom Capital was founded only 4 years ago, and recently raised their third fund of around 380M Euros and became one of the largest Series A investors in Europe having invested in the likes of Checkout (est. val. $40B), Moonpay (est. val. $3.4B) and Pigment (est. val. $500M). Blossom's mission is to supercharge the most visionary founders in Europe, enabling them to build companies which compete on a global scale. Previously she was a General Partner at LocalGlobe, where she invested in a number of exciting companies including Echo, Tessian and Zego and before that with Index Ventures where she led investments in Big Health, Call9, MarvelApp, Osper and Typeform and worked closely with Credit Benchmark, Peoplevox and Robinhood. During this episode we discuss about her first job in VC, the best and worst advice she has received and the characteristics of world class founders. Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Ophelia!

My guest today is Roland Manger - co-founder and Partner at Earlybird. With over 1.5 billion EUR under management, eight IPOs and 30 trade sales, Earlybird is one of the most established and active venture capital firms in Europe, having made investments in formidable companies like UiPath, N26 and Forto among others. Founded in 1997, Earlybird invests in all development and growth phases of technology companies and has grown to several autonomous, dedicated and specialized teams, focusing on different geographies and sectors. During this episode we discuss about the inception of Earlybird, the importance of balance between cohesion and autonomy in an investment team, and how the assessment of startups has changed over the last 20 years. Please enjoy this excellent discussion with Roland. 

Kyle Samani - Managing Partner at Multicoin Capital. Multicoin Capital is a thesis-driven investment firm that invests in cryptocurrencies, tokens, and blockchain companies reshaping trillion-dollar markets. They manage several billion in assets across hedge funds and venture funds. Since founding the firm in May 2017, they've developed a reputation for being forward-leaning, independent thinkers. They are known for pioneering token economic models, valuation methodologies, and challenging long-standing assumptions that the crypto ecosystem takes for granted. During this episode we discuss how and when Kyle got involved in the crypto space, the mental models they are using when assessing an investment and the first meeting and investment in Solana and Helium.

Mathias is a Berlin-based General Partner at Speedinvest, managing the fund's Marketplaces & Consumer team that focuses on all things network effects and consumer tech. Mathias has been building and investing in marketplace and platform businesses for over 13 years being previously part of Mountain Partners and Point Nine Capital. Over the years, he invested into over 80 startups in the space. At Speedinvest, Mathias led investments in companies such as TIER Mobility, Schüttfix, Planetly, Byrd and CoachHub among other. Since 2017, the Marketplaces & Consumer team is investing over €100M into early stage marketplaces and platforms and has made over 35 investments since. Mathias shares some great lessons throughout the episode that any entrepreneur that wants to build a marketplace can learn from, please enjoy this great conversation with Mathias Okenfels - General Partner at SpeedInvest. Mathias is organising the Marketplace Conference (Nov 16-17 2021) with speakers like: Andrew Chen, General Partner of A16z, Talia Goldberg, Partner of Bessemer Venture Partners, Elmar Broscheit of Gorrilas and he was kind enough to give us a 20% discount (see link). The attendees will get a free copy of Andrew Chen's book - The Coldstart Problem.

Paul Murphy is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners focused on early stage investments in technology companies in Europe. Previous to Lightspeed he was a general partner at Northzone where he led the investments in Hopin, Tier Mobility and Flink among others. He was also part of Betaworks. The creative group responsible, among others, for creating Giphy - the platform for animated Giphs, acquired by Facebook, Bitly - the link shortener and Dots - the beloved mobile game inspired Yayoi Kusama. During this episode we discuss his experience of building Dots at Betaworks and how they got their first 1000 users, the first meeting, following with an investment in Johnny from Hopin, and the key traits of the entrepreneurs that he likes to work with. Paul shares some great lessons throughout the episode that any entrepreneur that wants to build products that users love can learn from, please enjoy this great conversation with Paul Murphy - Partner at Lightspeed.

Matt is a partner at Sequoia focused on early and growth stage investments in technology companies. A self-proclaimed nerd from an early age, Matt started building computers and writing code at 12 years old in his mother’s kitchen. He has worked as an entrepreneur, an advisor and now an investor. At Sequoia, Matt has worked closely with companies like Carbon Black, Confluent, Graphcore, Tecton and Tessian among others. Prior to Sequoia, Matt worked at Goldman Sachs working with top technology companies like Microsoft and Salesforce where he also put together a report for Steve Jobs. In his spare time, Matt is wrangling three young kids with his wife and looking for people with whom he can practice his Swedish. During this episode we dive into Sequoia's move to Europe, Matt's journey to the investor that he is today and how they challenge their portfolio companies to be world-class. Matt shares some great lessons throughout the episode that any entrepreneur and investor can learn from, please enjoy this great conversation with Matt Miller - Partner at Sequoia.

Karl Munthe-Kaas is the Co-founder and CEO of Oda, Norway´s largest online grocery store. Oda was founded in 2013 by a group of ten friends, combining skills in software development with traditional Lean operations. They have used the Lean Startup philosophy extensively, both in the overall startup strategy, as well as in their daily experiments. Oda was valued at 1B Euro in 2021 after raising 265M Euro from Kinnevik, Prosus, and SoftBank to expand to Finland and Germany. Oda has a fully integrated warehouse and distribution system, resting on proprietary technology and operational processes. This has enabled them to compete profitably with discount supermarkets, while offering the convenience and time-saving of online retail and maintaining a distinctly Nordic approach to ensuring sustainability. During this episode we dive into the market opportunity in Europe and the online grocery value chain, the key learnings and tactics for implementing operational excellence in the organisation and Odas' secret sauce for winning against competition. Karl shares some great lessons throughout the episode that any entrepreneur can learn from.

If you are building user centric products you are going to LOVE this episode. In this episode we discuss about Johans' most successful venture to date, Kahoot! A bit about Johan. He is a creative technology entrepreneur based in Oslo, Norway. As a Founding Partner at We Are Human in London he creates purpose driven organisations striving for sustainable social and commercial impact. We Are Human’s most successful venture to date is Kahoot!, one of the world’s fastest growing learning brands with over 70 million unique monthly active users in 200+ countries. Under his leadership, Kahoot! grew from a research project to a company that captured more than half of US K-12 classrooms, as well as millions of business and social users. Kahoot! is currently valued at €6B Euros (according to Dealroom), and it is one of the biggest learning companies in the world. Johan remains a strategic advisor to the company.

Jacqueline van den Ende is the founder and CEO of Carbon Equity. Jacqueline went full circle in her hero journey starting by co-founding the first non-profit student run strategy consultancy in 2008 - De Kleine Consultant, still going strong today, then moving into private equity working as an associate for HAL investments (~€ 12.7bn net asset value) to then change gears and move to Manila, Philipines and be the CEO of Lamudi - a rocket internet company - growing a team from 2 interns to 100 FTE - just to realise that she wanted to be part of a more mission driven organisation and come back to the Netherlands. After being a partner at the VC firm Peak Capital she decided that she still has some entrepreneurial energy and decided to found Carbon equity - the first alternative climate investment platform - with the mission of bringing billions into climate funds based on their emission reduction potential. During this episode we discuss about a variety of topics ranging from building a high performing team to dealing with the impostor syndrome and where to hide your computer password.  This was an incredibly honest conversation on team building that any entrepreneur can learn from. Please enjoy my conversation with Jacqueline van den Ende.

Patrick Meutzner - one of the co-founders of Trengo. Trengo is a platform that offers one inbox for all customer contact channels from Social messaging, Chat, Email, Voice to SMS and they've been growing like crazy during the last year, growing from 12 people to 50 during a global pandemic and tripled the MRR in the last 12 months having clients across 60 countries. By all accounts this a very successful startup that is being chased by top European and International VCs but the story today is not about their success. The story in this episode is about what you usually don't see in the media. It Is about the struggles that entrepreneurs have and the challenges that come with high-growth. In this episode Patrick opens up and shares with us the struggles that come with being a founder, mental health issues and implementing a company wide policy for people in the team that struggle with the current environment.