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

My guest today is Eléonore Crespo co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, the business planning platform (gopigment.com). Prior to Pigment, Eléonore was an investor at Index Ventures, working side-by-side with entrepreneurs and spearheading investments in Alan, Spendesk, Swile and Slite. Before Index she worked as a senior analyst at Google, reporting directly to the EMEA president and CFO on matters of strategy and planning. During this episode we discussed about how she managed to raise 73M dollars 1 month after giving birth to twins, why as a founder you should always be hiring and the importance of calibrating of what great talent looks like for certain positions. Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Eleonore Crespo co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment!

Sebastian Mallaby is an English journalist, author and a Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Formerly, he was a contributing editor for the Financial Times He has written many well known books as  The Man Who Knew, More Money Than God, The World's Banker and the one that we will focus on in this episode: The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. In writing The power law Sebastian had unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time like Sequoia, Accel, Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Chinese partnerships such as Qiming and Capital Today. Main takeaways: 💃 The best VC funds in the world engineer frameworks to consider the effects of the power law in their assessment process. 🤺 Europe is the new exciting frontier for Venture Capital. 👁️ The long lasting VCs implement support (emotional as well) for the junior VCs to become successful. ❤️ This was an excellent conversion on the birth, timeline and present of Venture Capital and the law powering it! Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Sebastian!

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.