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

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.

Saul Klein is currently a General Partner at LocalGlobe - a seed VC based in the UK and GP at Lattitude - a series B focused VC fund meant to fill in the gap in the European VC ecosystem which you will learn more about during our conversation. Previously, Saul was a General Partner at Index Ventures a role that he held for 8 years In 2012 David Cameron appointed Saul to be the UK's first tech envoy to Israel and a Technology Business Ambassador. Saul is a serial entrepreneur with two decades of experience building and exiting companies in the US, Israel and Europe. He has a passion for working with seed and early stage businesses. Most recently Saul co-founded Platoon, Zinc, Kano and Seedcamp, as well as being co-founder and original CEO of Lovefilm International (acquired by Amazon) and He was also part of the original executive team at Skype (acquired by eBay).