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

Daniel Bakh and Dorin Tarau are the founders of Fullview, a customer support suite that lets you instantly monitor, control, and analyze user sessions for faster real-time customer support. The guys founded Fullview in 2021 and in record time they’ve raised 10 million Euros in just 10 months from top investors like Cherry, Seedcamp, and later on from Lightspeed. During this episode we discuss about how to build momentum and create urgency when fundraising, how to hire player-coaches and how Anoushka from Lightspeed convinced the team to choose Lightspeed instead of another VC on a higher valuation. Big thank you to Max from Cherry and Anoushka from Lightspeed for the input in the preparation for this episode. Enjoy!

Xavier Collins is currently a Vice President of Turo, the American unicorn, facilitating car sharing. At Turo, he’s responsible for launching and building the UK business as well as leading their international expansion. Prior to Turo, he held roles at Deliveroo and Uber and most recently founded one of the UK’s largest angel investment syndicates. During this episode, we discuss why he left a secure career in law to join Uber, why you usually get what you measure and how he finally became a singer and a songwriter with an album published on Spotify. Enjoy!

Tony Jamous is the founder and CEO of Oyster - a distributed HR platform that empowers companies to hire, pay, and care for talented teammates regardless of location. Tony founded Oyster In January 2020 and since then they’ve raised around 220 million dollars, grew the team to approximately 600 FTE, and have reached unicorn status. Prior to Oyster Tony founded Nexmo, a pioneer in the Communications Platform as a Service (“CPaaS”) category - the company went public via a merger with Vonage in 2016. After a successful Nexmo exit, Tony took some time off to consider what to do next. He began to invest in “platform models that can change the world”, Tony’s investments include Hopin, Hyperloop, Graphcore, and DialPad. During this episode we discuss about the challenges and learnings of starting, scaling, and exiting Nexmo, why removing the barriers of global recruiting is important and the mission of Oyster, and how he hired the executive team at Oyster to increase the chances of success. Enjoy!

Judith Dada is a General Partner at La Famiglia. La Famiglia is a European seed stage venture capital fund investing in B2B technology companies that enable or disrupt large industries. At La Famiglia, Judith focuses on the future of work, as well as data and ML-driven business models and she has invested in companies like Personio, Graphy, y42, tagr, and uncut among others. La Famiglia is backed by a selection of world-leading entrepreneurs from various industries that provide precious early market access, impactful partnerships, and deep expertise for La Famiglias’ portfolio companies. During this episode we discuss the questions La Famiglia asks themselves to crystallize their mission, we discuss gut instinct, and talent vs hard work. I had soo much fun talking with Judith and I am sure you will too.

Anthony Danon is a co-founder and general partner at Cocoa, the angel fund 100% backed by founders. Anthony has spent the last 7+ years as an early-stage VC focused on investing in what he calls "fintech is everything". He started his career as an operator in fintech, building credit risk models for an invoice financing company. As an investor, Anthony has been lucky to partner with companies such as TrueLayer, Primer, Wayflyer, and Ramp Network, to name a few. Prior to Cocoa he was a Partner at Speedinvest leading their Seed fintech strategy across Europe and an investor at Anthemis Group before that. All that, after a failed career as a graffiti artist and an attempt at becoming a professional soccer player. During this episode, we discuss how Anthony become a partner in a relatively short time, the key elements that make a good investor, and the positioning and mission of Cocoa.

Before joining Index, Nina was a Financial planning and analysis Lead for Google’s AdSense team where she managed a multi-billion dollar book of business covering Amazon, Ebay, and IAC. Nina started her career as a high yield bond trader at Citigroup and She also started HIVE Ventures, the first seed venture fund focusing on Armenian entrepreneurs, where she invested in over 30 companies. At Index, Nina focuses on venture and growth investments in enterprise SaaS, vertical SaaS, and AI. She is excited by the combination of software and payments to help legacy industries transition from using pen and paper workflows to adopting more modern, vertical-specific solutions. Nina works with transformational companies like ServiceTitan, Shopmonkey, Gong, and DeepScribe. During this episode we discuss about vertical Saas, VC career advice and how to separate a great a pitch from a great founder. Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Nina Achadjian Partner at Index.

My guest today is Ulric Musset the founder of Vauban. Vauban is a venture capital platform that makes it easy for investors & VCs to launch their funds, SPVs and syndicates. Over $1bn has been invested via Vauban's platform since its launch. Ulric is an angel investor as well as an entrepreneur with a keen passion for supporting the venture capital ecosystem. During this episode, we discuss what led Ulric to become an entrepreneur, the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, and Vauban's mission. Let's go and talk with Ulric.

My guest today is Andrei Brasoveanu Partner at Accel. He joined the fund in 2014 and works with the team on Web3/crypto, enterprise software,  developer-oriented software, open-source, security, and financial services. Andrei has led Accel’s investment in Sky Mavis, Sorare and Nansen among others and he has also worked closely with Celonis, Instana, Monzo, Personio and UiPath. Prior to Accel, Andrei spent a decade in the US working for some of the largest equity high-frequency trading firms in the country. Andrei is originally Romania. He graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics from Princeton and an MBA with Distinction from Harvard Business School. Let's go and talk to him! 

My guest today is Hannah Seal - Partner at Index Ventures. Before joining Index, Hannah managed the consumer marketplace business for Ebay in the UK, and set up the General Merchandise business for Ocado. At Index, Hannah is passionate about helping visionary entrepreneurs from day one, and supporting them as their companies scale and grow. She is particularly energised by founders who have an unfair advantage in tackling daunting problems in technical or challenging markets. Her investments for Index include Remote, a platform to enable distributed working; Multiverse, the company bringing apprenticeships into the digital age; Fonoa, the automated tax platform; and Beauty Pie, the online cosmetics and beauty subscription service. During this episode, we discuss her first day at Index, how she assesses founders for grit and perseverance, and the future of work. Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Hannah Seal Partner at Index.

My guest today is Henrik Landgren co-founder and CPTO of ArK Kapital a precision financing company that empowers technology businesses to grow faster with non-dilutive capital. They recently closed a 165M Euro seed round of Equity and Debt capital - round led by LocalGlobe with participation from Creandum and some prominent angels including Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, Zettle by PayPal founder Jacob de Geer, Embark Studios founder Patrick Söderlund, King founder Sebastian Knutsson, and EQT Ventures founding partner Hjalmar Winbladh Prior to ArK, Henrik was a partner at EQT Ventures - the Swedish venture capital fund that announced its first 566m Euro fund in 2016. At EQT Ventures Henrik was also leading EQT’s Motherbrain division. Motherbrain is the data platform that supports EQT to be truly data-driven in finding and assessing the best tech start-ups to invest in. Before EQT, Henrik worked as the VP of analytics at Spotify during 2010-2016 when Spotify was one of the highest-growing scale-up in Europe. He is the mastermind behind Spotify’s award-winning Analytics team building it from the ground up and contributing to many major strategic initiatives to build the world’s largest music subscription business. In the words of Ted Persson from EQT - Henrik has made “analytics” his trademarks, from Spotify to EQT Ventures and now ArK. During this episode we discussed about data-driven decision making and the DIBBs framework, how to build a data-driven culture and why Henrik is called the 9-minutes man. Without further ado, please enjoy this excellent conversion with Henrik Landgren co-founder and CPTO of Ark Kapital!