• does being rich or a successful investor means you are a deep thinker
• the intangible skills of an entrepreneur
• investors should be like penguins

 

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Observations

🌀 Here's a quote from a great weekend reading from PG:

"But that [being smart] wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he had important new ideas. Being very smart was a necessary precondition for having those ideas, but the two are not identical."

And then, a corollary - does being rich or a successful investor means you are a deep thinker? 

Conventional wisdom says no, of course there's not a strong correlation though there may be some back and forth causality. But I am nor rich neither a professional investor so I wouldn't know too much other than anecdotes and empirical observations - I am an entrepreneur though, so I tend to look at it through those lens. 

This is actually a tangent to a recurring discussion I have been having with my son lately, who's at that point asking what I do for a living and how I define success. My usual answer, and rule of thumb actually, goes invariably around the 'always give your best, never fake work, and show up consistently everyday. If you do that, you can live with the consequences'. This is also because he is at a moment in life thinking that being smart can be a proxy for getting at desired outcomes without too much effort i.e. good grades in school. 

As the saying goes 'if it's worth doing it, it's worth doing it well' but truth is that attitude is a mere prerequisite ingrained in a whole working process developed in time and which tends to be correlated to an outcome. If the process is right, and you create the right circumstances for the anticipated trajectory, the probability to get to the outcome gets higher, even though sometimes there's adversity and factors you cannot control.

And then, PG's observations are spot on, the ability of coming up with great ideas could be more important than being an intrinsic intelligent person, and in general, finding solutions and being pragmatic can take you a longer way than being smart but full of shit, for example.

Solving problems and finding creative ways is usually the startup way of building things. Being scrappy, doing everything with nothing, and pragmatically hustling your way out are at least as important as just being smart. And btw street smart beats just being smart, and then it is also a matter of motivation plus not being socially awkward (don't be an asshole is implicit), after all it's maybe better to know how to be a social person rather than a weird smart dude not able to communicate in a normal way with normal people.

Those are, I believe, some of the defining things ingrained in a person successfully achieving independence by building a startup. But how do you become such a person? Can you teach the process and putting yourself in a position you thrive in? How much is inner intelligence, how much is circumstance, how much is peers/mentors/parents and how much is ambition? A lot of food for thought, and the subject for a different kind of email, perhaps. 

🍢 So how was the Tech Tapas?

People seem to have found it interesting and useful. Here's some of the feedback I got:

• the 30-60 minute format was great, not too long not too short, and makes for a good personal context. Can work more on a more relaxed atmosphere and the format should be better correlated with the number of the people we would want in the event though, as well as with the time slot allocation. 
• the overall idea of bringing in front of investors with different background founders from across all Europe was actually one of the things people found valuable, both investors and founders
• with a couple of exceptions, investors hadn't previously known about the startups and in general the feedback was good about the quality of the startups and their presentations.
• this is a general large area I think there's a whole lot of fine tuning to be made to and which I will look closer into tbh.
• which brings me to some rookie mistakes - the time management could be improved (both as a format structure and as cutting off founders going offscript) as well as the technical choice for doing the whole thing (Whereby is not a suitable solution for doing video for more than 12 people and learnt this the hard way). Obvious ones in retrospect and easy correctable for the future, I believe.

There's many other little details but what's more important though, pre and post Tech Tapas, investors reached out to founders and hopefully this will lead to term sheets. Fingers crossed. Also important, founders received a lot of honest and constructive feedback about how to better sell themselves.

Looking at the big picture from the past few weeks, not an easy thing to pull off and quite ambitious, given that I am neither an event organiser nor an investor. Today I am lucky to have some honest and constructive feedback on how to do it better (some excellent suggestions actually), what could work and what not, as well as more on how to polish it on so this can make better sense and become scalable. Think am fortunate to have found believers and people genuinely appreciating the efforts.

Onward to the next one, will keep you posted. The startups and their pitches are available here.

 

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A better way to track intel

Did you know that you could build smart trackers on Nordic 9?

A tracker is a bot that can be customised for tracking intel by one or many countries, by one or multiple investors, by one or many industries, or by one or many size checks.

This way you can have a quick granular overview of exactly the domains you're interested in. More signal, less noise.

We're currently at more than 150 trackers built by our users, why don't you give it a try?

It's quick and simple to add one. And it's FREE.

 

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Cheat sheet reports

• Early stage marketplaces in Europe:
 - B2B
 - consumers
 - from the Nordics

• A list of Nordic startups manufacturing electric vehicles.
• A list early stage SAAS startups doing video software in Europe
• A list of promising very early stage edtech startups from Europe.
 
• Investors in Europe
 - a list of 100 investing at pre seed and seed
 - a list of 30 investing at late stage
 - top 140 active VCs
 - a list of 25 from the new wave of European VCs

• Intel:
- 100X ARR unicorns
- Most active investors in Europe by verticals as of 2021

Note: the reports are for Nordic 9 paying customers only. You can become one from here.

 

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Product-led B2B

The whole context is worth reading.

 

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Real estate micro bubbles

 

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birds vs cats vs building glass

 

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Value for money

Every week at Nordic 9 we send to our customers curated intel overview and commentary about the deals we tracked in Europe. You can dig through the archives here.

We also run a local edition, covering the Nordics - the archive here.

You should subscribe and get it too.

 

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Quick notes and links

🇪🇺 Euro goes shopping in America:
• Revolut acquired the team behind New York-based talent sourcing marketplace Wanted.
• Sunday bought Montreal-based CHK PLZ, a contactless payment solution with over 300 restaurants across Quebec. 
• FlixMobility acquired U.S. long-distance bus provider Greyhound for $46 million.

America goes to the EU:
• A growing number of renowned US tech investors are moving to Europe to capitalize on the continent’s start-ups.

I like this money circuit - American investors give money to Euro startups to spend it on American assets. I am sure somewhere in an EU office some official has to have a populist opinion on this.


🇨🇭 A Swiss CEO of a $15bn private equity establishment banned the word 'deal' within the company's internal comms because he is trying to get his colleagues to shift from a transactional mind-set to one he calls industrial.

He wants the employees of his firm to act like they are owners of businesses, not merely the doers of deals.

"We want to act like founders, not financiers. [...] People in our business are called sharks, vultures, wolves…in Germany they call us locusts. At Partners [the name of the company], we’re like penguins. When it gets cold they all huddle together to protect the young penguins.”

Penguins?


🎃 There's an old Romanian saying that goes like 'do what the preacher says not what the preacher does', which I was reminded of by reading how good investors could behave.

Just because they could doesn't mean they would - investors live in a world moving mostly based on signalling rather than on fundamentals making them credible and trustworthy. Just check the social media of any VC, it's easy to spot the building personal brand ones as they populate feeds with all sorts of prescriptive startup advice - that is actually targeted to their peer investors and not to founders, it's like a peacock's tail contest.

The reality check though is when having to deal with them personally in the real world, their attitude and talk is usually different than what you read in the marketing materials.


🤌 There's also great stuff good investors do, btw.


🇪🇺 Monocle's Tyler Brûlé has put together a list of recent "impressive launches, acquisitions and results" in global publishing. Doing media business in a smart way.


🇬🇧 Klarna launched a 'buy now, pay now' concept in the UK, joining the regular retailers. The Brits are looking into their business, is why.


🇬🇧 13k people crashed Crowdcube's servers in their quest to give neo-bank Chip £11.5 million. 11.5 million is not a trivial amount in a crowdraising deal, this investing thingie craze starts to become something. Overall, it is yet another sign of the high temperature of the European investment market.


🇩🇪 Axel Springer is focusing much of its energy on grabbing business in the United States but seems stuck in the past when it comes to the workplace and deal-making - NY Times investigated zi Germans.


🇳🇱 The Dutch government's forensic lab decrypted Tesla's closely guarded driving data-storage system, uncovering a wealth of information that could be used to investigate serious accidents.


🇬🇧 Amy Lewin picked up on the startup coaching story and produced some good evidence documenting that building startups is really lonely and hard and not the glam media makes it to appear.


🇪🇺 Google said in an internal document that it had successfully slowed down European privacy rules in collaboration with other tech companies.

Sounds like 'if you cannot beat them, confuse them' kind of thing.


🇪🇺 US vs EU negotiating via their journalist leaks:

Oct 15: Behind the display of bonhomie, U.S. officials are growing increasingly worried about European tech regulation plans, which they feel unfairly target Silicon Valley giants like Facebook, Google and Apple.

Oct 21: The United States will remove punitive tariffs on products from Austria, France, Italy, Spain and Britain after reaching a deal to end digital services taxes, the US Treasury announced.

Compromises are being made. 


🇩🇪 Magnet fishing - using powerful magnets to pull metal out of bodies of water - has exploded in popularity in Europe, the Berlin edition.


🤔 Bloomberg wants to buy PayPal for about $40 billion. Great strategic thinking and execution, if it works out -- owning an audience that gets you lower CAC and increase LTV, part 13862. Paypal already did it once for doing smart embedded finance with the Honey acquisition.


🪝 Donald Trump SPAC-ed a startup building a social network that has no capital structure, and no projections of future revenue. It does have a mock-up of the app though.

So if Donald Trump announced “hey I’m gonna do a social media company, buy some stock,” people would buy some stock. And then he’d get a lot of money. And then if the social media platform did not end up being profitable — as I cannot imagine it would be! — then he would, uh, still have that money? And if the social media platform did not end up being launched — if Trump and his crack team of technologists just couldn’t actually build a well-functioning online social network — then he would, uh, still have that money? And if there was no crack team of technologists at all, if nobody even tried to build the social media platform — then you see where I am going with this right?

The quote is from Matt Levine, you should read the whole thing.


💸 NFX set up a pre-seed fund for professors and grad students ready to start companies:
• 500K-$1M investment
• Feedback in 4 days
• Decision in 9 days


🚗  Which cars, trucks, and SUVs brands have increased the most in US:
• the most for new: Chevrolet, Jeep, Dodge
• the least for new: Mini, Mercedes, Lexus
• the most for used: Volkswagen, Hyundai, Toyota
• the least for used: Jaguar, Mazda, Infiniti

The local American brands are in the top of the new, and the top of the line stayed about the same. As for the used ones, the brands considered to hold their value the best saw had the highest price augmentation. Here you can find a table with cars with the best resale value in the States.


🦨 Not a week goes by without Facebook being in the centre of attention, now with the story of intending to rebrand the company as it aims to avoid both negative perception and breakdown consequences for being a badly managed business.

The public image they would like to convey is the new direction of the company, the so-called metaverse, a silly name indeed. Jokes aside, the result will be a different name for the same company, with the same DNA and boss (who sets up the DNA). The company is too big to fail anyways.


🤖 More than half of Roblox users are now older than 13, presenting the company with new trust and safety challenges.

Roblox, TikTok and Snap seem to be the goto places for under 18s. But kids grow up fast - question is what will they switch to, if that, when they grow even older.

Facebook is for staying in touch with grandparents. Linkedin is for getting a job. Twitter is for getting the news. Tinder is for getting laid. Will Zuck's metaverse be an option? Hard to imagine. Vertical networks? More increasingly so.

Otoh it is hard to generalise, given there's many examples of countries still dependent on Facebook.


Quickies

👿 Facebook content moderators working for Accenture are protesting their low pay with a billboard targeting Accenture CEO Julie Sweet.

⛓️ If you're into supply chain problems, here's a great nerdy thread on the current state of affairs and its bottlenecks, made by the head of a logistics startup from the US. The beauty of it is that the post showed results, as the officials made changes on the spot.

☕  'Payments terms are to be paid within 30 days, not to wait 30 days and then process the invoice' - how to deal with having your invoices paid on time.

🔎 The SaaS metrics that matter.

🧀 Goldman Sachs awarded bonuses to CEO David Solomon and president John Waldron worth about $30 million and $20 million.

🤔 I’m an HR manager at a small startup and I learnt that an employee has an OnlyFans account. Now what?

🇨🇳 Li Jiaqi, known as "The Lipstick King" in China, sold $1.7 billion of product during a 12-hour livestream on Wednesday. 250 million people tuned in.

Let that sink in for a minute.

🇨🇳 VR lightsaber tournaments are a thing in China.

🚶 What happened to Clubhouse?

💪 How to deal with feedback and criticism positively.

👓 The story of storyboarding: exploring the hidden art form behind films.

🌱 20 realistic micro-habits to live better every day.

 

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