is BNPL is the new grocery delivery?
• is London at the end of the tech investment boom cycle?
• BNPL has become all the rage
• forget about knowing how to code, become financial literate
Observations
🇬🇧 Are we at the end of the tech booming cycle in the UK? Investors are unhappy, Boris wants to make liquidity events more difficult than they should be, taxes are not founders friendly and, on top of that, the Silicon Roundabout is closing down.
link
🇬🇧 Monzo and Curve are the last British startups that announced adding BNPL products to their portfolio. Goldman spent 2.2 billions for purchasing a BNPL biz, joining the likes of Apple and Amazon. The BNPL market has become an arms race similar to the grocery wars from Europe earlier this year.
link
🇬🇧 Weezy is the last VC darling looking for a buyer, and put their ARR number on the table in order to lure potential suitors. How much they can actually get and an overview of the latest from the Euro grocery front.
link
Tech tapas
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It is an invite-only event. If you're interested to be part of it, or know somebody who should be in, please send me an email. Gracias.
Cheat sheet reports
• Who are the investors funding fintech startups from Europe:
- 40 angel investors
- 80 VCs
- the full list
• The tight connection between Swedish and Russian investors.
• Why did Point Nine Capital invested $12 million in Whereby?
• The most interesting European startups from YC this summer.
• Horse tech startups made in Sweden.
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Notes
🇬🇧 Index Ventures has launched a handy calculator helping entrepreneurs figure out how to create good stock options plans. Not only it covers stages and size tickets, but also it has useful benchmarks based on geography, seniority and type of jobs. It's good.
That's just great VC marketing. This is the type of utility and marketing content that actually makes sense and converts both on the awareness and on the knocking on the door funnel stages. Index has been traditionally good at utility marketing if we're to be honest, they also are behind the manifesto and IIRC, they were the first VC in Europe that started aggregating portfolio jobs on their site a decade or so ago.
🇬🇧 Good primer on how to go about investing these days from Tom Blomfield, a British entrepreneur turned angel investor. What makes the piece interesting, his personal learnings aside, is that he names Softbank for bad behaviour.
Calling out bad investor behaviour by their own is rather rare for 'we don't shit (in public) where we eat' reasons. It's a small world where everybody talks and knows about the bad apples but there's hardly people having the balls to go on record about it. Tom is most likely talking about Rajeev Misra from Softbank's London office, who is publicly known for doing controversial stuff - but those stories are no different than the ones about the one and only Adam Neumann, Rajeev's boss, whose similar reputation is well documented within the investor gossiping circles.
💰 Being bankrupt and/or not being able to have a stable financial situation is probably one of the most important problems of the world we live in. So, forget about teaching your kids how to code - how about teaching them how to be financial literate first?
I believe that it's better to teach kids about finance before they need it and schools are really bad at doing this anyway.
Think about it, what is the initial financial exposure of a kid? Doing chores for little cash? Parents setting up a banking card for them? That's less often than not. First job? They will set up an account at the bank next to their house, if that. Is that optimal? Of course not, they earned the money but still have no idea about what they can do with it, other than spending it for fun. The same can be applied to a lot of serious investors, btw. :-)
Jokes aside, isn't financial management one of the better particular cases for learning how to do math? Basic finance stuff should be included in the curriculum early on, next to the basics of math, physics and chemistry.
And sadly, it's likely that kids learn about money in school via marketing programs set up by big companies, which are, well, just marketing done with conversion purposes. Like Robinhood's back to school scheme, for example - theoretically they're supposed to teach you about finance, with the hope to lock you in their business from early on their cycle. That's what good marketing does.
So here's a free startup idea for you: an online teaching financial literacy for 12-18 years old. Please do it - and ping me if you do, I'm willing to get involved.
🇬🇧 Amazon is offering its Prime members in the U.K. and Ireland access to Deliveroo Plus for one year. Smart back-to-back, Amazon is also a shareholder in Deliveroo fwiw.
💪 Hey Siri, how do you define FOMO for investors?
🇪🇺 Brussels news outlet EU Reporter’s blend of corporate press releases, original news and paid-for content makes it impossible for readers to determine who’s behind the coverage.
🇪🇺 What is the timeline for Europe's biggest carmakers brands to fully switch to electric.
🇪🇺 Across Europe, legislation is pushing back against a waste-based economy and restoring something that companies have gradually taken away from citizens: The right to repair what they’ve bought.
A large majority of EU citizens would rather repair their devices than replace them. And a majority think that manufacturers should be legally obliged to facilitate the repair of digital devices or the replacement of their individual parts. Repairing products and extending their useful life could play a key role in mitigating the environmental consequences of all this waste.
🇩🇪 Deutsche Bank published a report accusing German financial regulators and the country’s government of serious failures, blaming them on the decline and the almost unprecedented loss of importance of German banks on the global stage over the past 15 years.
That is the same DB that has been involved in several scandals lately, including money laundering, rate rigging, mis-selling of US mortgages or sanction violations - all those happened because of regulatory failure and the decline of the country’s banking sector.
The report was pulled out of the public sources a few hours later.
🇩🇪 What the end of the Merkel era means for the world.
In a speech to CDU MPs in 2018, she compared the darkening global horizon to the period preceding the Thirty Years’ War (which ravaged what is today Germany) and warned of the complacency that long years of peace can bring.
🇪🇺 The energy situation:
• UK households and businesses face a tough autumn and winter after a fire at a power facility in Kent sent gas prices soaring to record highs.
• The whole Europe is bracing for winter energy shortage.
• Italy, on the other hand, will introduce short-term measures to offset the expected rise in retail power prices and is working on a longer-term reform of power bills
🇧🇪 Belgium’s internet quality is worst in Western Europe & also one of the least affordable. But hey, I hear taxes are friendly down there.
☘️ A Boston-based fitness wearable company left a message for Amazon and other wannabe cloners on every 4.0 circuit board. Plus every engineers’ initials who built it.
Don’t bother copying us. We will win.
🇨🇳 China''s real estate development group is on the brink of collapsing, and this can have similar impact to the one caused by the bankruptcy of the American bank Lehman Brothers back in 2008.
🤡 When the selling starts, FOMO turns into fear of losing everything as speculators jump off sinking ship. Today’s negative real yields don’t reflect reality. Fed warned it will taper purchases later this year. Someone is at least reaching for the punch bowl.
Stick with fundamentals.
Related: Discipline and investment quality focus will prevail regardless the stage of cycle + plenty of good ol' school advice from a podcast with a long timer in the VC business. Another good quote: the VC and their founders are not a family - they are a team. Some of the European investors call their founders 'family' which, apart from benign intentions, sounds like mafia stuff.
♟️ Why are hedge funds entering the private markets and why are Coatue going to leave a mark in VC in the coming years? link
🔘 Best non-YC, non-Techstars, non-500 Startups accelerator.
👺 A paywalled BI article points out that Mailchimp employees are furious after the company's founders promised to never sell, withheld equity, and then sold it for $12 billion. It's not black and white though, the media business is about selling clicks after all.
🚓 Instagram boss compares social media to cars saying that some people are just going to get run over, and that's the price we all pay:
We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large cars create way more value in the world than they destroy. And I think social media is similar.
He later apologised, of course.
🪅 A call up to 15 minutes with a star on Cameo has an average price of $31.
🕸️ As most of the rumours ahead of this week Apple's keynote were wrong, there is a possibility that Apple is purposely leaking disinformation in an effort to catch moles.
🤔 21st century problems: how unromantic is it to do calendar sharing with your other half? The answers are surprising and interesting.
📚 Recommended reading on energy.
🔥 What if we get things right? Visions for 2030.
🍆 Scientists believe they have discovered the origin of copulation in ancient Scottish lake.
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Sunday CET
Notes and commentaries about what matters in the European space - concise, no non-sense insights, interesting stories and implications for founders, investors, employees from tech companies or government representatives.
Published every Sunday morning by Dragos Novac and emailed to investors, founders and decisions makers from 50+ countries who want to understand the ecosystem from Europe.