• Why is Spotify in denial?
• Euro politicians will take a probation year as VCs.
• The metaverse is in safe hands.

 

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Observations

I didn't really intend to write anything about the Joe Rogan/Spotify situation - it's just a banal conflict whereas famous people not happy with how a media channel handles things decided to take their business elsewhere and make a big fuss about it in the process.

For people not in the know - the reason is Joe Rogan, a controversial and somewhat famous podcaster (in the US) paid by Spotify with 100 million to produce content on their platform and whose shows are biased and spread misinformation about Covid. That dude doing what he's paid for - saying crazy stuff for getting audience, following the good old media model - turned into a lot of negative PR for Spotify in the US - in Europe, the media is mum about it - culminating with some known artists asking the canceling of Rogan's shows or else taking their discography off of Spotify's properties. And gone they were.

Spotify seemed reasonable about it and acted in a decent way for dealing with the whole situation (even had Rogan publicly apologize twice this week, which is not trivial, and had some his old shows deleted from the platform) - i.e. we provide some middle ground accommodating solutions because we acknowledge there's a problem with how we do our jobs impacting the society, but at the end of the day, you like it or not, it is our business and there's no room for blackmail, we have the right to publish any media product we would like to, no matter how crazily controversial it is as long as it is legal. It makes sense, right? It is just what any media house would do with its creators in order to protect their $ generating assets.

Here's where the rubber meets the road though - this week Daniel Ek and his people had an internal meeting trying to calm down their own staff pissed off because the bad company PR is also reflecting on the people working for you. To cool them off, Ek actually vehemently denied that Spotify is a media company and that it needed to behave as such as opposed to being a manager of an agnostic tech platform that has little responsibility to the content they pay and make money from. Which is simply not true - Spotify is one of the largest media companies in the world for the simple reason that they pay for content, host that said content, distribute it to the audience coming for it and make money out of it. Yes, just like Facebook and Google, for example.

Daniel Ek may think of himself as a tech guy running a tech company but the business he built has a media model, and businesses are judged based on their economic model and labelled accordingly. Not only that, but also Spotify even acquired a few media companies (1, 2) on its quest to become the largest audio repository in the world. And maybe originally Daniel Ek didn't have the vision to build a media empire with a little tech tool aggregating music, but he arrived at this point, whether he likes it or not. You know the old saying - if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is likely a duck.

But why would he deny that Spotify is a media company and why it matters? I doubt it is Daniel's not being a big boy and take responsibility - it is rather an interesting situation for Spotify that can have multiple strategic implications for the development of the business and where he wants to take it in the future. It can easily transform in a slippery road given the legislators increased attention for regulating platforms like Google and Facebook for making use of their market power in abusive ways, some of which were found not to be legal, or even being fairly easygoing on how others used this kind of platforms in abusive or illegal ways. Google and Facebook had a similar stance as Spotify now initially but now are not even disputing a bit being media companies anymore. Spotify has reached a similar market power and influence and certainly doesn't want to be judged by the same token and getting the same constant negative PR and scrutiny of the two.

And that is why I believe Ek would prefer avoiding being labelled as such from the get-go - being associated to any little extent with the likes of Google and Facebook is simply toxic. But denying being a media company when it's an obvious case is just a futile exercise and Daniel is not going to win, if we're only to look at how history played out for similar cases. Particularly because he has the FB and Google as precedents, he just needs a different and a better narrative for Spotify. 

 

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Cheat sheet and intel reports

• We launched a new intel newsletter covering the fintech in Europe - embedded, banking-as-a-service, web3 and a whole lot more. More value for the same money - it is available here and you can subscribe for getting it in your inbox from here.

• Interesting web3 startups funded in Europe last fall - link
• Non-web3 investors which made at least a couple of web3 deals In Europe last year and their deals - link.
• Early stage startups building consumer fintech in Europe.
• Early stage SAAS startups from Sweden.
• Early stage German (DACH) startups that raised from non-German investors.

• series A European investors
• pre seed/seed investors in Europe
• late stage investors in Europe
• super angels active in Europe

• The most interesting deals from the Xmas holidays in the Nordics, DACH, the UK and the rest of Europe. 
• Active angel investors from France.
• A review of the investment ecosystem in Europe in 2022.
• Are we at the start of a massive correction or we're in a transitory phase?


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

 

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Spain leads the hot-desking

what is hot-desking

 

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Extrapolate this 10 years from now on

 

 

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Quickies

Notes

🇬🇧 Here's a sobering stat: 37 of the 126 companies that went public in London in 2021 were from the tech sector, and they all raised a total of £6.6 billion in capital, which is a record for the local exchange. To put it in context, that's less than 10% of the money spent on the private market in Europe in the same 2021 or about as much as Northvolt, Klarna, N26, Gorillas and Mollie raised in total last year.

But hey, there's a plan in place, Boris himself will speak with founders and leaders from leading high-growth tech companies to have this bettered. Sadly, it will have to wait - following the publication of Sue Gray’s report into lockdown parties at Downing Street, Boris Johnson pulled out of the meeting to focus on his response.

🇬🇧 Zepz, aka WorldRemit, the London-based money transfer service is prepping a U.S. IPO at around a $6 billion valuation, bypassing the UK’s push to drive more tech companies to list there.

🇪🇺 As the EU politicians still couldn't figure out whether they can be VCs with public money or not, and consequently causing delays in the funding commitments and further deployments to "start-ups and innovators", they finally seemed to have reached a compromise: they will resume doing their job, and postpone a resolution as they will explore reaching to a final answer within the next 12 months.

It's public money, so taking a year to figure it out how to spend it seems sensible, right? And at the very least it buys the politicians a probation period to be VCs with the public money for a year and thusly figure out whether they like it or not.

🇪🇺 As mentioned two weeks ago by yours truly here, Greylock wants to penetrate Europe via its new hire, Mustafa Suleyman, known as a co-founder at DeepMind. That's roughly three years after Sequoia Capital discovered Europe, according to a PR puff piecedid by FT for them.

🇩🇪 Christian Seifert of the German Soccer League is working with Axel Springer for the development of a streaming platform tailored to the German market for sports league competitions and other sports events. The launch has been set for fall 2023.

🇬🇧 The Brits figured they should make Google and Facebook pay newspapers and other media outlets for using their stories. The move comes after the Germans and the French did the same last year. 

🇬🇮 Gibraltar Stock Exchange was acquired as the owner, a blockchain company, is looking to build an exchange that will link the fiat and crypto markets.

🇪🇺 European cities like Amsterdam and Lyon started banning dark stores in central areas because they disturb the public space - they take over shopping-street storefronts, reduce commercial foot traffic or cause nuisances in residential neighborhoods

 

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Watercooler talk

💰 Tiger Global has raised over $11 billion for its latest fund and plans to tack on another billion before a final close next month.

👀 Insight and Sequoia backed a web browser for business that's been in stealth and already raised $100 million.

🇳🇱 Would you pay $10 million for a domain name? Some Dutch did.

💸 Any business will eventually become a fintech, the Airbnb edition.

🍕 Domino Pizza has started paying its customers to not get their pizzas delivered to them, as a result of a national labor shortage. Instead, Domino’s will effectively pay them to pick up the food themselves:
• Relevant data: digital orders make up 50% of Domino’s sales. Delivery accounts for about two-thirds of those orders, while one-third are takeout.

 

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Cyborgs, web three et al

😱 Facebook suffered the largest one-day stock crash in the history of the market, and lost about $251.3 billion in market value only this week.
• Apparently Mark Z. was a bit devastated about it, and not only because the value of his personal stock went down with 24 billion.
• More importanty than a few billions here and there, it looks like the name change into Meta and the metaverse pivot thingie as a shiny future for the company didn't work as a quick fix for their fundamental problems.
• On one hand, employees were forced into it causing "you're either in or out" situations.
• To make things worse, on the other hand, Facebook says now that priorities have changed yet again since TikTok is eating their lunch and a new pivot is required - to short-form video.
• Zig-zagging is the exact opposite of a clear and focused strategy, they even teach this in schools.

🦾 The metaverse has a great future in spite of TikTok preventing Mark to fully focus on it, so everybody be chill and don't worry about it, okay? Look, Satya Nadella just said that Microsoft will take a better look at it, and that the gaming investments will help the company build a true metaverse.

But I wonder - does that mean that Facebook's metaverse was not rue? Or will Microsoft's work be truer than Facebook's? Them dudes at Facebook even changed their name to be true, I am excited to learn what can beat that.

💰 Here's some great news from Amazon: it just increased its Amazon Prime subscription from $120 to $140. Maybe it's because of the inflation or something, because the business seems to doing fine - I mean, just this week it set the record for the biggest one-day gain on Wall Street as it added $191 billion to its valuation. In.a.day! 

👀 Roblox *is* the metaverse - the job at Roblox is to look at player identity and figure out how to take this massive 200-million-users-a-month community and give them the tools they need to express themselves visually. link

👽 Kanye stays away from NFTs because his focus is building real products in the real world, like real food real clothes real shelter. You'd think he didn't get the web3 is the future memo?

 

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Reads

🤔 Web3 is attracting a flood of investor interest but is rife with hype and speculation. A value investing approach can help.

🍷 Andy Warhol, Clay Christensen, and Vitalik Buterin walk into a bar.

🎲 Gaming the smiling curve. link

🎮 Don’t forget Microsoft - understanding the behemoth in Redmond teaches us valuable lessons in cloud infrastructure, startup strategy, and the future of software.

🤔 The School of Fish strategy: Just repeat what everyone else is saying. If it's proven wrong, well, everyone was wrong together. The establishment's consensus algorithm. Works until falsified by the outside world. link 

 

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How's your week been?

🇳🇱 Rotterdam's central bridge section had to be removed to make way for Jeff Bezos’s $485m superyacht. Dutch people don't seem too happy about the idea and plan to throw rotten eggs at the yacht.

💎 Sotheby announced the sale of a large and extremely rare black diamond described as a treasure from interstellar space.

⛵ Yacht lovers - there simply aren’t enough yachts available for purchase!

😳 Bloomberg announced that Russia already invaded Ukraine last Friday. It was a mistake and the article was online for about an hour before being removed. This is how journalism is done nowadays for gaming Google, I known many big media names pre-generating this kind of articles way in advance (one morbid example is pre-writing obituaries for people expected to die).

 

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