The Lowdown | 7.10.23 🗞️
The show & newsletter that wraps up the week in European Venture.
Welcome to this week’s edition of The EUVC Lowdown 🗞️ The show that wraps up the week in European Venture with some of the key people making the headlines. Today, we’re gonna cover:
This week’s events
This week’s podcasts
This week’s GIFs & MEMEs
This week’s LP syndicate news
This week’s stories
Behind the Engaged Investments Conference
Will the VC dry powder soon make the money flow?
Will Elon be the end of Twitter?🐦
Fund (& startup) pitch decks & narratives
This week’s funds
This weeks hires
Listen & subscribe to the latest episode of The Lowdown here.
This week’s events 🥳
Syndicate Dinner | Engaged & Disraptors | 11/10 in Prague
As always, we’re putting on a dinner in connection to our participation in Engaged & Disraptors. We’d LOVE to see you there! 😍
Only 20 seats available - claim yours here!
We’re also doing community breakfasts before each conference - dm for invite.
VC Cookout with fireside chats | Web Summit | 31/10 in Lisbon
Wanna come cook with us at Web Summit? 🧑🍳
It's gonna be a day centered around creating experiences and relationships that last 💞 with a program tailored to leverage the expertise of each guest to create insights you couldn't get anywhere else 🧠
And - of course - we'll cook under the tutoring of some of Lisbon's great local chefs 🧑🍳 diving into all the Portuguese gems 🍷🫒
This is going to absolutely amazing 😍
Only 15 seats available - claim yours here!
This week’s podcasts 🎧
The European VC, #115 Hampus Jakobsson, Pale Blue Dot
In this episode you’ll learn
– How Hampus walked into his first VC meeting dressed up in a suit thinking he’d fit in, only to be proven that VC is actually a group of cool people doing amazing things
– The hilarious story behind Hampus’ first entrepreneurial ventures and route into venture all the way to founding one of the signature climate funds in Europe
– The magic of being focused and absurdly curious as a VC
– How Hampus thinks as a thesis-driven investor, first with Blueyard and now with Pale Blue Dot
The European VC #116 Marvin Laio, Diaspora Ventures
In this episode you’ll learn
– Why Marvin as a successful Silicon Valley investor doubles down on Europe and what he brings to his founders
– A very honest conversation about the collaboration environment in Europe and the US
– How the best European founders can get juiced up by seeing the US ecosystem and experiencing that their just as good as those backed by the world renowned firms
– Learnings from investing in 414 pre-seed & seed startups over the last decade and why Marvin calls himself the Forest Gump of Silicon Valley
The NextGen VC #10, Jan-Soeren Zinke, IRIS
In this episode you’ll learn:
– The Growing German Startup Ecosystem
– How to break into VC in your early 20s
– How to build and maintain VC relationships
– The importance of side-projects
This week’s GIFs & Memes 🙊
What Emerging Manager expect will happen when he announces fund in Sifted
GP trying to get LP to act on co-investment opportunity
When the LPs that wanted to wait for final close comes back when you’re oversubscribed
This week’s LP syndicate news 💸
We’re closing our LP syndicate into Pacenotes this month and wanted to let you know why we’re so hyped about this investment 😍
The 🪙-argument behind our investment
We’ll get exposure to a portfolio of top tier VCs like Accel, Northzone, Seedcamp, and Balderton for strong base returns;
We’ll get co-investments with the very same managers sprinkled on top for some sweet alpha.
The ♟️-argument behind our investment
Getting anywhere near these funds is incredibly difficult (trust us, some don’t even wanna join us on the pod🤦) so the opportunity to understand them better via Pacenotes is a long term strong play.
Understanding how Pacenotes think and work to execute on the best co-invest strategy holds invaluable learnings for us 🧠
Exposure to these funds grants us a unique access point to some of the hottest deals across Europe - pretty sweet superpower for the whole EUVC syndicate 😍
This week’s stories 🗞️
Behind the Engaged Investments Conference
Petr Sima, founder of Depo Ventures, and the man behind the Engaged Investment conference came on the show today to shed some light on the motivation and vision behind the Depo Ventures conference.
We started quite some years ago with the ambition to lead create a conference for all the early stage investors in the region. But we couldn’t call it an “angel and VC conference” ‘cos the ecosystem wasn’t identifying as such back then. It was early days for CEE. But now we’re really seeing the conference come into it’s own with more than 150 investors across Europe participating.
Some of these being angels, some VCs and some LPs.
At EUVC we’re attending and looking forward to yet another great encounter with the CEE ecosystem. As you probably know, we’re super bullish on the promise and potential of Eastern Europe having already invested in Acrobator Ventures and committed to Startup Wise Guys (in closing) & 500 Emerging Europe as well.
If you’re there - do hit us up 💌
Will the VC dry powder soon make the money flow?
So, on today’s EUVC Lowdown, I originally quoted this debate to a well-known European VC linkedin influencer (👻) but have since realized the original source was Aziz Gilani. Sorry for reproducing the plagiarism. Either way, here goes the original debate👇
Jon Sakoda first put out his analysis of the market in an interview to The Information.
The amount of dry powder at VC funds is now nearly double the $147 billion annual average between 2016 and 2020, before the pandemic-fueled surge in fundraising, according to Sakoda’s analysis. With this much capital available, the industry could continue investing at its current pace for three more years—without raising a dollar of new money, he estimates.
“You really can’t bet against gravity … The funds have to flow.”
Sakoda expects VC firms to continue the fundraising pace they maintained between 2016 and 2020 over the next two years because of demand from new types of investors, such as family offices that want to expand their investments in private-tech startups. Total VC investments next year should rise to near-2021 levels, thanks to this new money and a return to a more normal pace of using cash reserves for deals—about 8% of total dry powder each quarter, said Sakoda. The drop in valuations should also make a single dollar of investment go further. As deal-making resumes, Sakoda anticipates dry powder is likely to plateau in 2024 at around $300 billion.
Data says the exact opposite of this thread. 2000 was a record setting year for dry powder, but VC $ deployed still declined for 3 straight years. Similar 07-08. Dry powder doesn't sit in a bank account, it has to be called from an LP, and LPs have strong opinions.
Supplying the below two graphs to underpin his conclusion 👇
In the lowdown episode today, we chatted through this counterpoint by Aziz, with Dan Bowyer commenting:
I have not seen it. I have not experienced it in my fund. And I haven’t heard of it. And I think I would have, if LPs not sticking to their commitments were a real thing having real impact.
I’m very curious. Have you?
Will Elon be the end of Twitter?🐦
On the Lowdown, Cathy White took us into a conversation on the Elon-show and his bid to buy (or not?) twitter. Here’s the latest, well summarized by The Information:
Elon Musk has spent months criticizing Twitter for everything from its management to its prevalence of phony users. Now he needs to figure out how to fix its business as advertiser spending evaporates.
Musk’s decision to reverse course and offer to complete his $44 billion purchase of Twitter according to the original terms could mean he will be taking charge of the social media company as soon as next week. Once he takes the reins, Musk will have to deal with a company that’s grappling with an economic slowdown, likely forcing him to make aggressive cuts to reduce Twitter’s costs.
At the same time as he’s also been texting about increasing the userbase about 3x from its current ~200m. Well, that’ll take more than texting.
The conversation took an interesting turn into how European VCs use Twitter vs LinkedIn leading to a clear piece of advice from Cathy, one of Europe’s best VC comms people:
It always makes sense to share your message on different platforms, as there’s always different users on each […] but for sure. For European VC right now, LinkedIn is by far the most powerful platform.
…All said with the remainder of today’s panel nodding in agreement 👌
Fund (& startup) pitch decks & narratives
Dan has dedicated himself to developing the world’s best pitch deck. Haven’t we all at some point? 🙈 Well maybe, but he’s actually taking a real stab at it. Kudos to him for that!
But I wanted to highlight this because one of the best thesis narratives I’ve seen presented was by Dan’s partner, Mads Jensen, when the The Danish Business Angel Network came by to visit them in London.
Here’s a small teaser 👇 taken from a 72 page deck, so in no way fair to the whole story.
What Mads does so brillantly throughout this deck is how he’s pulling together core macro trends and technological inflection points to form a coherent narrative that underpins their investment thesis around Make, Move, Manage.
I promise to try and get Mads to present this in an open setting soon 🤞
This week’s funds 💵
DM us if you have a close to announce🙏
🇬🇧 83NORTH - $400m, fund 11, 🌍 Global, final close - London
🇬🇧 Fasanara Capital $350m, fund 3, fintech, web3 - London
🇩🇪 PropTech1 - €30m, fund 2, 🌍 Europe, real estate - Berlin
This week’s hires 👩💼
DM us if you have a hire to announce with us🙏
🇬🇧 Mosaic Ventures - Investment Manager - London
🇬🇧 GMG Ventures - VC Associate - London
🇬🇧 Octopus - VC Internship First Cheque Fund - London
🇩🇪 Schumpeter Ventures - Investment Manager - Frankfurt
🇩🇪 Schenker Ventures - VC Internship - Berlin
💻 First Momentum Ventures - VC Platform Manager - Remote
🇬🇧 Effective Ventures - Operations Associate - Oxford
DM us if you have a hire to announce with us🙏
Thx for reading and being awesome 💗 we love you for it.