localglo.be

We are the 8%

2013-03-04T10:29:00.002+00:00

Keynote at Web Summit London

Here's the deck

We are the 8% from Saul Klein

Here's the op-ed and some other coverage in Guardian and ZDnet

Europe on a roll

2012-09-12T22:28:00.001+01:00

PirateSummit 2012 from Saul Klein

For 21C Malone, #whatsnext?

2011-09-16T05:08:00.000+01:00

So the news is out about John, Andy and Betaworks and you know it's real inside baseball when its number 1 on Hacker News :)

These guys are two of the people I've worked most closely with in the last few years and some of my favourite people in the industry and now they will be playing in different bands. It seems like much of the focus so far, has been on Andy going to USV but given I've know John for much longer, I thought I'd give my two cents on that part of the journey.

I think I first met John or as he’s now know - @borthwick - in 1996 in a tiny office in Cambridge, MA. We were talking about how Firefly and TotalNewYork could work together. He was building the bones of a distributed network of local content sites and we were building (I think!) a distributed identity network to personalize web applications.

We must have clicked, because this was the first of many conversations on pretty much the same theme we had in many different guises over the next 16 years.

While John stayed East and sold his company to AOL, where he worked with Ted Leonsis to buy and build out communications and media services like ICQ, WinAmp, Spinner and AOL Greenhouse, the Firefly team went West. We were locked up in the ivory towers of Redmond for two years trying to build out an identity based web platform (Passport), which core communications services (Hotmail and Messenger) could plug into as well as any apps Microsoft were building (Expedia, Sidewalk, Finance etc). We really wanted to work with John and AOL to federate the network, but we were Explorer and soon John became Netscape - any shared vision we had of what data driven web might look like went by the wayside.

When I left Seattle in 1999 and moved to New York to work on accelerator 1.0 with my partner Upendra (who went on to work with John at AOLTW) - the first crew we reconnected with and sought out were John, Scott Heiferman, Seth Goldstein, Steven Johnson and Clay Shirky.

This was (is) an amazing group - in fact its always a touch awesome to see what they’ve all done in the last 10 years, but John was always a little different. Entrepreneurial - check. Big thinker - check. Great seed investor - check (will also be thankful for John’s intro to Pyra Labs). Working in a nimble start-up environment - NFW!

Either John was in training to be Rupert Murdoch or John Malone, or he was mad. While the rest of us were dabbling in startups, he was fully embedded inside an AOL which was uncomfortably merging with Time Warner and getting pretty good at playing macro-political chess with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and News Corp. (I had a brief window into this when I was at Skype talking with John about how we could work with AIM).

In fact what I think he was doing, was trying to see how far you could push the innovation model inside a huge company. He wanted to see whether you could actually leverage this amazing set of assets to do something transformational. He and his little team of rockstars (including my now friends Carter and Josh) were figuring out if they could build a platform with the same principles of federated identity we’d discussed 6 years before in Cambridge to deliver personalized, interactive applications which could leverage the awesome distribution power of wires (ISP and cable), the social distribution power of contacts (AIM and ICQ) and combine it all with the greatest content kingdom on the planet (Warner, HBO and Time). Why not? It had to be worth a shot, in fact I was momentarily tempted to join him on this crazy mission!

But all good things come to an end - we knew that in the end, John would get frustrated and take the leap full time to start-up land. So in around 2007 after John had helped Scott Heiferman sell Fotolog and left Time Warner, he took a break with his family and passed through London. I was leaving Skype and about to focus more on investing with TAG and Index - so again we talked about #whatsnext.

We discussed the low cost of company building; we talked about new investment models; but as always, we drifted back to platforms and the components you would need for building and testing applications. John energized me to develop the Seedcamp idea, inspired by what Paul Grahams was doing at YCombinator and I listened as he outlined his first drafts of what would become the first few chapters of Betaworks.

I remember my first experience of John’s Betaworks vision. I think it was his first Betaday. There must have been around 25 people: Scott Heiferman talking about his amazing Meetup.com and building businesses which lasted decades (this was the business in 2002 gave me my faith back in the web), folks like David Karp (just starting) and hackers fresh out of YC roaming around. But the stand out for me was an amazing guy who John knew from AOL and Wesleyan (his college) - Andy Weissman - who was thinking about the next version of venture. As usual with John this was a loosely federated network, but he clearly knew which way it was going and although his foresight on Tumblr was not clear to me then (more fool me!), Andy was an obvious gem.

In a way Betaworks gave me my first real opportunity to work with John on a regular basis and my first ever occasion to work with Andy. Between TAG and Betaworks we ended up doing a lot together. We co-invested in Daylife, Songkick, Snaptalent and Tipjoy. We backed Betaworks projects like Bitly and with Index, Chartbeat. But where we definitely had the most fun (and arguments!) was in building companies together with Iain at TweetDeck and Mario at Twitterfeed. One of the most energizing few days I’ve had in years was when John was talking to me about us working with him and Iain at TweetDeck - rolling through our lessons from the browser-wars and plotting how to make clients more social and sticky.

This is a really exciting new chapter and the timing is typically spot on, because in the last 4 years Andy and John in startup parlance have “killed it”: Summize, TweetDeck, SocialFlow, Bitly, Chartbeat and on. They are at the top of their game. They have turned whiteboard sketches into products; products into businesses and invested in some of the hottest startups (Tumblr, GroupMe, Kickstarter) in the last 5 years - all the time helping to re-energize the NYC startup scene, creating an amazing space to work, be a landing pad for Seedcamp and generally just being great people.

I have to say, one of my great professional guilty pleasures in the last 4 years has been getting to know and work with Andy. He’s just a total pleasure: smart, laid back, totally passionate, seriously into his music and although he comes across as the most amiable, reasonable New Yorker you will ever meet, the man is no pushover. I am thrilled for him, Fred, Albert and Brad - what a quartet that will be, we've already done a lot together with USV and I can’t wait with Andy on board to do even more with all of them.

For John, the big question is always #whatsnext?

I’d say that the rehearsals at TotalNewYork, AOL and Time Warner will end up leading to a very interesting performance. As the media industry deconstructs, new entities will emerge and take the place of the old ones. Yahoo and other first generation web media companies are withering before our eyes. But if the future of media continues to riff around the combination of big data, social distribution and light-weight applications, my sense is that the brand, skills, assets and capital base that John has bootstrapped at Betaworks sets him up pretty well to figure out what the Malone or Murdoch of the 21st century looks like.

Is it possible that from a small agile company that both builds and invests, a digitally native Liberty Media could emerge? That’s the bet that I think John is taking. I really hope I still get to take part in the next 16 years of the conversation, its for sure going to be an interesting ride :)

Some highlights from Seedcamp Week 2011

2011-09-13T07:05:00.000+01:00

The team of Reshma, Carlos, Phil and Kirsen did an amazing job - and the teams were pretty awesome as well ;)

Daily Video Highlights:
- Day 1 Founders - (Yandex) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnRBUCCWTE4
- Day 2 Product - (Mozilla, Soundcloud etc) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1TJ_TZ7pK8&feature=related
- Day 3 Growth - (FON, McClure) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ygYMB58FO8&feature=related
- Day 4 Demo Day - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xffj0TcXUf0&feature=related
Some of the news coverage:
Seedcamp announcements:
- Teams: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/seedcamp-week-breaking-records-yet-again.html
- New partnerships: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/seedcamp-partners-experts-and-angels.html
- New advisors & investors: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/our-new-advisory-board-and-investors.html
- New corporate relationships: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/seedcamp-founders-pack-sponsors-and-seedhack.html
- Investors at Demo Day: http://www.seedcamp.com/2011/09/top-20-seedcamp-teams-present-at-demo-day.html

Tweetdeck: FT for the Social Web

2011-05-26T08:45:00.004+01:00

Congrats to Iain along with Tom, Reza, Sol (Peer), Sam and the rest of the Tweetdeck team on the sale to Twitter.

It feels like a long journey from the "you're going to love this" email sent by John Borthwick in Jan 2009 introducing me to Tweetdeck with an offer for Betaworks and TAG to work together to help support Iain in building out Tweetdeck in London.

When we met Iain, he was a one man band, based in the tech mecca of Tonbridge Wells. But as a lone developer he had created some real magic. Tweetdeck was making signal out of Twitter's noise with a simple but very powerful UX innovation - columns. This insight had already made Tweetdeck the leading desktop client for Twitter and its stayed there.

Tweetdeck always had the most engaged users on Twitter: most tweets per user, most followers per user and compared to traditional media, a massive daily active user base spending hours within the application. We used to talk about Tweetdeck as the "FT for the social web" - the place to access, engage and ultimately monetize the most active, connected and influential users on Twitter - and therefore in social media. I really believe that along with Iain and his team, Twitter have the potential to do amazing things with this asset - done well, this could have as much of a transformative impact for Twitter as Summize.

It has been a total blast working with Iain - he is a superb product leader and I will cherish our jam sessions. But it was also cool to watch Iain create a team and go from being alone, to adding the firepower of the young, but superb Peer team (a small TAG investment) and then with Sam and the leadership and support of the awesome John and Andy at Betaworks, building a true NY-LON organization.

As the UK government tries to build a narrative in East London about the emerging tech cluster in Shoreditch, Tweetdeck and Iain are a great case study: housed at Moo; shared workspace with Amee, Dopplr, Groupspaces, Lightbox and SparkPR; bootstrapped with Skype (Taavet, Nicola, Priidu, Joonathan) and Last.fm (Toby) alumni -- and acquired by a US tech titan building out a presence in London :)

Ok, so the story doesn't always end that way - or have to.

Maybe one day European tech, media and communications companies will have the vision and the ambition to do some of the buying themselves. But for now, London can have a day in the sun and here's to seeing Tweetdeck help Twitter develop an even more powerful offering for the power users engaged in influencing the growth and evolution of the social web.

The journey has just begun, it was a pleasure for me and Robin to be a small part of it, stay tuned for much more from Iain and his team.

Inside the Music Industry

2011-01-25T01:12:00.005+00:00

Really enjoyed the 48 hours I spent at my first MIDEM.

It was fascinating to be inside the music industry for a few days, meet really interesting people and see how the landscape is changing.

I really learned a lot talking to smart people like Vince Bannon and Ted Cohen who have seen every shade of the industry in the last 20 years, Denzyl Feigelson who has helped Steve Jobs re-architect the industry with iTunes and Mat from Metric who is creating a new way for bands to get born and built in the digital age. I also met some really cool companies like Echonest, Topspin, etc

At Index, having invested in Listen.com (Rhapsody) and Last.fm (CBS), we continued to invest in music - focussing mainly on two themes around how fans experience and enjoy music:

live: Songkick and Viagogo
listening: Doubletwist, rjdj, Sonos and Soundcloud

People love music, they always have done and as the industry changes, driven by the web and new technologies - we continue to think its a really promising area to be in.

Related articles

Marking the Day

2011-01-20T10:04:00.008+00:00

So many lessons learned from the 8 year journey that ended up being called Lovefilm.

Today, the torch passed to Amazon - I know there's lots more of this story to tell.

Project RFC $10m+

2011-01-11T01:12:00.005+00:00

What is it?
A request for an open list by city or region (#citylist) of the tech startups in the last 10 years who are cracking the revenue code.

We are looking for businesses with $10m+ revenue run-rate (RFC $10m+), the companies who may not all become members of the Internet Dow, but are certainly contenders for its Fortune 500.

This is not a traditional RFC - although the underpinnings of everyone of these businesses are highly technical and are being built with a healthy mixture of open-source and cloud. A big point of evolutions, is that in many of these businesses the key new muscles they are developing are increasingly design and commercial.

Why?
In case we hadn't noticed, business has changed - radically. In the last few years the Internet has created at very significant businesses of incredible scale and with remarkable growth rates -companies like Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Vente Privee and Zynga have gone from $0m to $1bn at mind-blowing speeds.

These are rare birds and they are the ones which people focus on. But there are already hundreds of other start-ups who have racked up very substantial revenues in the last 10 years and as Gilt, Groupon, Skye and Vente Privee increasingly show, many of these businesses are no longer in the Valley.

So in the spirit of learning from more of the great businesses across the Internet that are not just creating buzz and great Alexa numbers, but great revenue numbers - here's let's try RFC $10m+.

Hopefully this will help us to draw our some new strands of knowledge to supplement the amazing thinking being done around lean-startups and form some solid opinions on what makes great businesses, as well as great products.

How does it work?
Simple. The #citylists are not meant to be completely accurate or exhaustive - these are private companies, so how could they be.

Hopefully we can evolve decent coverage in some major tech hubs, so at least when you're travelling you have a good idea who you should try and visit :)

How can you help?
For now, Quora seems as good a place as any to keep the lists evolving.

Today I kicked off with #londonlist - and put in some markers for #paris, #berlin, #nordics, #israel and #nyc. Please help flesh them out - and share with your friends who can contribute.

This should be enough to get going with and hopefully spark a good discussion - not just about the companies themselves, but about the approaches they are taking to create great Internet businesses, not just buzz.

What about the Bay Area?
Go for it. But to be fair, we'd probably have to do #mtnview, #cupertino, #redwoodshores, #paloalto - #valley is too easy :)

Excited by the launch of Seedsummit.org

2010-12-07T07:54:00.002+00:00

See post http://seedsummit.org/blog/

3d organizations

2010-11-16T02:22:00.005+00:00

Something I've been thinking about for some time - the ideal shape of a startup organization and what it means for the longer term

Decided to post on Quora to see what happens....

Introducing Index Seed – Going back to our roots

2010-04-25T18:19:00.002+01:00

Post announcing Index Seed is now live here and collaboration with TAG here

Really excited about this, more to follow

Presentation @ Plugg 2010

2010-03-15T21:28:00.002+00:00

It was great fun presenting at Plugg 2010 in Brussels last week about the opportunities for European entrepreneurs to build game changing businesseses and learn to play nicely with the US.

If you're interested, here are the slides....

Europe needs to learn to play nicely

View more presentations from cape.

and video....

Can Europe Compete? A VC Perspective from Plugg Conference on Vimeo.

Seedsummit - network for active seed investors

2009-12-10T16:00:00.011+00:00

Tomorrow morning we're bringing together around 60 folks like Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman, Lukasz Gadowski, Stefan Glaenzer, Dave McClure, Andy Philips, William Reeve, Robin Klein, Jyri Engestrom and Sherry Coutu for the first edition of Seedsummit.

Seedsummit is a new event produced by Seedcamp, which aims to bring together twice a year a critical mass of our region's most active seed investors to try and establish a stronger, more cohesive network to support entrepreneurs.

Creating a distributed network for European startups

To succeed in creating an start-up ecosystem that can repetitively and sustainably build global leaders, Europe has to deal with the critical issue of fragmentation.

Seedcamp has spent the last few years very focused on building the beginnings of a network model for entrepreneurs. We've tried to lessen the constraints and isolation of geography by giving people the best possible access to a distributed network of advisors, funding and investors across our region, who can help them aim high and build ambitious global businesses.

At Seedcamp we believe we need to make our geographic distribution and cultural diversity part of our strength, so we've pushed the network out across the region with programs in London, Berlin, Paris, Ljubljana, Helsinborg, Tel Aviv, Warsaw, Kiev and San Francisco. In 2010 we intend to extend this to Copenhagen, Barcelona, Prague and New York.

This network model is the right focus and one that Seedcamp will deepen and maintain.

Leveraging the network for seed investors

One of the things we've learnt with Seedcamp is that there is a huge amount of seed investment activity across our region.

But right now it is fragmented, in pockets, shares no learnings and almost never networks. In fact, there is no dedicated regional network that brings together active seed investors in a concentrated way and these are the folks that entrepreneurs (including Seedcamp ones) often look to as their first source of capital.

So with Seedsummit, we are trying to create an informal forum where the people most actively investing in seed can get together, share best practices and dealflow.

Why is seed so important?

While micro-seed funds like Seedcamp, Techstars and YCombinator do an awesome job of helping start-ups get off the ground and traditional venture firms are great at providing early stage and growth capital, seed investing provides a vital bridge between prototype and establishing product/market fit.

Even before today's well worn arguments about the lower cost of starting businesses, seed has always played a vital role in any vibrant and successful start-up ecosystem. In the Valley, enlightened seed investors like Mike Markkula ($250k into Apple in 1977), Andy Bechtolsheim ($100k into Google in 1998) and Peter Thiel ($500k into Facebook in 2004) have given some of today's biggest technology players their start.

But more than just capital, the best seed investors provide critical advice, mentoring, connections and qualified access to top-tier capital when and if that becomes appropriate for start-ups.

Seed networks are developing strongly outside of Europe

While seed investing used to be the preserve of a few well intentioned individuals, seed in all key markets is becoming professionalized and there is now an incredible network of active stage investors and firms.

In the Valley there are folks like Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, Mike Maples, XG Ventures, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway and the SV Angel crew, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Allen Morgan, True Ventures and OATV. On the East Coast there is Union Square, First Round and the emergence of Betaworks and Founder Collective. Obviously there are also great investors in Boulder, LA, Vancouver, Boston and Seattle as well. In Israel there is Yossi Vardi of course and the TechAviv angels and across continents float Esther Dyson and Joi Ito.

In all of these markets - especially the Valley and Tel Aviv - there is enough concentration and flow that not only do startups have great choice but investors can share best practices, access more filtered dealflow and find great syndicate partners. As with any network, everyone improves by more participation and information flow.

So what about Europe?

In Europe we do have some very active seed investors and some venture firms like Index, Mangrove and Eden are institutional investors who are active at the earliest stages in the market.

People like Oliver Jung, Lukasz Gadowski, Martin Varsavsky, TAG, the Samwers, Atomico, Morten Lund, Brent Hoberman & Michael Birch, Klaus Hommels, Stefan Glaenzer, Sherry Coutu and the Cambridge angels have collectively done hundreds of deals in the last 5 years.

But the market is fragmented - syndicates which form easily in the Valley, Israel or New York often are hard to create. Sometimes it even hard to get people in London and Cambridge investing together, never mind Germany and France.

This is the goal of Seedsummit

Get these guys together - at least twice a year and make it easier for these active seed investors to work together and learn from each other, so it becomes easier for entrepreneurs to source and experience superior seed capital.

As with so much else in Europe we have a long long way to go, but like Seedcamp three years ago we have to start somehwere and that where is tomorrow when we have over 50 active investors from UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Nordics and the US come together to connect....

I'm really looking forward to it and seeing what happens.

Seedcamp: thoughts on the evolution of a European startup

2009-11-08T00:39:00.019+00:00

Why write this post?
People often ask me about Seedcamp - why we started it, what's it about and where's it going. I also haven't put any thoughts down on the subject of building startups in Europe for over two years. It occurred to me that as a European startup itself, looking at Seedcamp might give a view on both. So this is a lot longer than 140 characters but hopefully this answers some of the questions. Anyway, here goes....

Why did we start Seedcamp?
The genesis of Seedcamp was a post I wrote back in February 2007 called "Y Europe can seed the growth of its new stars". The thesis was that there was no reason why Europe couldn't produce great start-ups, we had:

Plenty of technical talent
Access to increasingly sophisticated risk capital
More and more role models & an emerging startup ecosystem of mentors
Globalization of the web which no longer put the US at the centre
Radical lowering of start-up costs

None of this has changed in the last 3 years - if anything, it is more true than ever given:

the further development of open source;
the emergence of cloud services;
the bootstrapped role models of 37signals, FreshBooks and the like;
the mass-market adoption of new distribution platforms like Facebook & iPhone

So what's the real problem with Europe?
Mike Arrington knows that its not just that people like long-lunches. The problem is our region's cultural complexity and geographic fragmentation. When you include Africa and the Middle East, there are over 50 viable markets within a 5 hour time zone - the same time zone that separates New York and Silicon Valley. Instead of 50 states with one government, one language, one currency and one set of media - we have 50 countries. Say no more.

If you want to get everything in one place, there is nowhere better in the world than the Valley. It is perfectly self-contained.

But if you want to tap into the diversity of talent, ideas and culture you can see from Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Budapest, London, Amman, Kiev and everything in between then you need a different and more distributed approach.

Can Seedcamp's distributed approach work?
We don't have the density of the Valley and quite frankly never will, so we need to deal with what we have and make the best of it.

Personally, I believe passionately in the distributed model. I think over time, with the right institutions and networked infrastructure it is capable of producing serious technical and business alchemy.

Seedcamp was designed to be a way of bringing together the different strands of the ecosystem together - entrepreneurs, investors, advisors, academia and corporates. A grass roots attempt to bring some cohesion into the region's diverse and highly fragmented startup scene with a focus on the first-time, most inexperienced entrepreneurs.

Seedcamp is one several positive initiatives, including the great work Mike Butcher is doing taking Techcrunch across Europe, that Loic & Geraldine Le Meur do every December with their LeWeb conference and the forum for European founders Brent Hoberman & Marc Samwer put on every summer with Johnnie Goodwin & Jeffries.

We all have a very long way to go
I know people say that long-term thinking is unfashionable in our industry, but I agree with Fred Wilson and my dad that great things take time. In my mind, helping to bring some cohesion to our region's distributed network of talent, capital and advisors is a 15-20 year project.

No single organization can achieve this. Even if Seedcamp is not ultimately a success - as measured by the success of the entrepreneurs who have been funded by it or experienced its programs - hopefully it will have helped to inspire some of the right thinking.

Getting to the right point takes time, and the cycles that kicked off what we now know as Silicon Valley began nearly 50 years ago.

Investing legends like Arthur Rock (Fairchild Semiconductor), Don Valentine (Cisco, Apple, EA), Don Lucas (Oracle), Dave Marquardt (Microsoft) and John Doerr (Netscape, Amazon, Google) and the entrepreneurs they backed created franchise businesses that still dominate the technology industry today. But maybe more importantly, all these businesses created the raw materials (talent, seed capital and technology) for next generation of the today's winners like Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and many many others.

In Europe and Israel, we have been going for no more than 15 years - so we need to maintain the perspective to think long-term, to build great franchise businesses and have the patience to reap the rewards of the ecosystems they will help to create.

Plus, how many independent technology titans do we have in our region today? Not enough.

A truly great independent technology business is capable of doing what Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, VMware have all done - generating a billion dollars in annual revenues. In our region, its hard to look much beyond SAP, Amdocs and Checkpoint - sorry Nokia doesn't count but Skype is on its way.

[An interesting sidenote is that none of Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Checkpoint or VMware took in more than $10m in outside capital. They were just great businesses.]

What can Seedcamp do to help?
Seedcamp is a 2.5 year old startup focused on micro-seed investing, so only so much.

We launched Seedcamp with the idea that we would hold 3 years worth of Seedcamp Weeks and make small €50k investments in 15 companies. Here's the launch post and presentation.

We knew the problem we were trying to address was large enough to be worthwhile and we had a long-term vision for what we could achieve, but like any start-up we only had limited resources to prove:

there was a need for our product in the market ("make something people need")
we could operate to the benefit of all our stakeholders (customers, partners, investors)

Seedcamp's first 100 days were like any other startup

You always need inspiration. I was inspired by the work that Paul Graham was doing with YCombinator and some conversations I was having with John Borthwick about new models for startups.
You always need some luck. I was really fortunate to be introduced by Mike Arrington at FOWA to Reshma Sohoni.
You always need a great co-founder. Reshma was at 3i at the time but thanks to some enlightened management from Mike Reid (now at Frog) and Daniel Waterhouse (now at Wellington), she was seconded to help and we set about developing a program and getting support for what would become Seedcamp.
You always need the focus of a deadline. In July, we set ourselves a launch date of September
You always need ambitious challenges. We set ourselves the two month task of:

getting applications from all over Europe
finding a venue for a week in September (and putting on the event)
getting over 100 top-notch mentors to inspire and advise entrepreneurs
raising €2m (enough money for 3 years of Seedcamp)

You always need some sceptics. We had many.
You always need loads of support. In addition to Index and 3i who encouraged me and Reshma to develop Seedcamp, we had a great group of initial supporters who helped us brainstorm the concept and produce the event including Paul Birch, Sara Murray, Mattias Ljungman, Robin Klein and Jason Goodman.

So after 2.5 years what has changed from the original Seedcamp plan?

We have expanded our regional footprint considerably
- We planned to run only 3 events in 3 years all in London - we ended up doing over 22 events in 3 years in 10 countries
- We learned pretty quickly people wanted Seedcamp in more locations and now run Mini Seedcamp's in 7 regional hubs across the year
- We've reviewed our 1,500 applications from 53 countries
- We have had winners from Estonia, Romania, Slovenia, Poland and Jordan - we have proven to ourselves that their is both demand for what we offer and great startups from all over the region
We built a bigger, more diverse network of advisors & partners
- We started off with 100 advisors at the first Seedcamp week in 2007 (albeit superstars!)
- We now have over 1,000 people to help support startups across every dimension of their journey - product, marketing, business development, investment etc
- The depth & breadth of this network means that at every event in every region we have at least 50 amazing advisors to support the winning teams
- We've also had incredible support from the likes of Microsoft, Google, IBM, Sun, AWS, Oracle and Facebook to give teams access to knowledge, technology and support
- We've had additional great board input from the likes of Fred Destin, Alex Hoye, Dave McClure, Christophe Maire, Charles Grimsdale and Oliver Beste
We've made more investments than we planned
- We planned to make 15 investments and mentor 60 companies
- We've made 21 investments and mentored 280 companies so far:
  - 2007: Kublax, Hypernumbers, MyBuilder, RentmineOnline, Tablefinder, Zemanta
  - 2008: Basekit, Kyko, Mobclix, Soup, Stupeflix, Toksta, Ubervu
  - 2009: Boxed Ice, Brainient, Codility, Erply, Kwaga, Patients Know Best, Platago, Talasim

And what hasn't changed?

We are still a fund - we are not a non-profit. We believe in having a mission which has social good at its core, but we have always set out to be a commercial enterprise that offers a return to our investors. How else could we inspire entrepreneurs to create businesses if we were not one ourselves?
But like YC (and Techstars) we are a different kind of fund - we apply a new model to discovering, supporting and launching start ups.
We address the micro-seed stage - we invest €50k in a start-up in return for a small amount of equity (normally 5-10%), which means the kind of companies we can help leverage the platforms and practices outlined above and the founders typically have low personal burn-rates
Our founders are focussed on bootstrapping - we help support teams through to "ramen" or real-profitability (3 out of 8 of this year's winners are already profitable)
We help teams that want it, access seed or venture capital - by working hand-in-hand with investors active in seed (€250k-€1m) and venture (€1m+) rounds

What are some of the questions people still ask us about Seedcamp?
We try to be as open as we can about who we are and what we do, but as a startup running fast you aren't always as clear as you think and you can definitely be misunderstood at times. [Mike Butcher should be posting later on today an interview answering some of questions on Seedcamp - will update with link].

So in that spirit here are some FAQs:

Who are Seedcamp's investors?
- We raised over €2m to make investments and operate Seedcamp
- Our investors have always been prominently listed on our site
- They include some of Europe's top venture firms and seed investors, as well as firms large and small actively involved in the startup ecosystem
Why did they invest in Seedcamp?
- For different reasons but mainly because they share our vision for building the regions startup infrastructure
- They want to have filtered access to great startup to invest in or advise
- They like us :) and believe we will make good invests which give a positive ROI
Can only Seedcamp investors invest in Seedcamp companies?
- Absolutely not, anyone who's a qualified investor can invest in Seedcamp companies
- Seedcamp investors do often get to know the companies better as they have typically put in the time and commitment to come to Seedcamp events but any mentors, corporates or readers of Techcrunch (who regularly covers Seedcamp finalists) are free to invest and often do
- We love it when people want to invest in the companies, it means we're doing our job :)
How does Seedcamp judge the finalists for Seedcamp Week and Mini Seedcamps?
- We have an open web-based application process in the months running up to every event
- Every application is reviewed by and scored at least two judges - the judges are a combination of Seedcamp investors and advisors- all of them very experienced at looking at startup plans and teams
- We normalize the scores to counteract variations in judging styles and then invite the top 20 teams to attend a Mini Seedcamp
- In the case of Seedcamp Week, we invite 40 teams to come to London for a 10 minute interview with a panel of judges and then apply the same scoring techniques
How does Seedcamp make its investment decisions?
- All Seedcamp investors are invited to participate in the investment committee decision of making any €50k investment as we are allocating their capital
- This group is often more than 25 people which is unusually large (and sometimes unwieldy) group for an investment committee, even a large venture firms would have no more 10 people
- Like Seedcamp judging, all teams are scored, the votes normalized and a debate held to determine which companies to invest in. As she will spend the majority of timw with the companies Reshma has a veto right
What if I want to invest in Seedcamp?
- Seedcamp I is now closed.
- Seedcamp was funded in a couple of months by over 30 different organisations and individuals - all of whom have a clear interest in helping to build the startup ecosystem and want to be exposed to the best startups the region has to offer.
- Some of Europe's best VCs, angels and professional firms large and small participated and Seedcamp welcomes investment from all these groups.
- Our aim has always been that Seedcamp would be 'owned' by the industry and not dominated by any group of institutions or individuals. For that reason, we encourage wide ownership and look forward to expanding and diversifying this base.
- The structure is a typical Limited Partner one and the formal fundraising for Seedcamp II will begin very soon.
When do you intend to raise Seedcamp II?
- We'll be talking to investors in the next few months about our next fund.
- We hope to retain many of our existing investors but hope to be able to work with many of the new investors we have met since we began, especially in new regions and in the public/private sector

So are we succeeding so far with Seedcamp?
We've definitely shown that there is a need for what Seedcamp offers.

Whether we have been able to deliver value to the stake holders (startups, partners and investors) is something we'll only be able to judge in time. The reality of startups and the funds that invest in them, is that most businesses take 5-10 years to become great - in fact many will take longer and most will never succeed.

What we know so far:

Startups: we do know from the research we've done that startups really value the experience and focus on the business advice, networking and validation that Seedcamp offers even more than the access to capital - this is great news.
Partners: we have had great feedback from advisors and partners. They seem to value not just the filtered access to really promising teams, but something which has surprised us, is how much fun people have mentoring. We have mentors who have become long-term advisors, invested in and in one case become the CEO of a Seedcamp company. Mentors also tell us how much they like the peer-to-peer networking of meeting each another and interacting in a new type of setting (ie not a conference).
Investors: the Seedcamp fund has its own group of investors (see our site), feel free to ask them if they are happy :) But the investors which matter to the startups are the ones that will fund them - the good news is that within 3 months of graduating from Seedcamp 2007 and 2008, 11 of the 13 startups have received follow-on funding.

So where does Seedcamp go beyond the start-up phase, what's Seedcamp II?
We've had plenty of discussion over the last year to think about where to take Seedcamp next.

We like to think we've made a good start, but we really understand how much work there is still to do. We've also learned some fundamental lessons in operating Seedcamp that we'd like to apply to the next phase of our development.

Some of the key things we feel strongly about in terms of improving the model are:

We want to continue pushing the federated model - not just deepening our roots in the regions we are already playing in, but also starting to go into regions where people have asked us to take Seedcamp but so far we've not had the resources or bandwidth to go
We want to extend our network - one of the things people have liked the most about Seedcamp is how we've been able to bring some cohesion to the fragmented startup scene across the region. We know we can do a better job bringing together active seed investors, tapping into academia and working with public/private partnerships focussed on encouraging startups.
We should be making more investments - not just because we think the talent is out there and we are only just starting to really find it but because the economics of investing means that to have great returns you have to place enough bets. This is true of growth, venture and seed (look at the portfolio sizes of Jeff Clavier, Josh Kopelman, Ron Conway and TAG) - its especially true of micro-seed and something YC is aware of as well.
We need to have fire power to follow our winners - early stage investing doesn't make economic sense if you can't follow your winners. Most startups need additional capital - even though as I pointed out above, some superstars don't need more than $10m. Unless you are lucky enough to be the guy who wrote a $300k cheque which turned out to be the only money into Checkpoint as more money goes in you get more diluted. Good seed investors (like First Round Capital) know that you need to firepower to keep funding your winners, both to ensure they have enough capital and to presever your ownership. Managing and allocating reserves is a very tough discipline, but one that great investors practice and do very well.
We need to be able to attract and retain a killer team - sparing her blushes Reshma has done an amazing job, as Seedcamp scales we need to add to our team at the highest levels and we need to be able to attract and retain people like that. Micro-seed is a special discipline - it means rolling up our sleeves and working with businesses and entreprenuers that are very unformed. This is not a skill all investors have and if Seedcamp is to succeed we need the best team to support these startups.

So will we be able to take Seedcamp to the next level? I hope so, but like any startup, its hard to know what's around the next corner - as I said above, even if Seedcamp doesn't succeed to go from startup to phase two, hopefully we'll have inspired some of the right thinking.

Super excited about Songkick

2009-06-09T00:03:00.008+01:00

Today the team at Songkick publicly rolls out the labour of love which they've been working on for the last year - and I'm really excited about it and very proud of the team.

Why? Well, for a few reasons.

First, the service they've built is really killer. They have taken all the distributed passion and energy that fans pour into gigographies and live music across the web and pulled it all together in one place. The service launches with over 1m gigs past, present and future and the team has built a social layer around the content letting you really get lost in the venues, the bands and the music. If you love live music, you'll love this product and it has a real shot at becoming the home for live music on the web.

Second, they are playing in the most exciting and potentially the most valuable part of the music industry. While recorded music is in trouble, live music is growing like crazy. For fans the emotional attachment we have to concerts and festivals is something unique and for artists live is the place where you get your start, make your mark and is the mainstay of your income throughout your career regardless of your label. Artists and their managers control live music and as labels have lost control over the recorded product, live has become a pivot which is revolutionizing the industry.

Third, the Songkick team led by Ian, Pete and Michelle have really shown themselves to be great start-up role models for the next generation of European entrepreneurs. When I first met them in Boston a few years ago as they were leaving YC, they said they wanted to aim high and bring a passion to succeed and build something really big into the London start-up scene. There are some teams you meet you want to back immdiately, and they haven't disappointed. They are shooting for the moon but they have always kept their feet on the ground. They have been very strategic about investors, partners and hires and are incredibly disciplined controlling their costs and managing their time. Hard things for first time entrepreneurs. Sure they've made mistakes but they learn fast and adapt. Hallmarks of people who can build something big.

So, well done Songkick. To all the team. I know its been a huge effort to go live and you've all been itching to show the world what you can do - enjoy it. To liv music fans, enjoy it too both th trip down memory lane and all the gigs to come.

No blogging for ages

2009-05-28T00:15:00.003+01:00

Twitter has made me very lazy when it comes to my blog, even lazier than before - hard I know.

So in no particular order here's a few random things/posts/businesses in the making which have been on my mind:

The Value of Live, Real-Time Web and Twitter
Socially Constructed Services
Smart Energy
Beyond the Banner & Social Advertising - what happens when $20bn industry implodes
Disruptive Consumer Financial Services for the Bottom of the Pyramid
Places to innovate in Education
The inescapable weight of the cost structures of Traditional Media
Transparency & Provenance in all things, but especially food
Successful blends (people, companies, countries) of Creative/Business/Technology
Company building and relay races
Seedcamp 2.0
Micro-seed/Seed/Early-stage investment models

And of course, my wonderful family.... :)

Anything else I should be thinking about? Who should I be talking to on the points above? Any of them you think are worth major focus....

Is anyone still reading this?

See you at www.twitter.com/cape via Tweetdeck of course :)

Good overview for using Tweetdeck

2009-02-25T17:09:00.002+00:00

Latest Twitterings

2009-02-23T10:52:00.001+00:00

follow me on Twitter

Reshma being interviewed @Seedcamp Tel Aviv

2009-02-02T20:28:00.004+00:00

Reshma and team did a great job at Mini Seedcamp Tel Aviv - really great to see excellent teams, mentors and the Seedcamp network adding another (and really critical node) in Israel.

Getting sucked into Twittersphere...

2009-02-01T13:01:00.005+00:00

and predictably wondering what role my blog plays going forward... even starting to have the sense that facebook is getting less useful in comparison to twittersphere via tweetdeck

nothing new here, i guess i'm late to that particularly party (there are nearly 20m results on Google on this topic) but the tipping point that twitter has hit over the last few months following the summize acquisition means that other than the 140 character limit, there's not much keeping me off-Twitter and on blog for now

would be great to have an easy way to post from blog to twitter, rather than just via the badge - i'm sure there are good ways. if you know anyone please let me know in the comments

interesting times...

Thanks to the American Voters

2008-11-07T01:21:00.004+00:00

What a landmark event to usher in the Obama era. Finally someone who has the leadership skills, intelligence and openness to truly represent the amazing diversity and idealism at the core of America. You really did the 5.7bn other people on the planet proud - thanks.

Looking forward to Fotonauts

2008-11-07T00:53:00.001+00:00

Thoughts on European Start Ups

2008-10-27T20:42:00.004+00:00

I had a great time putting this presentation together past week to give at the O'Reilly Web2Expo in Berlin.

Thoughts on European Start Ups

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: startups vc)

Thanks to everyone for the embedding, the video and the really great feedback - much appreciated.

For some really practical advice, check out Robin's great post on cash management.

Kindo ties the knot with MyHeritage

2008-09-23T00:12:00.006+01:00

Congratulations to Nils, Gareth and Andrew and the rest of the Kindo team. They have just announced that they are tying up with MyHeritage. See coverage on Washington Post via Techcrunch, VentureBeat and PaidContent.

Over the last year the team has built a simple product which is a pleasure to use in over 14 languages -- all the while building a really nice tone of voice, perfect for the family market. Combining this savvy with MyHeritage's scale and smart technology for photos and family history promises something to look forward to for consumers.

Last Day of Seedcamp Week 2008

2008-09-22T23:57:00.002+01:00

Seedcamp Day 5 Highlights from Seedcamp