Every single entrepreneur is at a different stage, with a set of particular conditions that apply to their singular persona. It’s impossible to provide a one-size-fits-all approach to address the specificities of their journey. Same goes for a leader or a manager.
However, I have observed that some of the best entrepreneurs we back, those who maximise their odds of success regardless the challenges ahead of their ventures, share a set of common deductive principles.
I’ve just posted this new post on Substack >> https://2lr.substack.com/p/social-regression
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Over the past few months, I have wondered if it made sense for me to move away from Medium to try another platform. The main reasons behind this consideration were the following:
For some time I considered using Ghost or Wordpress, but I wasn’t so delighted just thinking about the configuration of a template & some plugins… Then I saw the emergence of Substack, intrigued. …
Venture capitalists back entrepreneurs who work hard to build meaningful organisations. They contemplate them execute on a single mission, support each one of them in their own way by leveraging as much as possible what they know, observe, and learn from their comfortable position of having many chips in different pots.
Don’t mind me saying that I have the best job in the world, especially with a single investor, Xavier Niel, who enjoys taking risk, has the means to undertake them, and more importantly in my position, trust the people he works with. …
Impala just announced its $11M Series A round led by Stride and Xavier Niel, with the participation of Insight Partners Co-Founder Jerry Murdock, as well as Tom Stafford and the partners of DST Global 💸
I am thrilled to join the company’s journey alongside those amazing people 🤗
Venture capital is a search for outliers, it’s a walk through a chain of events (among them meeting with entrepreneurs, digging into the unknown, learning from people, drawing lessons from mistakes) that ultimately unfolds into the discovery of unexpected yet perfect matches between incredible opportunities and stellar teams.
While Ben articulated a brilliant narrative around the travel hospitality industry when we met in June, the circumstances behind this get together reminded my how lucky we are to meet with extraordinary founders. …
My browser is opened with only one tab, the notifications are off both on my computer and my phone. There is a cup of coffee on my left and my Bose noise-masking sleepbuds are on with a boardwalk sound.
I’m in the zone.
To write.
I know that this piece will take me approximately two to three hours to write, more or less, or at least that’s the time I will dedicate to it. It’s 8.47am.
Whenever you are on an intense streak, practicing sport like climbing or karting for instance, not only concentration is required, but it naturally comes to you as your full mental bandwidth is dedicated to it. I’m taking those two activities as examples because they work for me, while I find myself thinking a lot when I’m running, cycling or swimming for instance. …
Over the past few years, I have come to realize the inherent logic and intuition behind our decisions to back entrepreneurs who have revealed, over time, to be phenomenal founders and company builders.
When I joined Kima Ventures in September 2015, it was becoming clear that our mandate to support the rise of French entrepreneurship was taking on its full meaning.
Honestly, I don’t think we could have predicted such acceleration in the maturity of the market. The quality of French founders, both from an execution excellence prism and a growth velocity perspective, is phenomenal, the amount of capital raised and deployed towards them has grown tremendously, and the ambition to build beautifully giant companies is finally catching up to realize self-fulfilling prophecies in the making.
When we backed Zen.ly back in November 2015, I remember telling Xavier that it was a $10B+ opportunity. We sold it to Snap for 30 times less. Nevertheless, I still believe it is a $10B+ opportunity. …
Kima Ventures has the largest portfolio of French companies in the world. We’ve had the opportunity to observe over the past few years the incredible rise of the following phenomenons:
Most of the founders we back have to go through the pain of handling a roadshow. And they know that a fundraising process can’t last forever. It’s bad for creating and managing momentum, maximising the output, and more importantly for the business.
Therefore, entrepreneurs must concentrate meetings, gather interests and commitments, but also update their prospective investors as things progress.
Even though investors who commit are not supposed to get cold feet by the time you close, you can’t perfectly rely on human rationality, , it’s your responsibility as well to keep people updated about your business and the fundraising process. …
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