What I’ve Learned: South Summit “Special Edition”

Last week I was fortunate to attend South Summit, an annual gathering of founders/entrepreneurs, investors, and anybody else that wants to be a part of Southern Europe’s biggest startup conference. This year, the Madrid-based event hosted over 12,500 attendees from more than 100 countries, including 6,500+ entrepreneurs, 600+ investors, and 400+ speakers.

Over the summit’s three days, I met hundreds of super interesting people, saw innovative startups, reconnected with friends and former colleagues, heard around 20 pitches, and wrote 14 pages of notes from the 27 sessions I attended. Here’s a few things I jotted down:

Niklas Zennström (founder of Skype and Atomico):

“What separates good entrepreneurs and great entrepreneurs is FOCUS.”

The biggest challenges faced by Europe’s entrepreneurs:

• Not finding great talent. Europe is especially missing people with experience scaling companies
• Fragmented geographies. While Europe has a mostly unified currency, an awful lot of other things are different — languages, taste, climate, politics, etc.

“I don’t care where you are coming from, but you have to be going global.”

Jim McKelvey, (co-founder of Square):

The old advice to entrepreneurs, and then better, updated advice:

• Seek opportunities > Solve problems
• Invent something > Assume technology (invent as a last resort)
• Work fast > Learn when it is good enough
• Study great leaders > Question everything
• Be bold > Humbly persevere

Sometimes we are doing the right thing, but at the wrong time. Timing matters.

When it comes to advice, context is critical — even great advice might not be right for your situation.

Felipe Navio (co-founder of Job & Talent):

Compare notes — you rarely are in direct competition with other founders.

Enrique Perez Hernandez (of Morgan Stanley on Europe’s Tech M&A Landscape):

On pursuing profit vs. growth:

• Growth used to be perceived as the more important measure of startup potential.
• Now profit/profitability is the priority.

Don’t wait for the acquisition market to “appear.” Develop it.

I can’t remember who said it:

“The only way to know the limits of what’s possible is to push past the order and convention of our lives and find the edge through failure.”

Dave McClure (Founder 500 Startups):

Don’t focus on PR to know if a startup has potential, focus on outcomes — people, product, customers.

If corporations want to “steal a baby unicorn” (acquiring it before its future super-high valuation), they should focus on startups that are in the Series B and C range.

Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari, Chuck E. Cheese, and recently Modal VR):

Silicon Valley costs startups 3.5x more per unit of output than Spanish startups (i.e., don’t rush to move to Silicon Valley)

You don’t “own” an idea until you work on it.

The most important skill in selling… Listening.

Don’t fall victim to the paralysis of perfection.

Caroline de Maigret (fashion model and business woman in a talk on fashion and luxury goods startups):

When you try to look cool you never succeed.

I don’t forbid myself to be happy in order to look cool.

Be curious. Don’t be lazy. Say “yes.” Don’t be scared of not succeeding.

There is a sort of cross-pollination from doing a lot of things.

Eden Shochat (founding partner at of Israeli VC firm Aleph):

In a metric-driven world, we measure our firm’s performance [in part] by keeping track of the number of introductions we’ve made, their ratio to sales (conversion rate), hires we’ve sourced, additional funding we’ve brought to the table, media/PR we’ve generated for our portfolio companies, etc. If we say we create value as a VC firm beyond the funding we provide, we want to be able to “prove” it.

Jeff Clavier (founder of SoftTech VC):

Talking about “What’s Hot, What’s Not,” (not his full list, but…)

• Things that are hot: AI, Autonomous vehicles, AR, VR
• Things that are not hot: Mobile apps, ad tech, unsustainable unit economics, growth at any cost
• Things that are fading: On demand economy

One of the last sessions I attended was a round table discussion on the “Future of Venture Capital in Spain” with some of Spain’s top and rising VC’s (including Samuel Gil, the partner I worked for this summer at JME Venture Capital). They spent over an hour debating trends, public policy issues, and having a frank discussion (with primarily only other investors present) about how bullish they are on the future of the startup ecosystem in Spain specifically and Southern Europe more broadly. In total the group had over €1 billion in investable capital at their disposal. And while these are the partners who often get a fair amount of credit for the over 300% growth in Spanish venture capital since 2013, they eagerly shared that credit with the other side of the equation, the amazing founders and startups that Spain is generating right now.

Would I go back to South Summit again next year? Absolutely. The enthusiasm for the future of entrepreneurship in Spain was infectious (as if I needed any convincing) and the exchange of ideas/learning motivating and thought-provoking.

As a final bit of food for thought, someone at the event quipped, “I don’t think we actually are all that ‘risk averse.’ What we really are is averse to the risk of having other people’s perception of us worsen.”

Be brave. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

This is part of a series on what I learned or had reinforced as a VC Summer Associate with JME Venture Capital. You can also check out what JME “learned” from me, via “What We Learned from our Summer Associate,” and read the series of “lessons learned” from Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, and Week 6.