What to read (and watch) this week
It’s time to share some interesting stuff to read and watch again. Perfect for the upcoming Sunday.
Snap IPO everywhere.
Everybody is waiting and talking about the Snap IPO. Therefore I would highly recommend to watch this video of Snap’s IPO and have a look at the roadshow material in general.
If there is one thing we can learn in Europe then it is how to sell yourself and present your company. Or to sum it up: how to sell a vision and a story. We really suck at this and in case of Snap you will learn that Snap is a camera company (which I even believe now).
There is also a nice blogpost from Andreessen Horrowitz Partner Ben Evans about the difference between Facebook and Snap and the potential future development of Snap in terms of users, content creation, etc. Definitely interesting to read in this context.
To stick to the point: another thing about Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wrote an essay on creating a community and also about his vision what Facebook is and its potential development. If you read Ben Evans post before you will realize that this makes a whole lot of sense for Facebook. And there is also some really nice input about how the company sees itself and its power in modern society in the essay.
Therefore it also suits that you are now able to transfer money via Messenger with Transferwise. Kind of a big thing in my view and proves the point that banks and payments companies will face a hell lot of (price) pressure the upcoming years.
Europe is on the fast lane.
But coming back to Europe we see a lot of trends that should give us more courage. The New York Times wrote an interesting piece about the upcoming European Tech scene with the Swedish / UK fund Atomico as one of the main actors, as they raised another $765 M fund. There is one thing from the article that I want to emphasize: „Analysts say that Europe’s smaller pool of venture capital may have helped the region’s start-ups to avoid some of the excesses of Silicon Valley, where many new companies have received millions, if not billions, of dollars — often at eye-watering valuations — only for their business ideas to fall flat.“ Something to think about ;)
So for everybody who wants to found a company in Europe — timing could have been worse. And if you founded a company or are currently in the phase of starting a business you always will hear people then talking about product market fit. For those: Read this blogpost about that mysterious product market fit.
Best quote comes from Marc Andreessen:
“You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of ‘blah’, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s.”
Sounds easy actually.
Extras:
For people into SaaS or that mysterious cloud have a look at this presentation from Bessemer about the State of the Cloud:
https://www.slideshare.net/AnnaKhan9/the-state-of-the-cloud-report-2017-bessemer-venture-partners
The best startup ad I’ve seen for a long time comes from Wealthsimple (who are also genius in creating a story and nice looking products):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd3MMysL2NE
If you are interested in History or have read „Why nations fail“ then you will like this article about How did Europe become so rich:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-europe-become-the-richest-part-of-the-world
