2020 — sweatpant mania, circus directors, and faces in a box
A round-up of mini revelations from a year like no other, from our Famiglia to yours 👨👩👧👦.
1The year people in the same location dialed into Zoom from separate screens.
2 “Nobody wants to work for a tired idiot” — Daniel Gross. Truer than ever.
3Hiring pages went personal: Watch BackHQ lead the way.
4Building companies in public reached mainstream. We see you, Dennis, Suhail, Enzo & Paul!
5You say building companies on Twitter is so 2019? How about TikTok?
6On that note: GenZ founder superstars — we can’t wait to see you take over the world, Max, Max, Gregor (& keep them coming!)
7Every landing page ever in 2020.
8Igor Levit brought Beethoven to our homes and to the Nobel Prize concert.
10“All facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx —Is 2020 the tragedy or the farce?
11 “Where are your children?” was a question Jeannette was asked in every other fundraising meeting in 2019. In 2020, all parents can confidently answer this question by pointing to a corner of their screen: “Throwing tantrums without pants, thank you very much.”
12Investor behavior codex 2021 (suggestion): No more messing up cap tables (i.e., diluting the hell out of founders for nothing in return) at the founding/angel/pre-seed stage.
13Karl Lagerfeld once said: “Those who wear sweatpants have lost control over their life.” We wonder if 2020 was just the first chance for us to wreak havoc without his judging gaze.
14Are founders allowed to lie? — Alex Danco.
15Twitter is the new LinkedIn.
16Speedy fundraising became the norm — What used to take two weeks and in-person meetings is now two days and millions wired to a face-in-a-box.
17The platform of the year goes to…TikTok? No, it’s OnlyFans!
- $2Bn paid out to creators to-date (founded in 2016!)
- Implying $500m cumulative net revenue to OnlyFans in <5 years (20% take rate)
- Over 100 creators have exceeded $1M earnings
- No outside investors & profitable
18Mental health is not just an app (& psychedelics are not just Burning Man).
19Nominating Evan Spiegel for Product Manager of the Year.
20"At any given investment I ask myself whether it is raising the average of the portfolio I have built.” — Elad Gil.
21Breaking up monopolies is so 19th/20th century. In the 2020s, opening up the protocols of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and letting anyone shape the product is the compelling intervention.
22“Communications Management has become a purpose in itself. It’s no longer a battle for products but for perceptions.” — René Obermann.
23The #stayhome pandemic showed us that European e-commerce was more than just slightly behind. We’re expecting many more apes around town soon 🦍.
24 “Don‘t hire for capabilities, but rather for values and potential.” — Jim Hagemann Snabe.
25“I feel a life in me which no god created and no mortal begot. I believe that our existence is from ourselves and it is only from our own free pleasure that we are so intimately connected with all that is…” — Friedrich Hölderlin. We just love this wisdom even after 250 years.
26The Fed is printing money into the economy like crazy: Around one third of all USD that ever existed were created in 2020…
27…so hedging against inflation is a good plan. How about by investing in some art shares? Thanks, Strictly.VC!
28David Foster Wallace agrees: “Good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, […] and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.”
29#wfh with your partner can mean your safe space becomes your invaded space. Dr. Sue Johnson gives golden relationship advice for the 2020s.
30“Founder journeys are either high or low, there’s not a lot in between.” — Ross Mason.
31An unsurprising yet astonishing Amazon statistic.
32Mourning Ruth Bader Ginsburg and remembering her incredible work for gender equality and against discrimination.
33Every company now needs the profile of a modern remote circus director: Somebody to turn everything into a spectacle, make people laugh over mediocre jokes, whose energy never fades, who mesmerizes you, and shines a big sparkling light on each and every team member.
34All employees can be a product managers in the age of automation-first operations.
35In 2021, we will start making both male and female attendance at founder events a prerequisite for speaking there.
36Thank you, Verena Pausder, for being a true forward thinker for digital education and fair labor laws this year with #wirfuerschule and #stayonboard.
37The year in which companies established two new C-level positions: Welcome, Chief Climate Officer and Chief Notion Officer. Shoutout to leaders for climate action for all the work you pushed on that front and the Esther’s of every company who make Notion a religion.
38A year that made us realize that while the work we do as VCs is important, we don’t save lives and we don’t take them, even though VC’s Twitter shenanigans make you think otherwise sometimes. Maybe time for more humbleness,…
39….so with a sense of irony, also the year we got called out on EuropeanVCbrags. Paula , proud to have you on board!
40And no further commentary needed on this meme…
41And finally, quoting a poem my Mary Oliver:
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
