The Point 9 Top 9 Highlights of 2016!
Hi there!
We’re not famous for respecting traditions here at Point Nine, but there are three traditions that we absolutely want to preserve when it comes to our newsletter: bad jokes, bragging about our portfolio companies and the “Top 9 highlights of 201X” edition that we run every year. Today it’s that time of the year when we can combine all three, so let’s dive right in and take a look at the highlights in our little corner of the world.
We announced 13 new members to the #P9Family in the last 12 months. We also made a couple of exciting investments that we didn’t disclose yet. Stay tuned. 😎
We like the shape of ‘our’ 9 so much that we use it everywhere.
The #P9Family raised more than $180M in follow-on investments throughout 2016 from ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ funds like Benchmark (Contentful), Social Capital (Front), the SaaStr Fund (Automile), Naspers (Brainly), Insight Venture Partners (GoSpotCheck) and several other great investors. Congrats to everyone who filled up the piggy bank this year, and a big shoutout to all of our amazing co-investors!
Speaking of new members, the Point Nine team also welcomed two awesome ladies, Ola and Paula, two smelly truffle pigs, Robin and Louis, and a new Venture Partner, Janis. Thrilled to have you on board, guys/gals!
The new team members in their favorite Christmas shirt (for the worst photoshopped GIF of 2016)
To accommodate our growing pig herd team we obviously needed a new office. After spending the last couple of months in a tiny cozy temporary office we finally moved to our new amazing home in December. We also adopted a new office mascot, which we are not allowed to publicly show off due to what seems to be the strangest copyright law ever. 🙃 🇩🇪 You’ll see it when you visit us in our office.
The crew who made sure the moving out went smoothly
In 2016 we continued our .9 CTO Meetup world tour with two CTO meetups in Lisbon and Paris, organized a “Mobile Summit” and our second Marketplace Meetup in Berlin and did two SaaS satellite events (during SaaStr in SF and SaaStock in Dublin). We also held our traditional PNC SaaS Founder Meetup (there you go, we do have more traditions!), which we turned into a 2-day camp this year.
Huge thanks to the 100+ speakers and 500+ people who made all of these events so awesome. We love you all. And if there’s one thing the world needs more of in 2016, it’s love!
Check out this video to get some impressions from our SaaS Camp and this video for the CTO Meetup.
To ensure people can recognize and talk to us during these events we’ve also launched a new clothing line. Our first collection consists of socks, t-shirts, hoodies and baby onesies.
“Point Nine Capital: Fashion for Women, Men and Babies”
We doubled-down on our love for France this year — and this despite the fact that Les Bleus made us feel quite blue when they kicked out the German soccer team in the EURO 2016 this year. With four new investments — Storefront, Sqreen and two not-yet-announced ones — we actually did more investments in La France than in our home country this year. We haven’t made French our official office language yet, but with now two French and one Belgian in our team there’s definitely more and more French chatter in our office (besides English, Polish, Spanish, German and Denglish).
It’s not so often that six .9ers travel together to attend an event, but when this event is Jason M. Lemkin’s epic SaaStr conference the occasion is too good to pass. Between the awesome talks, the incredible founders we met, the parties we crashed and the funny San Francisco smell in our Airbnb flat, we have so many good memories that we’re doing it again in 2017. See you there!
Will 2017 finally be the year when a team member manages to steal bring the JML cardboard to Europe?
We crossed the 💯 posts threshold on our Medium Channel this year.
- Christoph and Pawel got creative with their SaaS and Marketplace Napkins. (there’s even a toilet paper edition)
- Rodrigo shared a ton of knowledge with his “From launch to Series A” series.
- Mathias spread a lot of Marketplace love along with Robin.
- Savina continued to open source our secret sauce with our “Open Source Deal Memo Template”.
- Clement kept exploring the System of Records and API worlds.
- The operations team joined the party with Dominik, Karolin and Jenny sharing their 2016 predictions. (see you soon for the 2017 edition)
The energy consumption required to write and read all of this corresponded with an increase of global temperature of approximately 0.01 degrees (but hell was it worth it!).
And it’s a wrap! 2016 was a tough year in terms of world politics, but we have a good feeling for 2021. In the meantime, we wish you and your families all the best for a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.
See you in 2017!
