Enterprise & Deep Tech Weekly

Issue #80: For the week ended May 22, 2020

Light at the end of the tunnel. Last week, I had several calls with companies where they were in offices as opposed to at home. While London remains under lockdown for now, Asia, Israel, and much of Europe are starting to gradually unlock and the gears of business seem to be starting to turn ever so slowly. For our part, we’ve seen deal flow start to increase as well. Compared to our baseline, March was down by 16%, April was down by 28%, but May was up by 28% and that was through May 21 — not even the whole month. Part of this may be that we are more actively reaching out to founders — but I think a most of it is due to a growing sense that this strange period will ultimately end and to the unquenchable entrepreneurial drive of early-stage founders who have adjusted to the new post-Corona reality and are moving forward with their plans.

Our next Insights Series webinar is on Wednesday with Jerry Dischler, who leads product for Google Adwords and Youtube advertising among other things. He’s also Angular Ventures’ “product sherpa.” You can register for the webinar here. Our previous session, which is viewable here, was with Uri Baruchin, and internationally renowned branding strategies. We started doing this to find a way to create a community of founders across Europe and Israel who are focussed on solving enterprise and deep tech problems. During the Coronavirus period, we are all isolated from each other more than ever — and our hope is that creating a community of founders facing similar challenges will help ease some of that isolation and increase the speed with which founders can move up the learning curve across a range of issues. On the call last week, with about a hundred founders from around the world — several of which were asking questions and dialoguing with Uri about branding challenges — our world felt a little less lonely and our challenges a bit more surmountable. We hope to see you next week on our product management master class with Jerry.

As always, if you are building an enterprise or deep tech startup in Europe or Israel, please let me know… Now let’s get to the news.

Angular Insights: Talks for Enterprise Founders

Angular is hosting a series of online interactive events with our community of early-stage enterprise tech founders from across Europe and Israel. These 30-minute talks are designed to deliver practical startup advice in an easy-to-consumer format — with plenty of opportunities to engage with our speakers. Typically, these take place on Wednesday at 3pm UK, 4pm CET, 5pm Israel.
To register for any of the talks, just click on the links below.

• May 27: Product Management with Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management for AdWords at Google (and Angular Advisory Partner)

• June 10: Enterprise Product Strategy with Vivek Saraswat, investor at Mayfield Partners and former product leader at Docker, VMware, and AWS.

• June 17: Monetizing an Open Source Project with Fred Simon, Co-founder and Chief Architect of JFrog

• June 24: Mistakes Slowing Your Growth with Guy Poreh, former Head of Digital BBDO, the Chief Innovation Officer at Silver + Partners, and Founder of Playground (and Angular Ventures Advisory Partner)

Stay tuned for upcoming sessions with: Martin Henk of Pipeline, Omri Tamir of Datorama, Yaron Galai of Outbrain, Geatan Gachet of Algolia, and more.

From the blog

Coronavirus Impact Survey: We surveyed over 120 founders on their response to Coronavirus.
Surviving Coronavirus. A guide for founders and some resources on remote work. Also, some straight talk on VC fundraising in 2020.
Defining Enterprise/Deep Tech. What do we actually mean by the phrase “enterprise or deep tech?”
Introducing the Angular Ventures Team. Getting to know Anne and Andrew.
Launching Angular Ventures I. What we do, why we exist, and how we got here.
US incorporation? Just do it. Why nearly all enterprise tech companies should incorporate in Delaware.
Technology for Trust. Why we invested in Vault Platform
A Security Layer for the Physical World: Why we invested in DUST Identity
A System of Intelligence for Field Service: Why we invested in Aquant.io

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• France/Search. Algolia, the headless search giant, brings in a new CEO. The new CEO, Bernadette Nixon, was previously the CEO of Alfresco.

• France/User Analytics. Contentsquare raised $190M for user analytics.

• Israel/Security. Semperis raised $40M for its identity-driven cyber resilience solution for enterprises.

• Israel/Security. Application infrastructure security company Aqua raised $30M.

• UK/Payments as a Service. Modulr raised $23M for its payments API platform which automates payment flows, embed payments and enable customers to build new payment products and services.

• Germany/Industrial. Arculus raised $17.5M for a “modular production platform.”

• France/Video Creation. Playplay raised $11 million for its SaaS platform that has design technology and templates that allow users to build videos from scratch, either with their own footage or by using a library of stock photos and videos.

• France/CMS. Open-source CMS vendor Strapi raised $10M.

• UK/Payments Stack. Primer raised $4.5M is a fintech that wants to help merchants consolidate their payments stack and to easily support new payment methods in the future.

• UK/Engineering SaaS. Continuum Industries raised $2M to provide AI tools for engineering professionals to automate their existing engineering design processes.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• The tech M&A boom to come. The WSJ suggests that a VC funding slowdown could lead to a boom in M&A activity. “For the largest players, we certainly see this immediate period as a potential opportunity to make plays to aggregate capabilities by acquiring smaller businesses that may need liquidity.”

• Food supply chain optimization. McKinsey published some research on this critical area. “Advances in digital and analytics technologies offer a way to optimize the agriculture supply chain. The agriculture industry is capturing more data than ever, on everything from agronomy to the weather to logistics to market price volatility. Data storage capacity has increased, storage cost has plummeted, and computational power has grown. Meanwhile, both predictive data science and prescriptive optimization techniques have matured and gained visibility.” Our portfolio company Trellis.ag is focussed on exactly this area.

• Microsoft vs. Airtable. Microsoft’s decision to compete head-on with Airtable is both tremendous validation that Airtable is onto something.

• Microsoft vs. Opensource. Microsoft president Brad Smith, says “Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century.”

• Bringing ad targeting in house. The NYT will phase out 3rd party targeting data and build its ad targeting stack in-house.

• Deep dive on SSGs. Rachel Stephens of RedMonk put out a thorough history and analysis of the static site generator market, one of the key drivers of the JAMstack revolution. “The commonly cited reasons to use an SSG are performance and security. As mentioned above, the pre-rendered pages are generally faster to load, and importantly the attack surface can be narrower than sites backed by a CMS plugin ecosystem. However, as with all technology choices there are tradeoffs.”

How to Startup

• What does Series A ready mean? Louis Coppey of Point Nine lists nine things that portfolio company PlayPlay did to get Series A ready. Number 6, “Nail the GTM motion” may not surprise you, but several others like “set up the right monitoring” just might.

• Should you fundraise now? Can you fundraise now? Peter Specht of Creandum put out an incredibly helpful 3x3 matrix to help founders think about whether or not they should fundraise now.

• Five things no one tells you about VC firms. Jason Lemkin provides a quick list of some key lessons most founders need to learn about VCs. “Many folks think VCs will pressure them to sell, to get liquidity. While that happens sometimes, the opposite is more common. VCs want you to keep going.”

How to Venture

• FOMG, not FOMO. Floodgate’s Mike Maples said something recently that I found profoundly helpful. VCs often fear missing out on a hot deal (“FOMO”), but that is not what keeps him up at night. He worries more about “missing greatness” (FOMG) in a founding team he has met. It’s a much more practical and constructive way to think about what drives success for VCs. The full conversation is on 20minuteVC.

• All about the upside. Tilman Langer, Point Nine’s general counsel, reviews key terms of VC investments and argues that the important ones are all about maximizing upside from winners. “Since venture capital returns tend to follow a power law, a small number of investments usually generates 80–90% of the returns of a fund. The incremental returns that we can generate on these investments by, for instance, increasing our investment along the way vastly dwarf the potential gains achievable with elaborate contractual protections in case things go awry.”

• VC in the time of Coronavirus. Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate reflects on VC in the current downturn. “This is a business reset. If you had product market fit in January, you might not have it in June. Companies that were expected to outgrow and probably outspend competitors are now just need to outlast everyone else. Can startups evolve as quickly as they need to?”

• Life, death, probability, and investing. A devastating personal story by Morgan Housel of Collaborative Fund on how a near-death experience guides his approach to risk today. “In investing, the average consequences of risk make up most of the daily news headlines. But the tail-end consequences of risk — like pandemics, and depressions — are what make the pages of history books. They’re all that matter. They’re all you should focus on.”

Portfolio News

Candu’s CEO, Jonathan Anderson, spoke about his journey to start Candu and pivot from an in-app LMS to a UI builder in the latest CELab: the Customer Education Lab podcast.

Crux OCM recently presented at Plug and Play Energy’s event Cutting Costs in Today’s Oil Patch.

Datos Health’s FDA-cleared remote care system is designed to support hospitals by helping keep suspected coronavirus patients, and those infected but not requiring hospitalization, at home while still providing them with optimal care.

Planable was featured as one of the 15 social media management tools for 2020.