Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #40: October 16, 2018

Hello from a bright and sunny London, and welcome to Issue #40!
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Last week I was in San Francisco meeting with VCs, portfolio companies, and a few new companies as well. The energy of the valley — and the energy of European/Israeli companies that relocate there — cannot be overstated. For all the recent ink spilled on whether we have reached “peak Valley” or not…the answer is no. There is nowhere on Earth where it’s easier to grow a great company faster.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting six interesting startups that are part of EF’s most recent cohort in London and Berlin. All of them are enterprise, all of them are born here on this side of the pond, and all are brilliant. The Valley may be the best place to grow rapidly — but evidence of the rise of the rest is all around us.
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If you are building an enterprise tech startup in Europe or Israel (or came from there and are now in the US) please let me know…

From the blog

Angular’s first investment: Why we invested in Aquant.io

1Q18 & 2Q18 EU+IL VC Data.
$12.7B of VC investment summarized in 70 slides.

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• UK/Semiconductor IP. Apple is spending $300M to acquire a portion of Dialog Semiconductor (Reading, UK, founded 1981) and spending another $300M for other assets, including IP and — apparently — about 300 semiconductor engineers who will team up with other Apple dev centers across Europe.

• Imperva goes private. Imperva (Nasdaq: IMPV) agreed to be acquired by PE shop Thoma Bravo for $2.1B. Founded in 2002 by Israeli security titan Shlomo Kramer, the company — which makes web application firewalls and specializes in database protection — went public in 2011. (So no, tech journalists, this does not count as the exit. That already happened.)

• Israel/Testing. Perforce is buying Perfecto Mobile for $200M. Founded in 2006, Perfecto raised around $84M, so the Israeli press is reporting this exit as a bit of a disappointment.

• Spain/Israel/Corporate Travel. TravelPerk raised $44M for its enterprise corporate travel incentive management platform (yes that’s a mouthful). It’s a brilliant product concept, and the company is chasing TripActions (an Israeli team based in SF) for leadership in the space.

• Germany/Powerpoint Killer. Pitch, founded by the Wunderlist team, raised $19M to build a replacement for Powerpoint. (Just when I’m getting really good at Powerpoint…)

• Denmark/Computer Vision. Apple acquired Spektral. “Apple has purchased Spektral, a computer vision company based out of Denmark that has worked on segmentation technology, a more efficient way to “cut out” figures from their backgrounds in digital images and videos, reportedly for over $30 million.”

• Germany/Social Media. How Jodel GmbH took a unique approach to building a social media community.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

• Hey, Mr. Postman. Twillio is acquiring Sendgrid for $2B. Twillio’s stock was apparently down on the news (normal for an acquisition — contact your local economics professor), but the acquisition makes sense to me. Both companies play a key role in helping product teams maintain contact with users. “Increasingly, our customers are asking us to solve all of their strategic communications challenges — regardless of channel. Email is a vital communications channel for companies around the world, and so it was important to us to include this capability in our platform,” Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson said in a statement.

• WSJ on China’s Dotcom Deja Vu. “We’ve seen it before: the crazy spending, the stratospheric valuations. Twenty years later, it looks like the dot-com boom all over again, but this time the players are much bigger — and Chinese.” (paywall)

• Long live the chatbot. Intercom bets on the technology once again.

• Vertical BI. Looker launched verticalized industry- and function-specific templates in its latest release. This verticalization of BI tools is an indicator of the maturity of both the BI space and the SaaS market more generally.

• Crypto wars. Nouriel Roubini testified to the US Senate on cryptocurrencies. To put it mildly, he is not a fan.

How to Startup

• Mailchimp at $600M in revenue, $0 in VC backing. How Mailchimp (which delivered this newsletter) got to $600M with no VC backing out of Atlanta.

• What’s the point of UX? Intercom’s VP Product Paul Adams on the right way to think about UX. Includes both a video and a text summary. Here’s a snippet: “…Which leads me to the biggest lie that we tell ourselves. The biggest lie is that we are the voice of the user. That’s the biggest lie. People in sales teams talk to customers every single day. Many designers might hear that and think “That’s different. They’re talking to sell, whereas when we talk to people, we’re talking to learn.” But that’s just wrong. Modern sales team talk to learn. If you go and talk to the best people in your sales team, in your company, you will discover that they talk to learn.”

• 8200 EISP Applications open. Applications are now open for the next batch of startups at 8200 EISP, an Israel-based accelerator that leverages deep connections in the Unit 8200 network. Apply here. (You do not need to be a Unit 8200 alumnus.)

• AI wheat and chaff. Navot Volk, who runs Microsoft for Startups in Israel, on how he tries to separate AI reality from AI nonsense.

• Product doesn’t win. We’ve all heard the mantra before: the best product will always win in the end, so focus on that and trust in the wisdom of customers and market. The Information’s Jessica Lessin doesn’t agree. (paywall)

• What is a product qualified lead (PQL)? Amanda Neilsen explains. “The marketing qualified lead, or MQL, has long been an important and familiar term in B2B marketing. It’s used to identify when a prospect has moved far enough in your marketing funnel (and in their buyer’s journey) to demonstrate buying intent. However, the SaaS industry innovates quickly, and a new type of qualified lead has joined our ranks. The product qualified lead, or PQL, is used to identify a prospect that has signed up to use your software firsthand and provides even greater visibility into buying intent based on how they’ve interacted with your actual product.”

• How to fundraise. YC partner Geoff Ralston on how to fundraise (video).

• How to hire. My friend Carl Fritjofsson at Creandum on how to hire.

• Brex. The story of Brex’s incredible growth and very young Brazillian founders.

How to Venture

• Softbank, realpolitik. Things may get a bit more thorny for Masayoshi Son and Softbank if the Saudis keep murdering journalists. “If the Saudis are implicated in the murder, you might find a lot of investors not willing to take their money,” said Chris Lane, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. “This could start to freeze the Vision fund out of future deals. This also potentially puts Vision Fund II at risk.”

• VCs who think they are pickers have it backwards. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed.argues that VCs need to get founders to pick them if they are to really outperform consistently.

• The new Series A roster. Semil Shah, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting last week, lists the top new Series A funds in the US.

Portfolio News & Jobs

A podcast with the amazing Roy Raanani of Chorus.ai on how to turn conversations into assets.

Siemplify CEO Amos Stern in Forbes on how the CISO’s role is evolving.

Mathilde Collin of Front on why she quit notifications and why you should too.

— — — Portfolio Jobs — — —

Vault is hiring developers for front end and back end. Location flexible.

Cloud66 is hiring software engineers in London.

Datos is hiring a BD lead in the US.

Moltin is hiring for multiple roles in the US and UK.

Resin is hiring globally.

Angular Ventures

I am the founder of Angular Ventures, a specialist early-stage enterprise tech VC firm based in London and Tel Aviv.

Angular backs companies born in Europe or Israel with the ambition to define a category and achieve global leadership, usually by starting with the US market.

You can follow me on Twitter and Medium. If you are running an early-stage start-up in the enterprise space anywhere in Europe or Israel, I’d love to hear from you to see if Angular can help. You can find a list of past and current portfolio companies here.

Yours,
Gil Dibner

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