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Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #95: For the week ended October 13, 2020

Author

Angular Ventures
October 13, 2020

What does "execution" mean anyway? The cliches are all over the place: "It's all about execution" or "now we just need to execute" or even "I can't wait to stop fundraising so I can get back to executing."  It's even in the title: "Chief Executive Officer." We all talk about it, but rarely think about what it actually means to get stuff done and how to turn that into a methodology. 

This week, we invite you to join us for a special edition of our Insights series of interactive webinars. We will be hosting Omri Tamir, COO (and one of the earliest employees) at Datarama, which was acquired by Salesforce for over $800M. His main topic will be execution and how to build a culture of execution and operational excellence at a high-growth startup. We hope you'll register to join the conversation tomorrow.

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 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 sessions, just click on the links below.

Check out: www.angularventures.com/events for additional upcoming events, recordings of past events, and to subscribe to our event series.

From the blog

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

  • France/Insect Farming. Ÿnsect has raised $372M for their farms that grow mealworms that produce proteins that can be used in animal feed and fertilizers in the hope of creating a more sustainable way to produce food for the world’s growing population.

  • Netherlands/Cloud Communication Platform. MessageBird has raised $200 million for its messaging platform that allows businesses to interact with their customers on a variety of channels all consolidated into one thread within the Dutch app.

  • Israel/Payments. Tipalti raised $150M for its end-to-end accounts payable software that automates the entire supplier payments operation, making global mass B2B payments frictionless & efficient.

  • Netherlands/Synthetic Protein. Mosa Meat is known for making the world’s first lab-grown meat burger back in 2013 has raised $55M to expand its facility in Maastricht into an industrial-sized production line, as well as getting European licenses for the products. 

  • Israel/Security. Illusive Networks raised $24M for software that provides cybersecurity monitoring to help companies detect and reduce the risk of cyberattacks.

  • Sweden/HR Tech. Winningtemp raised $18M for its engagement, performance management, social praise, and e-learning platform that helps managers create cohesive, engaged and high performing teams. 

  • Czechia/Data Lineage. Manta raised $13M for a unified data lineage platform.

Worth reading

Enterprise/Tech News

  • Twilio agreed to acquire Segment. The two iconic companies are merging with Twilio buying Segment for $3.2B, but it's not an obvious match. Twilio argues this is about breaking down data silos to better extract customer insight. Larry Dignan at ZDnet agrees that the merger makes sense: "[The acquisition] gives Twilio a customer data platform (CDP) to combine with its broader communications platform as a service and customer engagement tools. As a result, Twilio can now be connected to every touch point customers have with their end users. Twilio's plan is to turn the customer engagement data into actionable insights with intelligence about touch points and communications. What's more interesting is that Twilio with Segment will be able to combine customer data and interactions for intelligence on everything from marketing, data warehousing, communications and analytics tools. Twilio will ultimately do battle with Salesforce and Adobe to be the connective tissue between customer data and the enterprise technology stack."

  • Has serverless stalled? Bernard Brode calls into question the idea that serverless architectures will sweep across all applications and use cases, calling out four key issues: (1) limited programming languages, (2) vendor lock, (3) performance, and (4) inability to run entire applications. "Perhaps the most crucial reason why serverless architectures are not going to replace traditional models anytime soon: you (generally) can't run entire applications on severless systems. Or rather, you could, but it would not be cost-efficient to do so. Your successful monolithic app probably shouldn't become a series of four dozen functions connected to eight gateways, forty queues, and a dozen database instances. For this reason, serverless suits greenfield development. Virtually no existing application (architecture) ports over. So you can migrate, but expect to start from zero."

  • IBM restructures. Big Blue is spinning off its services unit to accelerate its pivot to cloud-native software. Ben Thompson of Stratechery believes this amounts to surrender. "From my perspective, this spinout is confirmation that IBM is, as I suspected, wholly unprepared culturally to repeat Gerstner’s transformation. I wrote about that transformation in Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover, which centered on Gerstner’s account of how he turned around IBM. What is notable with regards to today’s news is that everyone around Gerstner was certain that the only way IBM could be saved was by breaking up the company, but Gerstner realized that IBM’s biggest asset was its size: by virtue of its monopoly past, the company was used to doing everything passably well, and very few individual things very well; that meant the company could find success only by offering all-up solutions, instead of piecemeal products."

  • The excel pandemic. How Excel broke the UK's coronavirus data strategy.  

How to Startup

  • The end of bargain valuations. Finn Murphy of Frontline struggles with valuations and comes up with some solid advice for founders. "Founders shouldn’t be afraid to push on the price button when you’re raising — don’t get too stressed about the next round, if you don’t achieve your milestones with the money you’re raising now (and you’re putting yourself on a venture track) you’re likely screwed anyway so be VERY conscious of how high you’re setting the bar. Top 10% valuation implies top 10% performance — if you need a bridge round don’t be angry when it’s a down round. If you don’t have multiple funding options, you don’t get to set the price, so don’t be offended when a VC offers you 2 on 6. When capital is critical to your success you take what you can get at the end of the day."

  • Team building in Covid times. SiSense HR chief Liron Prizant reflects on what HR means in a covid world. "We already had a quarterly “Coming up for air” day in place, which gives everyone the chance to rest and recharge after the busy end of each quarter. Since the start of the pandemic, we have added regular, self-care days to everyone’s calendar. On self-care days, the entire company is given the day off because we recognize that remote work, lockdowns and other unprecedented conditions can add additional stress to our colleagues’ daily lives, and to avoid accumulating backlog while a person is on vacation."

  • Customer path dependency. Sarah Guo breaks it down. "The Two Laws of Customer Path-Dependency: 1. It's hard to take your marketing/sales upmarket, it's 10X harder to take your marketing/sales downmarket. 2. It's hard to make a product enterprise-ready, it's 10X harder make an enterprise product simple for SMB/end-users adoption."

How to Venture

  • Real talk on small fund fundraising. An amazingly personal account of raising a fund from Charlie O'Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge. I don't know him personally, but I know the pain he describes personally. I also have been watching him execute from a distance and am a huge fan. 

  • Don't trust the seed data. A look at reporting lags in VC data by Tomasz Tunguz.

  • Not easy. Ian Cassel sums up the mental stress of early stage investing in a tweet: "The longer I invest the more I realize you get 1-2 really great opportunities every few years. The rest of the time is spent wondering if you will ever get another great opportunity again and convincing yourself to own mediocre opportunities while you wait."

Portfolio News

Datos Health’s CEO, Uri Bettesh, will be participating in HIMSS’ panel on lessons learned from COVID-19 and reimagining the future on October 14.
 
Vault Platform’s CEO, Neta Meidav, set out the four key steps to creating a successful workplace speak up program.
 
Trellis’ Head of Product, Uri Rosenzweig, talked about the future of food production, a zero waste food economy and Trellis’ mission of an Autonomous Food Supply chain on the latest The Modern Acre podcast episode.
 
Planable is hosting a webinar on holiday planning for marketers on October 15.

Portfolio Jobs

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Aquant.io

Crux OCM

DUST Identity

Firebolt

Vault Platform

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