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Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly
The Angle Issue #29: July 3, 2018
Happy Monday — and welcome to Issue #29! It’s a gloriously sunny day/week/summer in London…
In 2000, in my very first week on Goldman Sachs’ internet research team, a senior equity analyst grabbed me by the shoulder one afternoon and said: “come with me, I want you to see something.” We took the elevator up four floors to the firm’s trading floor on the 50th floor of 1 New York Plaza. There, in a side room, a team of Goldman’s equity capital markets guys were finalizing the price for an offering of DoubleClick stock. For a moment, that room was the center of the technology universe. At the time, DoubleClick was the leading “ad server” business in the world — helping put the first banner ads in front of the first internet users. DoubleClick went public in 1998, was taken private in 2005, and was acquired by Google in 2007 (for $3.1B), where it became an important part of Google’s AdWords business. This week, Google announced it was retiring the DoubleClick and AdWords brand names, which will just be called “Google Ads.” When I was getting started in venture in 2005, online advertising was the hottest (and sometimes the only) game in town, and the DoubleClick and AdWords brands ruled that domain. Today, online advertising feels like a contracting and highly efficient industry where VCs fear to tread. The retirement of the DoubleClick and AdWords brands is a reminder that technology — like all business — lives in cycles and nothing is forever. The same disruptions we are building and funding will get disrupted themselves.
Please feel free to email me with comments (or startups) and, if you like this, please forward to friends. Thanks!
From the blog
2017 EU+IL VC Data. $20.3B of VC investment summarized in 74 slides.
Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech
What does Donald Trump mean for your non-US startup? Jennifer Schear, advisory partner at Angular Ventures and founder of Schear Immigration, reviews what the administration’s policies mean and don’t mean for founders seeking to relocate to the US.
Netherlands/Databases. Elastic filed to go public. Founded in Amsterdam by Israeli-born Shay Banon, the company provides fast distributed document search capabilities and is widely considered the leader in that space.
Germany/Process Mining. Celonis raised $50M from 83North and Accel at a $1B valuation. Having already expanded to the US in their previous round, the company is now opening a UK office as part of a European expansion. The founding story of this company — three students from Munich who stumbled upon this opportunity as part of a school project — is pretty amazing. The company has apparently been profitable since year one.
Israel/Data Governance. BigID raised $30M just a few months after their previous round. The company is riding a massive wave of interest in data governance in the wake of GDPR.
UK/HR. Beamery raised $28M for its candidate relationship management SaaS.
Germany/Testing. Silexica raised $18M for software testing tools for multicore software.
Israel/Security. Silverfort raised $11.5 for multi-factor authentication.
AI Nationalism. Ian Hogarth argues compellingly that we are headed for increased nationalism in the development of AI technology. “There is a difference between predicting that something will happen and believing this is a good thing. Nationalism is a dangerous path, particular when the international order and international norms will be in flux as a result.”
Worth reading
Crypto primitives. A16Z launched a dedicated crypto fund headed by Chris Dixon. In his blog piece introducing the fund, Chris framed the crypto opportunity in a very thoughtful and helpful way — in terms of new primitives that can be woven together into meaningful applications. Definitely worth a read — for the crypto-converted, the crypto-curious, and the crypto-skeptics: “Trust is a new software primitive from which other components can be constructed.”
(For a more skeptical take, check out “BitCoin is a cult” by Adam Caudill.)Machine Learning’s soft security underbelly. Researchers have pointed out that the semiconductor supply chain may introduce new vulnerabilities in a world of ML: “If we don’t really know why a machine learning algorithm made a decision, then it’s easy to hide modifications that will change its predictions for some inputs.”
VC’s midlife crisis. Micah Rosenbloom of Founder’s Collective on the Midlife Crisis of Venture Capital. Micah outlines five questions that plague his VC friends and addresses them one by one. Worth a read. “When I see my peers stressed, it’s usually because they’re trying to use someone else’s playbook instead of defining their own and sticking to it.”
“I never said she stole my money.” How this one 7-word sentence can help explain the mysteries of human speech.
Valuing Tesla. Ok. Tesla’s not an enterprise company, but this analysis of how to value it by Professor Aswath Damodaran at NYU is killer.
Working with Goliath. Some advice for startups on working effectively with large brands.
Forget what VCs tell you about growth. There is a ton of wisdom in this article by Mark MacLeod on VC/founder growth expectation. In a nutshell, Mark is arguing that when VCs are telling founders to try to triple revenue. there are many cases (perhaps most cases) where figuring out how to double revenue is enough to build a world-beating company. Underlying that observation are two others worth highlighting: First, Mark correctly observes that not every company in the $1–5M revenue range is ready or able to triple. Just because you have significant revenues doesn’t mean you have figured out how to scale them super fast. Second, Mark points out that pouring resources into “hyper-growth” before its actually possible can lead to disaster.
Portfolio News & Jobs
Datos is hiring a BD lead in the US.
Moltin is hiring for multiple roles in the US and UK.
CrateDB. Marketing analytics company Qualtrics published a detailed post on how and why they use CrateDB as their core text analytics engine: “CrateDB actually uses Elasticsearch technology under the hood to manage cluster creation and communication. It also exposes an Elasticsearch API that gives us access to all of the indexing capabilities in Elasticsearch that we need. Second, we need to be able to retrieve exact aggregate information efficiently, which functionality CrateDB provides. We need exact aggregates because our text storage solution informs data reporting tools that are frequently under heavy scrutiny. Finally, CrateDB’s SQL interface provides a favorable protocol for retrieving the extensive amounts of data that we use in various reporting tools and to train machine learning models.”
Snyk released a container vulnerability management solution as an enhancement to their Dev/Sec offering.
Bit was the #1 trending repo on Github last week (it might not be by the time you click on this link, but still cool!)
Jira partners with Rollout to bring feature management into Jira’s software.
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 or connect with me on LinkedIn. 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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