On the threshold
Gil Dibner

This will be our last newsletter of 2022. Perhaps this year more than others, it’s important to take some time away from daily pressures to reconnect with family and friends.

2022 was a year of transition. The year began amid the ongoing frenzy of rising valuations and rapid financing rounds, with unicorns being minted every day. By now, the great tech slowdown is upon us and many expect a broader economic recession to continue well into 2023 and perhaps beyond. We entered with talk of NFTs, web3, and metaverses. We are exiting with excitement (and some hand-wringing) about ChatGPT, Dall-E 2, and what they might mean for the future of work, software, and creativity. The world’s geopolitical situation seems precarious as well, as the McKinsey Global Institute highlighted recently, asking if we are on the “cusp of a new era” that might be very different from the preceding one. That sentiment — that we are on the threshold of something new and unfamiliar — seems to capture the spirit of this moment.

For those of us building companies, we’re going to be building against a rapidly shifting backdrop. In this time of great uncertainty, it’s impossible to know what 2023 will bring. So the best advice we can give is this: Let’s take the time we need over the next few weeks to recharge our batteries so that we can face whatever the next year will bring with energy and optimism. We’ll need it.

Happy holidays, happy new year, and hold on to your hat.

Gil

EVENTS

Feb 8 / Lessons Learned From Investing Early in Over a Dozen SaaS Unicorns Including Salesforce, SuccessFactors, Box, Gusto, SalesLoft, ServiceMax, Veeva, Bill.com, Doximity, Yammer and Zoom Among Others
Jason Green, Founder & General Partner, Emergence Capital

Feb 15 / The Evolution of Collibra’s Product Positioning & How They Created a Category
Stan Christiaens, Co-Founder & Chief Data Citizen, Collibra

FROM THE BLOG

The Tech Recession of 2022
What lessons can we learn from the successes and failures of the 2010s?

It’s Never too Early to Build your Growth Model
What are the specific mechanisms by which one user turns into many, and an initial investment turns into revenue?

How to Think About Revenue Quality as an Early Stage Founder
What does “quality revenue” mean when you don’t have much revenue at all?

It’s Not All About Bottoms-up
Two recent trends indicate that we may finally be past the mistaken belief that bottoms-up is the only “fundable” business model in town.

EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS

Sweden/Automotive Systems. Einride raised $200M for its autonomous electric self-driving delivery vehicles and freight mobility platform.
Israel/ML Tooling Components. NeuReality closed $35M for its AI inferencing chip optimised for computer vision, natural language processing and recommendation engine applications.
UK/Marketing. Chattermill raised $26M for its platform that helps companies unlock insights by analyzing customer feedback data from across myriad digital channels.
UK/Financial. 9fin raised $23M for its AI-powered debt market analytics platform.
Israel/IT Infrastructure. Axiom raised $7M for its identity and access management layer targeted at developer platforms.
Greece/Marine. Harbor Lab raised $6.4M for its SaaS disbursement account analysis software that calculates and evaluates port expenses against real-time port tariffs.
Denmark/Marketing. Dreamdata raised $6.3M for its B2B alternative to Google Analytics.
UK/Marketing. Plain raised $6M for its customer support platform.

WORTH READING

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

State of the market. Atomico released their ‘State of European Tech 2022’ with Sifted doing a wrap up of the major themes from mega rounds slowing down to average fundraising process times increasing. A few takeaways:
-Tech investment projected to reach $85bn (-18%)
-IPO markets shut down, US investor retreat, and widespread layoffs
-Europe doubles down on purpose, self-reliance, and sustainable growth.

Semiconductor investment. President Biden visited a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. site Tuesday in Arizona, where the company plans to build a second factory and increase its investment to $40 billion. “American manufacturing is back, folks,” Biden said at the event. “These are the most advanced semiconductor chips on the planet, chips that will power iPhones and MacBooks, as Tim Cook can attest … It could be a game changer.”

Google’s innovator dilemma. Dare Obasanjo, a Program Manager at Microsoft, had a thought provoking tweet about Google’s next move to combat OpenAI’s ChatCPT. From Obasanjo: “Google employees explain why we haven’t seen ChatGPT like functionality in their products; the cost to serve an AI result is 10x to 100x as high as a regular web search today plus they’re too slow relative to how quick search results must be returned.”

HOW TO STARTUP

How to bag your dream hire. Mike Smith the former VP of Walmart and now GP at Footwork answers the question on why did he join Stitch Fix as COO when there were just 4 people at the company. From Smith:

“Moral of this story for founders looking to win over that dream hire:
-be clear about your vision and how your hire will help to achieve it
-be willing to share the stage
-be honest about where you need help (and where you think you don’t)”

The front-end of AI. Indieprenuer Levelsio tweeted about a Hackernews thread proclaiming the real opportunity in AI for most people will not be in AI but in building a front end around it.

From developers to commercial success. Ed Sim of Boldstart covers Hashicorp’s latest earnings call reflecting on how the company balanced “workflow features” for end developers, while also focusing on “system of record features” to manage and scale the software through the organization. From Sim: “[it is] also a matter of sequencing — always need to nail the individual user value prop for developers on day 1 b4 u can get the budget….challenge also grows as company gets bigger + customers demand more enterprise features + making sure u don’t lose sight of North

+ dev 1st engine.”

HOW TO VENTURE

Minimal viable capital. Samir Kaji, the CEO of Allocate, has a great tweetstorm with advice for first time or emerging fund managers wanting to raise in this downturn. Think about the minimum viable capital you need to raise to prove your strategy, and raise that. From Kaji: “Basically, it’s the minimum amount of capital that allows you to execute on a given thesis while providing you with the necessary proof points for future fundraising. It’s a lot smaller than people think.”

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Gil Dibner was named to the Forbes Midas List Europe, again, in 2022.

Januar announces its partnership with Coinify to bring better infrastructure to the future of finance.

Planable’s CEO Xenia Muntean spoke about their journey at the Untold Stories Conference last week.

Paradime is coming out of stealth with its operating system for analytics on top of dbt.

Trellis was highlighted by The Jerusalem Post, shining a spotlight on their work to help wineries in their decision-making in terms of growing, harvesting, winemaking and marketing.

Levity was featured in the German newspaper Handelsblatt about making AI more accessible to as many businesses as possible.