YSL Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #10: January 11, 2018

Hope you are enjoying the new format - and welcome to issue #10. Please feel free to email me with comments - and if you like this - please forward to friends and subscribe!

From the blog

New blog post: Focus & Blogging. four resolutions for 2018

2018 EU+IL VC Data. If you haven't yet, you might want to check out my quarterly data deck on European & Israeli venture capital investment trends, which was released last week. $20.3B of VC investment summarized in 74 free slides. For the full, downloadable report, click below:
 

Portfolio News

JFrog's Conan C/C++ Packet Manager V 1.0 was released, two years after it's initial release. JFrog acquired Conan back in 2016. Speaking of JFrog, their Swampup 2018 devops conference is coming up in May and the call for speakers is open. 

Styla is hiring a Head of Customer Success, a UX Designer, and a Customer Success / Key Account Manager, all based in Berlin. 

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• UK/Electronics Components. Google bought British company Redux which apparently converts a mobile phone screen into a speaker.

• Lisbon/Translation. Unbabel raised $23M for an "AI-powered/human-refined" translation platform, led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from several other corporate and local venture backers.

• Oslo & Berlin/Real Time Analytics.  Swarm64 raised $12.5M led by Intel Capital. The company builds a relational database for real-time big data analytics. 

• Israel/CES. Israeli startups are having a very busy time in Vegas. Innoviz announced an advanced LiDAR system. Intuition Robotics won a "Best Innovation" award for its ElliQ social companion robot for the healthcare industry. And clean water company Lishtot took first place in CES's "Startup Night" for its water testing IoT product for the developing world. 

• Israel/Amazon. Israeli startup CEOs are calling out Amazon for poaching employees from the same startups that are also AWS customers. The charge is being led by Shai Wininger, founder of Fiverr and, now, Lemonade. This is part of an ever escalating war for tech talent in Israel. 

• US/H-1B Visas. Changes to the H-1B visa program seem to be hitting US employers trying to hire overseas. 83% of US employers say the U.S. immigration system has impacted their ability to find and retain talent; 21% have had to move work overseas.

Worth reading

• AI Predictions for 2018. A really interesting set of specific AI predictions for 2018 from Carlos E. Perez, author of Artificial Intuition and the Deep Learning Playbook. Most intriguingly, he predicts: the failture of most AI HW plays, the emergence of "Artificial Intuition," and the impossibility of achieving "explainability." I'm going to have to read this one again slowly, but it's worth it.  Here's another good piece, by the way, from Scientific American, on how deep learning will impact biological imaging.

• Netflix/Infrastructure reliability. A deep dive from New Stack on how Netflix ensures application reliablity and uptime with Spinnaker and other internally built tool. 

• Docker/Kubernetes. A great long read on how Docker's decision to open-source its container framework set the stage for Kubernetes to conquer the container world. Silicon Angle has another detailed look at Kubernetes' dominance in the contanier eco-system. According to Chris Short, "Docker is Dead." There appears to be a theme emerging. 

• Facebook/Chatbots. Looks like Facebook's "M" messenger chatbot program is slipping quietly into that dark night.

• Quantum Apocalypse. Shlomi Dolev of Ben Gurion University on why the NSA is starting to freak out about quantum. 

• Tunguz on SaaS. My friend Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint predicts a strong outlook for SaaS exits in 2018, as Blockchain rises and "AI" and "open source" fade.

• Australian design unicorn. Canva just crossed the $1B valuation mark. 

• It's us or Facebook. According to early FB investor Roger McNamee, "increasing awareness of the threat posed by platform monopolies creates an opportunity to reframe the discussion about concentration of market power. Limiting the power of Facebook and Google not only won’t harm America, it will almost certainly unleash levels of creativity and innovation that have not been seen in the technology industry since the early days of, well, Facebook and Google." Long but worth reading. 

• Mobile banking. Knowledge at Wharton (go Quakers!) tackles mobile banking. "Millennials consider it to be a pain to deal with brick and mortar, especially when they can get a better product at a lower price, and it’s more convenient, through digital means."

• Department of "It's not all your fault." Joseph Flaherty of Founder Collective offers five reasons why VCs don't invest in a startup that have nothing to do with the founder or the startup itself.