YSL Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech Weekly

The Angle Issue #18: March 14, 2018

Hello and welcome to issue #18!

There was a $550M AI-driven acquisition in enterprise tech, but undoubtedly the best thing that happened this week was John Oliver's treatment of cryptocurrencies on Last Week Tonight. You can check it out here (non-US viewers might need a VPN). "Everything you don't understand about money, coupled with everything you don't understand about computers."

Also this week, YC released its "request for startups," a list of 25 areas in which they are actively looking for startups. It's a very good summary of the state of the art in VC thinking.

Please feel free to email me with comments - and if you like this - please forward to friends and subscribe if you haven't already. Thanks!

(Please remember to add [email protected] to your address books.)

From the blog

Moltin. Why I invested in Moltin's Seed Round.

2018 EU+IL VC Data. $20.3B of VC investment summarized in 74 slides. 

Europe/Israel Enterprise/Tech

• Israel/APIs. RapidAPI, founded by now-20-year-old Iddo Gino, raised $9M led by Andreesen Horowitz. The company maintains a directory of 8,000 APIs and serves 400B API calls monthly from 500K developers.

• UK/Fintech. UK financial regulators are seeking to support London's status as a fintech hub for Europe (and the wider world) through a series of very forgiving regulations for innovative financial technologies. "In an unusual move for a regulator, the FCA in 2015 established the world’s first regulatory “sandbox” at its London headquarters, where fintech startups can build and test new products and services in a safe, controlled environment with oversight by regulators. The FCA is particularly encouraging to fintechs working on problems that fill market gaps, such as small businesses lending and robo-adviser products in wealth management, among other things."

• UK/Security. Netsparker raised $40M to scale its web application security scanning software. 

• Ireland/Payments. Stripe acquired Index, a SF-based payment company. "The deal is significant as this is the first time it gives [Stripe] a formal product for offline stores. While it has long supported in-person payments, the firm has increasingly been working with larger retailers, many of whom are looking for a more seamless “Stripe-like” experience when it comes to card-present transactions."

• Spain/Bitcoin & ISIS. This story is as interesting as the headline: "Legendary bitcoin developer Amir Taaki went to Syria to fight Isis. Now he's back, with radical plans for bitcoin – and the states of Western Europe"

• Israel/AWOL. The IDF is working on a plan to give its personnel an option for a two-year "tech leave" to work on startups.

• Israel/Fashion. Amazon is entering the Israeli market and the local fashion industry is not happy.

• Israel/Startup spies. You can now pitch the Mossad's VC arm, Libertad Ventures.

• Vatican/Holy Hackathon Batman. The Vatican is convening a hackathon of 120 students aimed at finding technological solutions for three global issues the Catholic Church hopes to address: social inclusion, interfaith dialogue, and assistance for migrants and refugees.

Worth reading

• Don't fear the professional services. Martin Casado of A16Z argues that (low margin, non-scalable) professional services are often a necessary evil in building a pre-chasm enterprise tech company. 

• Founder friendly. Amid breathless reports of VC-founder drama at Uber, Roger Ehrenberg of IA Ventures put out a brilliant and concise blog post on how being truly founder friendly often means honesty and tough love. "My objective is not to be a founder’s best friend, but to be the partner that helps them be their best selves. And if this means having some hard conversations with some bruised egos and hurt feelings in the short run, but with an eye towards medium and longer-term payoffs that possibly change the game for the better, so be it." Amen.

• $550M AI Acquisition. S&P bought Kensho for $550M as part of a strategy to embrace AI. 

• What makes a good founder? Jason Lemkin answered a quora question about how old is too old to be a founder. His answer, however, is generally applicable to founders, regardless of age: (1) Commitment for the long run; (2) Commitment to work 24x7x365; and (3) No optionality. 

• From Apple to Alexa. The inimitable Scott Galloway on how Apply evolved into a luxury brand, and what that means for Amazon's Alexa. Worth a read. He always is.

• Is Moore's Law Dead? MIT Technology review argues that this previously reliable predictor of advancement in processing power is no longer in effect. One implication is that driving the next set of improvement in compute power is going to require entirely new approaches. But a second, and less well appreciated, one is that Moore's law served an important coordination function in technology. Everyone knew what compute power was likely to look like in the future and application developers could plan accordingly. The end of Moore's law could make it much harder to coordinate software and hardware advances.

• The vanishing millennial hipster. A fascinating piece on how millennial hipsters are vanishing as a target market for the travel industry. This rings true, and has wide implications for many industries and the technologies that serve them. 

• The quantum supremacy. Google's researchers have announced that they are close to acheiving "quantum supremacy" - the point at which a quantum computer is more computationally powerful than the world's fastest supercomputers. The MIT Technology Review takes a detailed look at what that actually means and doesn't mean.

• Enterprise sales metrics 101. AirTree ventures with a breakdown of the key enterprise sales metrics founders should be tracking.

• Defining blockchain. A fascinating look at the very loose definitions that are plagueing the crypto eco-system, including a quote from my friend Gideon Greenspan in Israel. But the best quote is from Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

• Salesforce pricing teardown. A detailed look at everything that is wrong with Salesforce's pricing page. 

• Gentle Robots. The WSJ on the quest to build robots that can perform "softer" tasks that, until now, can only be performed by humans. "Soft robotics is a “game-changer” for such applications because engineers don’t need to know with the same level of certainty where objects are to get machines to pick them successfully."

• How are VCs measured? Rob Go with a great post on how VCs are measured and what that means for founders. 

• Deck 'em. YC releases its template for a successful simple seed-stage slide deck.

• To valley or not to valley? Jason Lemkin breaks down whether (and, more importantly, when) a startup should consider hiring a sales force in the Bay Area: "I think in 2018, it’s close to impossible to justify a large sales organization in the Bay Area unless the unique expertise in SF is worth the cost.  It may even be impossible to scale much beyond 10 reps in the Bay Area cost effectively with a low ACV....I think $30k ACV is probably the cut off. Here, you’re edging into a true solution sale. And having an experienced VP of Sales and VP of Marketing that know how to sell and market solutions is important. And having experienced reps (vs. kids fresh out of college) helps a lot.   And at $30k ACV, a good rep can probably close $800k a year (some more, some less).  That makes competitive Bay Area OTEs attainable and affordable, even with the turnover."

Portfolio News

Resin releases support for multicontainers in its IoT devops suite.

SwiftShift took second place at the Release It! pitch competition at SXSW. 

More coverage of Snyk's $7M series A round from Boldstart, Canaan, Heavybit, and others. Watch CEO Guy Podjarny demonstrate how to hack into a serverless environment here.