???????? Hi friends!
As a tech enthusiast, I’m always left incredibly disappointed when tech fails.
Well today, I was reminded that even the richest (and possibly one of the smartest) people in the world can build products that don’t work as you expect them to.
In this instance, I’m talking about the Tesla.
Only a year in and a pretty significant failure which means I’m going to be spending most of my day today at the service centre. Sigh.
But on a more uplifting note, this week on Nothing Ventured I spoke to Fatou Diagne and Stephanie Heller. They’re the founders of Bootstrap Europe, a fund providing growth debt to high growth scale ups.
Here’s what you can expect:
➡️ Fatou and Stephanie discussed their ‘origin’ story: From boarding school in France > travelling across the dessert in Africa > ultimately founding Bootstrap Europe
➡️ We discussed how startups can use venture debt alongside equity investment to scale
➡️ How, despite being massive underdogs, Bootstrap Europe was able to acquire SVBs European venture debt portfolio (at a discount no less!) and continue to support great ventures in Europe.
Check it out!
This week there have been a few things that have caught my eye in the tech and venture ecosystem and what we’ll be talking about this evening, namely:
???? Friend of the podcast, Hussein Kanji, joins the Midas List Europe
???? Venture funding in Europe slashed in half this year
???? ChatGPT one year on
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Now let’s get into it.
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The Lowdown
Midas Touch
Given the state of venture at the moment (which I’ll discuss below), I thought it would be worth taking a moment to celebrate friend of the podcast, Hussein Kanji’s ascension to the Midas List Europe ????
According to Forbes, the Midas List Europe is:
With VCs being scored on a number of KPIs including deals done, valuations and exits, it’s one of the gongs that many VCs aspire towards.
For anyone paying attention, you may well see glimpses of the podcast throughout the article (though they did interview Hussein too!) – glad to have played a teeny tiny part in the article, if not the achievement!
Congrats to Hussein ????
Market go up, market go down
Now for the bad news.
Venture funding in Europe has dropped dramatically this year against a backdrop of tight markets, high interest rates, US investors exiting the continent (funding from US investors has dropped 14 percentage points).
There’s also been a general realisation that many businesses probably shouldn’t have raised venture in the first place.
Funding into AI has remained – unsurprisingly – the bright spot whilst a number of scale-ups have had to suffer through the pain of down rounds (raising at a lower valuation).
The article below suggests that funding at seed remains strong.
This is unsurprising because at seed you are not necessarily investing on stable metrics, it’s much more of a punt on the potential of the business.
But once you start getting into Series A, B and beyond, investors are much more brutal in their assessments of performance, requiring solid metrics and ongoing growth for them to continue to pour capital into these companies.
ChatGPT One Year On
Now that the dust has settled on the crazy happenings at OpenAI last week, it’s worth noting that yesterday (November 30th) marked the one year anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT.
It feels incredible that it is only one year in given how ubiquitous generative AI feels within the tech ecosystem and how pervasive the use of ChatGPT has become over the last 12 months from students to employees to startups and beyond.
ChatGPT had 1m users within the first 5 days post launch and is now up to 100m users according to the company and is visited almost 1.5 BILLION times every month ????
It’s launching brought the terms Generative AI and LLMs into the general lexicon and it is pretty hard to imagine a world without ChatGPT (or it’s challengers) moving forward.
The pace of change in this space has been incredible and, I’m excited to see what the next 12 months bring us ????
And finally, this meme has been doing the rounds and, I gotta say, it had me giggling out loud (yes I know I’m a geek!) ????
Tech company profitability
— BuccoCapital Guy (@buccocapital)
Nov 30, 2023
????And that’s a wrap for this edition of The Lowdown – I’d appreciate your feedback so just reply to this email if you’ve got something you’d like to say.
???? And if you think someone else might love this, please forward it on to them,
???? Finally, if you’re a fan of the Nothing Ventured podcast, please don’t forget to like, rate and subscribe wherever you get your pods – it really helps us spread the word.
That’s it from me so until next time…
Stay liquid 🙂
Aarish
