エピソード
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The Agenda 👇
* The Building Bridges podcast: a conversation with Azeem Azhar on his book Exponential 🎧
* My latest Sifted column about French startups raising money like never before
* Thumbs up/down for the last weeks
* A list of recently unlocked essays from the archive
📓 What a journey! My first encounter with Azeem Azhar, writer of the Exponential View newsletter and author of the recently published eponymous book Exponential, happened on Twitter a few years back, right after I had settled in London with my family. At the time, I think Exponential View was in its infancy and Azeem was still writing a regular column for the Financial Times.
* We exchanged messages on Twitter about the future of trade unions—which ended up inspiring me with the idea of “exit unions”, discussed here and here, as well as in my book Hedge.
And that is how the connection was made. I believe Azeem and I have only met once IRL, but we’ve kept reading each other, and then Azeem invited my wife Laetitia Vitaud and me to contribute one of the summer editions of Exponential View, which we dedicated to... the future of workers’ rights and trade unions in the platform economy. You can read it here: EV #179 Platforms & workers.
* More recently, Laetitia was a guest on Azeem’s own podcast, an episode dedicated to discussing craftsmanship as the best paradigm to imagine the future of work. Here’s the link: Technology and the New World of Work 🎧
It was only logical that with Azeem publishing a book (his first!), he had to be a guest on our own Building Bridges podcast. Here’s what Laetitia wrote about their conversation:
The pandemic provided us with ample evidence about our being ill-equipped to grasp exponential change. At the beginning of each new wave of contamination, policy makers fell into the same cognitive trap. They ignored exponential growth at the beginning. The early points on any exponential curve look so unimpressive at first that everybody (except for epidemiologists or financial experts) will fail to pay attention to it. So people aren’t ready to adapt to exponential change.
At school, classes are often taught as if Google and Youtube didn’t exist. Our tax systems largely ignore the specifics of our digital economy and fail to properly grasp the value created by digital giants. Labour unions fail to target the growing precariat of our day and age. More people fall through the cracks of the safety net we designed for the industrial age. Even the way we measure and analyse economic value is more and more beside the point. The list could go on and on…
That’s why I was particularly satisfied to find out that this gap had been given a name: the Exponential Gap. In [his] must-read book titled Exponential, Azeem explains that in our Exponential Age, technological change is exponential whereas institutional change is only linear, which results in a fast-growing gap between the two.
👉 You can listen to Azeem and Laetitia discussing the advent of the Exponential Age using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Bonus: For those who prefer to listen to French, Laetitia and I will discuss Azeem’s book in the next “À deux voix” episode of our Nouveau Départ podcast, to be published tomorrow. Time to subscribe to our French-speaking platform 🇫🇷
🇫🇷 Last week was quite big for French startups, with a handful of them announcing unprecedented megarounds over the course of just 48 hours. This is the topic of my latest column in Sifted, published this morning, in which I make two points:
* Yes, the French entrepreneurial ecosystem is starting to compound, with the first generation of successful entrepreneurs finally paving the way for the next generations, following a process well documented by analysts of successful entrepreneurial ecosystems.
* However, we should be wary of a typical French trait known as “toxic positivity”: the idea that everything is going well, everyone is doing things right, and France will inevitably grow its own tech giants—like it once grew landmark companies like LVMH, L’Oréal or Air Liquide.
Put simply: there’s no guarantee that because a country was among the most advanced in a given paradigm (that of the Fordist Age), it will remain so in the next one (the Entrepreneurial Age). French founders have to keep pushing, looking outward, and connecting with the rest of the world.
👉 Read more in It's been a record year for French Tech; what's next? 🇫🇷
😀 Echoing my early discussions with Azeem about the future of trade unions, here’s a fantastic contribution by Li Jin (alongside Scott Duke Kominers and Lila Shroff), recently published in Harvard Business Review. This niche topic has become a global conversation, effectively in sync with profound transformations on the labor market. Read more in A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy.
🙂 A gem I discovered: Tyler Cowen on reading fast, reading well, and reading widely. You might remember Tyler being a guest on the Building Bridges podcast a few months ago (here 🎧). He’s known as one of the most effective and efficient readers there is. In this article, discovered via Trevor McKendrick, he explains his approach to books and to absorbing what’s in them.
😏 This tweet was my most popular in recent memory: worth reading the thread, and the article that’s linked in it—a discussion between George Kankou Denkey and Howard French about urbanism in Africa:
😐 I call it “The Great Fragmentation”. David Halpert of Prince Street Capital calls it “Digital Decolonization”. And this article published in Bloomberg discusses an interesting variant, which they call “Westlessness”. Give a read to “Westlessness” Is the Word if the Old Established Alliances Fall Apart:
While it lasted, the West — not in an ethnocentric but in a normative sense — made the world, on balance, a better place. Its ongoing fragmentation therefore bodes ill for stability and peace. The U.S. should keep trying to salvage this West, even as others, like the U.K. and Australia, are wise to draw up a Plan B. But ultimately it’s the Europeans who have to decide what they want — and then do what it takes to become credible.
😒Another one along the same line: Who needs expats? (from The Economist). It discusses trends that I already covered in my 2015 essay The Power of the Tongue: English in the Digital Economy, and I’d like to share this fascinating quote:
This speaks to a broader economic shift that has dented the need for expats. Once upon a time they used to be the ones able to facilitate access to foreign capital and know-how, often from Western sources. Now money is abundant and the most exciting business opportunities are emerging markets doing business with other emerging markets, particularly in Asia. You don’t need a Westerner to show you how to do that. The world they understand is no longer as relevant.
😖 For a few weeks, everyone was wondering if the fall of Chinese real estate behemoth Evergrande would precipitate a global financial crisis. It appears China tackled the matter and prevented the situation from degrading further. The whole episode was an opportunity to learn more about real estate in China as well as the (mostly negative) role it plays in economic development. I loved this essay by Noah Smith (paywalled, but worth subscribing!): China's real estate trilemma 🇨🇳
China’s government now has to decide what to do, and quickly. It doesn’t lack for policy options. The problem is that there are a number of competing concerns here, and figuring out which to prioritize is not an easy problem. Basically the three concerns are: 1. Short-term economic growth; 2. Middle-class wealth; 3. Long-term productivity growth and structural economic transformation. Let’s talk about all three of these goals, and why China probably can’t accomplish all of them at once.
📚 I unlocked two more essays from the European Straits archive recently:
⚖️ Principles for Capital Allocation (April 2020)
👾 Unai, VR, and the Hardware Lottery (September 2020)
And here’s the whole Twitter thread including all unlocked essays since last June:
Sign up to European Straits if you don’t want to miss the next issues 🤗
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Chris Bruntlett talks about cycling in cities in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast
* A complementary reading list on the future of urban transportation
* Thumbs up/down for last week, and a few unlocked articles from the archive
Here’s my investment thesis in a few bullet points:
* we long thought that the only playbook to build tech companies was that of Silicon Valley;
* but then China opened our eyes to the existence of a very different playbook;
* since these two radically different playbooks co-exist, maybe there are many others;
* in particular, there must be such a thing as a European playbook, which we still have to discover.
When I voice this thesis, people immediately jump to the next round of questions: What’s this uniquely European playbook? What makes Europe different from the US and China? What are our strengths and how can we Europeans play on them?
This, I must say, is the holy grail of investing in Europe. Any investor with a deep understanding of what makes Europe unique has an edge over US competitors and any locals that don’t know how to do anything other than to emulate Americans.
* Plus, learning to differentiate your approach to the market in Europe is good training for doing the same in the many other regions in the world where successful tech companies are now growing at a fast pace. Again, the key to success in venture capital at the global level is not to replicate the same approach everywhere, it’s to understand the local context and adjust investment decisions accordingly. It’s true in Europe, but it’s also true in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere.
But still, what about Europe? One of my findings is that the best way we Europeans can learn about ourselves is by asking outsiders what they think, whether they’re from the US, Asia or other parts of the world.
* Another finding is that what Americans, in particular, admire the most about Europe is our cities: their density, their vibrancy, the quality of their infrastructure, the beauty of their architecture, and generally how rewarding and convenient life can be when you live in a large European city.
If you follow that path, a key to understanding Europe’s entrepreneurial potential is to get a better understanding of what makes its cities different—whether that’s housing, retail, healthcare, proximity services, transportation, or any other aspect of urban life. And since I came to this realization, a big part of my thinking as a European investor has been focused on cities: what makes them different from cities on other continents, and what unique opportunities can be seized by European entrepreneurs as a result?
All of this is why I was especially interested to listen to my wife Laetitia Vitaud’s conversation with Chris Bruntlett, a cycling enthusiast, the Marketing Manager at the Dutch Cycling Embassy, and, together with his wife Melissa Bruntlett, author of several books about urban mobility. Chris is a Canadian who moved to the Netherlands specifically because he was attracted by the Dutch urban way of life and what makes it so unique: the key role that bicycles play in day-to-day transportation. As Laetitia wrote on the Building Bridges website,
When you look at the infrastructure decisions made in the Netherlands in the 1970s, you see that they were designed as very democratic and inclusive infrastructures: the old use them, people with disabilities use them, so do families with children. Cycling is cheap. And it has the potential to transform our (work) lives for the better.
👉 You can listen to the whole conversation between Chris and Laetitia by using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
As a complement to the Building Bridges podcast with Chris Bruntlett, please enjoy this reading list on the future of transportation in cities:
* This is the year a major European city will ban cars from its centre (Martin Mignot, Wired UK, January 2020)
* 11 cities that have joined the car-free revolution (Adele Peters, Fast Company, January 2020)
* Coronavirus: a huge push for cycling to work (Robert Wright, The Financial Times, May 2020)
* Bikes starting to push cars out of cities thanks to COVID-19 (Florence Schulz, Euractiv, May 2020)
* Now is the moment for European cities to get a move on and leave cars behind (Emily Brooke, Sifted, May 2020)
* Cities Have a Small Window to Save Themselves From Cars (David Zipper, Slate, May 2020)
* Why We Need Feminist Cities (podcast w/ Leslie Kern—Laetitia Vitaud, Building Bridges, October 2020)
* Mass Transit Is the Way to Get Cities Moving Again (Lionel Laurent, Bloomberg, July 2021)
* Welcome to the 15-minute city (Natalie Whittle, The Financial Times, July 2021)
* The Gender Divide in Transport Is Starting to Crumble (Carolynn Look and Elisabeth Behrmann, Bloomberg CityLab, July 2021)
* How to end the American dependence on driving (Gabby Birenbaum, Vox, September 2021)
😀 After 10 years in Paris (from 2006 to 2015) and then 5 years in London (from 2015 to 2020), my family and I have been experimenting with escaping from the big cities, moving from London to rural Normandy at the start of the global pandemic, and then from Normandy to suburban Bavaria in November of last year. Read a few related ideas in my Household Finance in the Entrepreneurial Age.
* Another interesting experience of escaping the Big City has been that of my friend Stefano Bernardi, an investor who’s been living in the Dolomites (from San Francisco) for several years, and has now launched a project named Trento Remote to provide everyone with the opportunity to join him in this experience. Read Stefano’s announcement here: Launching Trento Remote: a curated batch for remote mountain living ⛰
🙂 They did it again! Our friends at Index Ventures have been at the forefront of pushing for simpler, better approaches to granting stock options to employees of European tech startups, most notably with the #NotOptional campaign about which I wrote in my 2019 essay Why Employee Equity Matters. Now the very same team has launched a powerful tool to help early-stage founders plan and execute on bringing their early employees in as shareholders. Check it out here: Index Ventures OptionPlan.
😏 A recurring theme of this newsletter is the transition from the Fordist Age, which was dominated by manufacturing, and the Entrepreneurial Age, which is dominated by tech companies. A recurring objection from my readers concerns today’s equivalent of the working class: what will replace those steady, high-quality jobs that manufacturing used to provide? Well, it seems we now have the answer—it’s Amazon: Amazon’s New ‘Factory Towns’ Will Lift the Working Class.
😐 If you want further proof of that trend, just consider how hard Amazon and Walmart are competing on the labor market, as suggested by this article: Amazon and Walmart are Winning the Labor Market Wars. It’s good news for workers, as they can play on the competition so as to obtain higher wages and better benefits. It’s bad news for many other employers in proximity services, who now have to renounce treating workers like crap. Not sure what kind of news it is for us consumers, though!
😒 Luckily for workers at Amazon and Walmart, their jobs tend to be located far away from the dense and expensive metropolitan areas. On the other hand, many workers in proximity services continue to suffer from unaffordable housing and/or long commutes because not enough has been done to build housing over the past decades. It’s a problem that’s at the core of the current malaise within the Western middle class (and beyond!), and hopefully one that can be solved in time. Read more in Sam Bowman, John Myers & Ben Southwood’s The housing theory of everything.
😖 I admit defense industry contracts between France and Australia has never been at the top of my interests. But last week’s cancelling of such a contract in favor of Australia’s partnering with the US and the UK caused such a stir that I had to pay closer attention to the whole thing and its implications from a geopolitical perspective. For a glimpse into how the French reacted to the setback, read Rory Medcalf’s What does the new Aukus alliance mean for global relations? And for more in-depth analysis and commentary, follow Bruno Macaes’s Twitter account:
Sign up to European Straits if you don’t want to miss the next issues 🤗
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
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The Agenda 👇
* I spoke with Toni Cowan-Brown about everything that’s changing in F1 🎧
* Thumbs up/down for last week
I’m very happy to publish what will be the last episode of the Building Bridges podcast this season: a wide-ranging conversation with Toni Cowan-Brown about the fascinating world of Formula 1 🎧
Toni is the first repeat guest on Building Bridges, since Laetitia already interviewed her a few months ago about being a European in Silicon Valley. Being a Nation Builder alumnus, Toni’s main focus is the intersection of tech and politics. She’s currently the publisher and/or co-host of several inspiring lines of content, including her personal newsletter Idée Fixe; the podcast Unapologetic Women, which she co-hosts with Sorcha Rochford; and the podcast Another Podcast along with Benedict Evans.
As I explain in my opening, my personal story with Formula 1 can be divided into two parts. The first was my growing up in 1980s & 1990s France and cheering for 4-time world champion and local hero Alain Prost. Prost’s popularity was such at the time that I was watching as many races as I could and knew quite a lot about the teams, the rules, and obviously the drivers.
But then Prost retired after winning his fourth world championship in 1993, and like most of France I became bored and disengaged from Formula 1. In fact, I stopped following the sport altogether until I discovered Netflix’s (excellent) Drive to Survive earlier this year—effectively a 28-year gap between being a Prost cheerleader and enjoying the popular Netflix series about current seasons!
Hence my very first question to Toni: What has happened in Formula 1 over the past three decades? Quite a lot, it turns out, between the evolution of the power unit, the constant shortening of the pit stops, and many other things that you’ll discover if you listen to the podcast.
In our conversation, Toni and I cover the following topics:
* What matters the most, the car or the driver? Hint: it’s both, and so much more!
* Why spec series (that is, series in which cars are all the same) are the best opportunities for women to break into motorsports.
* Why the UK is the core of the Formula 1 world, and all about Motorsport Valley, a small area in England where (almost) all the teams are headquartered.
* Why Formula 1 teams are the best illustration of French economist Philippe Aghion’s concept of a “neck-and-neck firm”.
* What the Formula 1 overlords are doing to try and win the interest of the American audience—including Drive to Survive, which has been tailored for the US.
* Why Formula 1’s weird (and sometimes dark) politics is being turned upside down thanks to social media (hello, Lewis Hamilton!).
* Who and what you should follow if you want to dig deeper and engage with the sport.
👉 Listen to my conversation with Toni Cowan-Brown in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Also here are a few videos that Toni mentions in our conversation:
* Jos Verstappen F1 Pit Fire (full) (1994)
* Formula 1 documentary | Pit Stop in Two Seconds (December 2019)
* Lewis Hamilton’s eyes get fully open when F1 V10 sound blasted past behind (December 2020)
* Over 4 Minutes Of Bono Coaching George Russell Team Radio 2020 Sakhir GP (December 2020)
And don’t forget to check out some of Toni’s other works on Formula 1:
* A 3-part essay about Formula 1 as part of Toni’s newsletter Idée Fixe: part 1 (the basics), part 2 (the driver or the car?), part 3 (sponsorship & big tobacco).
* A conversation with Benedict Evans (Another Podcast): F1, the plane that never takes off 🎧
* An episode of Unapologetic Women about athletes becoming activists 🎧
😀 The Dealroom team is doing an excellent job, along with Sifted and the European Commission, on documenting European tech and outlining the challenges it needs to tackle to get even better. After an excellent report on Corporate Innovation in the Entrepreneurial Age, they’ve just released another great report on Startup Cities in the Entrepreneurial Age 👉 Read it all here 👀
🙂 Our friends at Stripe recently launched a product called Stripe Tax—which, as you can guess considering the company and the product’s name, is about helping startups and small businesses comply with differing tax rules when doing business across borders. Read all about it here. Also, this:
😏 The piece I wrote last year about the future of construction featured a French entrepreneur, Pascal Chazal. Interesting that Pascal’s insight was that retail chains would take the initiative in disrupting the housing market, and now there’s this: John Lewis plans to build 10,000 rental homes.
😐 Everyone is finally awakening to the idea that venture capital is eating financial services. It’s a phenomenon that I call The Diffraction of Venture Capital (see this list of curated links on the topic), but now it’s made its way into the Financial Times: The new world of venture capital.
😒 There was a debate recently about Western European VCs writing (much) more than their counterparts in Central & Eastern Europe. Fortunately, Marcin Szelag, a VC investing from Poland, is remedying this with his newsletter CEE Venture Rounds Review. Keep writing, Marcin!
😖 I once wrote about investors needing to switch from a country risk paradigm to one focused on widespread uncertainty. The examples I used were Brexit and the CCP’s crackdown on Hong Kong. But this is also relevant: Didi Crackdown: Wall Street Should Have Seen the Regulatory Risks Coming.
From Country Risk in an Uncertain World (July 2020—just unlocked):
In the past you could confine your business within the limits of the vaguely global part of the economy in which risks could be assessed and managed. Today, the Great Fragmentation is destroying even that “globaloney” corner—starting with Britain, Hong Kong, and even the US—and forcing everyone to realize that uncertainty, not risks, rules the world economy now.
Sign up for European Straits if you don’t want to miss the next issues—starting again in September 🤗
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Normandy, France 🇫🇷
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Laetitia spoke with Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat about everything future of work 🎧
* My latest column in Sifted is about publicly traded VC firms in Europe
* Thumbs up/down for last week
* Recently unlocked essays from the European Straits archive
For the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast, Laetitia interviewed our friend Roy Bahat, an SF-based venture capitalist with Bloomberg Beta and an inspiring leader on the future of work. Here’s what she wrote about their conversation:
For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m excited to share my interview with Roy Bahat, who as the Head of Bloomberg Beta has been “obsessed with how we make work—the thing we do with more waking hours than any other—better”. He’s been an inspiration for me at least since I watched this video in which he speaks about two key drivers for workers: “Stability and dignity”.
Roy is used to making short, insightful and actionable pieces of content about work, careers, entrepreneurship and personal development. I recommend his series of to-the-point #thisisnotadvice interviews which you can watch on Twitter. They cover a wide range of topics like “Should I mentor someone and, if so, how do I do it?”or “How can I be the type of founders that VCs want to fund?”.
But I confess I wanted more time with him. I wanted to hear him in a longer format so he could tell his career story, what it means to be a VC specialised in the future of work and so we’d still have time left to speak about the future of work and how we can prepare for it. I’m so grateful he accepted!
As he explains in this podcast, he hadn’t planned to become a VC, let alone one who focuses on the future of work! But after doing tons of reading, talked to thousands of people and given the subject a lot of thought, you could say he’s become quite the expert. (More exactly, he’s reached that level of expertise where you become humble again. It’s a bit like Japanese martial arts: when you reach the highest level, you can wear a white belt again like a beginner!)
I simply love how he adresses the most simple yet profound questions. Here’s how he sums it all up neatly on his LinkedIn profile:
I've had a messy, hand-wringy career (in non-profit, professional services, city government, big media, video games, academia, day-zero startup, investing), where I was never hired for any job for which I was qualified (including starting a company, where I guess I sort of co-hired myself and was still unqualified). Only later did I realize the one thread that tied it all together -- making work better.
In 2013, Bloomberg L.P. gave me the opportunity to turn my obsession with the future of work into my job when we created Bloomberg Beta. I believe the fastest way to make change is to build extraordinary technology companies (and, these days, machine intelligence companies in particular).
We talked about a lot of things, including feminism and why it’s important to embrace it. Among the many themes covered were also the skills of the future. How do you make yourself “futureproof” in a fast-changing world? I asked him because in his book Futureproof, NYT journalistKevin Roose thanks Roy profusely for the inspiring conversations he had with him. (Check out this article I wrote about the book.) Here’s Roy’s conclusion:
How do we prepare? Most of the past thinking about preparation for the future that I learned growing up what “point preparation”—”here’s what the world’s going to be like: prepare yourself for it” (…) But if you believe that the pace of change is going to be more rapid, then learning is the most essential skill, rapid reinvention… In the tech world, I call this being the CIO of your own life… constantly looking for new tools and trying to integrate them and experiment with them. Another one is setting your own priorities. We don’t learn in school that this is a skill. The third one is the scientific method applied to everything around us. If the world is going to keep changing, scientific method is our best way of understanding how.
👉 Listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Roy Bahat in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Normally when we talk about startups and IPOs, it’s in the context of which VC firms have won a big payday after making a bet on a company that grew large enough to go public. In my Sifted column this week, I look at a situation that reverses the roles a bit: VC firms that themselves go public, raising money from public markets and thus giving access to VC performance to a wider swath of investors. While it’s still a relatively rare occurrence, I believe we’ll see it happening more and more, all part of venture capital taking a more central role in the financial services industry.
👉 Read more in Startups IPO. Why shouldn’t VCs?
😀 Lots of interesting discussions recently over turning traditional companies into tech companies. It’s a topic I’ve covered a lot (see All About Shifting Patterns Across Industries). More recently I was interested in Dealroom’s report about Corporate Innovation in the Entrepreneurial Age and the latest episode of Another Podcast w/ Toni Cowan-Brown & Benedict Evans, about digital transformation 🎧
🙂 A while ago I wrote about the opportunities that European founders should pursue in Asia: read Should European Founders Look to the East?, as well as Martin Pasquier’s reaction in Another Round on Expanding in Asia (both unlocked). It turns out one of our portfolio companies, WeMaintain, just applied the playbook: Are Asian markets the secret to European proptech success?
😏 Lego is one of the most fascinating companies around—especially from a European perspective! Last year I contributed to covering it with my 11 Notes on Lego. More recently, there were lots of echoes in the media about their move to recycle plastic and turn the legendary bricks into more environmentally-friendly stuff. See Lego's lesson in innovation (Financial Times).
😐 I didn’t comment much on the Chinese Communist Party celebrating its 100th anniversary, but you can definitely find many pieces of background history. Here are some that are worth your attention: China’s Leaders – from Mao to now (The Guardian); The Chinese Communist party: 100 years that shook the world (The Guardian); and my own Primer on the Chinese Communist Party (unlocked) 🇨🇳
😒 Andy Jassy has now succeeded Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s CEO. You can read related articles in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, as well as my own 11 Notes on Jeff Bezos (unlocked). Also read this illuminating blog by Steve Blank about what happens when the visionary founder passes the baton: Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple.
😖 Maybe it’s simply me succumbing to the gloom that accompanies the never-ending COVID-19 pandemic, but I find that the awareness of climate change and its catastrophic consequences has gone up to eleven, and it’s definitely affecting everyone’s morale. Have a look at this in the FT: How to cope with the climate apocalypse. And this, by the ever-gloomier Umair Haque. And this about Europe.
📚 Since the paid version of European Straits has been discontinued, I’m gradually unlocking the entire archive so that everyone can read and share. It’s not systematic in any way, but rather I unlock essays when they’re relevant and I want to quote them either here or on social media.
Here are the ones that you can now discover if you weren’t previously a paying subscriber:
🇬🇧 Notes on Britain in the Entrepreneurial Age (June 2020)
💰 Notes on Revenue-Based Financing (July 2020)
🇨🇳 A Primer on the Chinese Communist Party (September 2020)
🌏 Should European Founders Look to the East? (October 2020)
🇨🇳 Industrial Policy: China Gets It, We Don't (October 2020)
🏗 Why Software Has a Hard Time Eating Construction (October 2020)
🇪🇺 European Tech's Forgotten Stories (November 2020)
🌏 Another Round on Expanding in Asia (November 2020)
🗺 Business Strategy at a Small Scale (January 2021)
🇮🇳 A Great Writeup About India's Startup Scene (January 2021)
👨🏻🦲 11 Notes on Jeff Bezos (February 2021)
🕰 "Be Patient" | A Conversation About Angel Investing w/ Pascal Levy-Garboua (Part 1 & Part 2) (February 2021)
Sign up to European Straits if you don’t want to miss the next issues 🤗
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* I spoke with Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute about intellectual history and the state of the world 🎧
* Thumbs up/down for last week
* Thread of the week: about productivity and work-life balance
* A new essay by Younès Rharbaoui about “time-variant business models”
For the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I interviewedNils Gilman, who leads the research program at the Berggruen Institute, a think tank based in Los Angeles and Beijing.
Nils and I met in February of last year at Tim O’Reilly’s Social Science Foo Camp. We had an initial discussion in which I discovered that I had read his book Mandarins of the Future, an intellectual history of modernization theory—the framework designed by the US government in the 1950s and 1960s to offer countries in the Global South a capitalist path to prosperity. For several years now I’ve been interested in everything that relates to economic development, the global economy, and America’s role in the world. Therefore it was easy for Nils and I to connect and exchange ideas!
Indeed, Nils’s expertise in intellectual history was one reason why I wanted to have this interview with him. As software is eating the world, there’s necessarily much focus on entrepreneurs and the companies they build. What people don’t realize, however, is how much beliefs, perceptions, frameworks and, more generally, ideas determine the direction in which our economy is headed as we shift from the Fordist Age of the 20th century to today’s Entrepreneurial Age.
* A new paradigm, after all, is nothing more than a new representation of the world. It’s not the world that changes as much as the way we see it—and the words we use to describe it!
In this regard, I was very interested in the part of the conversation in which Nils describes the interactions and differences between “modernization theory” (the framework he discusses in his book), the strategy that was actually implemented by successful Asian countries such as Taiwan and South Korea in the 1970s, the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”, and the relevance of it all in today’s world.
* As it turns out, there’s a collective job to be done: the world might only change slowly and at the margins, but our representation of it needs a radical upgrade!
And then there’s more to our conversation. On top of being a historian, Nils has had a career that spans across very different worlds and disciplines: the tech industry, in which he spent several years some time ago; national security, a field in which he co-founded a consulting firm in the wake of 9/11; and higher education, in which he once served as chief of staff to the Chancellor of UC Berkeley.
* Today, Nils puts his experience and knowledge to great use in tackling problems as head of research at the Berggruen Institute, focusing not necessarily on the most pressing problems of our time (like climate change), but rather on problems that are so elusive that we don’t even have the right words or frameworks to analyze them and understand them—as is the case with the declining legitimacy of democratic systems, for instance.
All in all, there was some very broad ground Nils and I could cover, and one hour wasn’t nearly enough. In our conversation, we also discuss the following:
* Nils’s birth in Denmark, his fluency in the language, and what it was like to discover that he speaks Danish “like the Queen” (which is not necessarily meant as a compliment).
* Why criminal organizations excel in arbitraging our cross-countries differences in legal norms and moral values—a phenomenon he calls “deviant globalization”.
* The respective positions of the US, China and Europe on the global stage, and the challenges that each region must tackle if it wants to succeed moving forward.
* Why the current transition calls for a new social contract and why Nils, along with his colleague Yakov Feygin, thinks we must build a new “mutualist economy”.
Here are the various ways in which you can dig deeper into Nils’s work:
* His book Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2007).
* The (excellent) magazine Noéma, published by the Berggruen Institute, of which Nils is the deputy editor.
* A few works by him that I liked a lot: The Twin Insurgency (The American Interest, 2014). The Official Future Is Dead! Long Live the Official Future! (The American Interest, 2017). The Long Shadow Of The Future (w/ Steven Weber, Noéma, 2020). Governing In The Planetary Age (w/ Jonathan Blake, Noéma, 2021). Who Controls The Past Controls The Future (Noéma, 2021).
* His newsletter Small Precautions and, of course, his Twitter account—a place where he’s very active and doesn’t hold back.
👉 Listen to my conversation with Nils Gilman in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🎧
😀 I loved this recent Bloomberg article by Karl Smith about the radical shift that’s happening in the US housing market. In short, the market has been made more liquid by tech companies such as Zillow and Opendoor. The ‘downside’ is that houses get more expensive (liquidity premium!) and, more and more, only institutional investors can afford them—which is why renting might be the future.
🙂 More interviews with Marc Andreessen! Here’s one (in written form) with Noah Smith (who was my guest on the podcast a few weeks ago), another (audio) with Patrick O’Shaughnessy as part of the Invest Like the Best series, and a third one (written form) by Antonio García Martinez of The Pull Request. Enjoy!
😏 About the Diffraction of Venture Capital, I was interested in this Financial Times article about Baillie Gifford, a Scotland-based investment firm that makes tech-related bets on public markets. It’s interesting for two reasons: it’s made in Europe, and it’s happening on public markets—far away from the small, opaque and illiquid world of traditional venture capital.
😐 A new chapter in the series “Our Elite Is Failing Us”. Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and once a guest of mine at The Family in 2019, published a new essay about scientists not being better than the rest of the elite in sharing information and interacting with the public. Read it here: The Enemies of the Open Society - Discourse.
😒 Wealth anti-management. A few years ago, I asked myself a question: if the wealth management industry keeps innovating, does that mean that wealthy families will stay wealthy forever? (Read my answer in The Future of Wealth Management.) In fact, however, there are many reasons why wealth evaporates over time. Here’s one: Rich professionals are scammers' favourite targets.
😖 We’ve seen this in Europe: the harsher the US gets on its own tech companies (see my column last week in Sifted), the more legitimate European democratic governments feel in implementing tough regulations that apply to the tech sector in general. Well, now it’s happening in authoritarian countries, too: Facebook, Twitter Critics in US Are Giving Ammunition to Authoritarian Leaders.
🕰 My colleague Younès Rharbaoui has a new edition of his Chasing Paper. Taking its impetus from the new series Loki, he thinks about how companies prosper by exploiting the potential of cross-border and/or time-sensitive arbitrage to discover business models that nobody thought were possible. Check it out (and the examples, including our own The Family) in Time-variant business models.
From Marc Andreessen's Latest Lesson in Strategy (August 2018):
The deepening of strategic thinking is always a sign of the maturity of a techno-economic paradigm. In his masterful The Lords of Strategy, Walter Kiechel tells the story of the big thinkers who revealed the complex secrets behind corporate success in the 20th century. But there are striking differences between the past age of the automobile and mass production and the current Entrepreneurial Age when it comes to strategy. Many of those can be found in the discipline itself, which has been radically reshuffled. Some differences also exist in the speed and ways strategic thinking is reaching maturity.
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(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Laetitia spoke with author and speaker Sophie Wade about everything future of work 🎧
* A new “Long Read” format: first up on the list is Formula 1 🏎 (in progress)
* Thumbs up/down for last week, as well as recent news.
For the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast, Laetitia interviewedSophie Wade, a speaker, writer (and podcaster) about the future of work, who is the author of the bookEmbracing Progress: Next Steps for the Future of Work. Here’s what Laetitia wrote on the Building Bridges website:
Sophie was born in England but now she lives and works in the US. She lived in many countries before that, therefore she has a multicultural approach to the subject that I was especially drawn to. She worked as a consultant with numerous executives and acquired a broad, deep knowledge of work-related issues, such as corporate culture, recruiting talent, leadership, transformation and now “hybrid work” and how to make it right. We talked about all these subjects that are part of my own daily research too. She is adamant: working with empathy is the future!
What’s the most unexpected work-related transformation brought about by the pandemic? What does “hybrid” look like? What are the challenges associated with it? How do we make the workplace more inclusive in this day and age? How should leadership evolve? How does one change their mindset to become “future proof”? And how much of all this talk about the future of work is determined by culture? What can intercultural comparisons teach us?
A few years ago she published this book titled Embracing Progress in which she presents empathy as the solution to a lot of the problems faced by organisations. When it comes to leadership, for example, the battle between ego and empathy is the single most decisive battle. It involves “shifting identity and choice”:
The “ego” of the emerging brand of leadership is not the “command and control” type of autocrat that this word has evoked in the past. Now, it’s more about empathy—creating an environment based on trust and respect—in order to engage the workforce and improve employee ego, stimulating self-awareness and self-worth. Ego here is also about the company’s identity, the values and purpose that the leadership aligns with.
When leaders understand the identity of their company and the workers that comprise it, leading people is more about engaging and guiding them. Values echoed by the leaders of a company offer a clear and more “natural” direction for the workforce to follow in their own actions, relating to everything from daily tasks to long-term goals and career planning.
👉 Listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Sophie Wade in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
As announced a few weeks ago, soon I will relaunch the long-form 10- or 11-point essays that many of you have enjoyed in the past. It will be occasional (I expect a monthly frequency on average, in addition to the weekly edition) and will cover a broad range of topics related to the Entrepreneurial Age, viewed from Europe.
The one I’m working on at the moment is “11 Notes on Formula 1” 🏎
Like almost everyone I know, I’ve been watching and enjoying Netflix’s Drive to Survive. It pushed me to go much deeper: going down the rabbit hole of F1 YouTube, listening to related podcasts, speaking a bit with experts I’m connected with, such as former podcast guest Toni Cowan-Brown, and realizing that a lot of what’s happening in the F1 world resonates with what we tech people have become accustomed to.
Below is the provisional list of notes I’m currently drafting:
* A manufacturer’s championship. You may primarily know about the drivers, but it’s the cars that make all the difference—and the various manufacturers taking part in the competition are required to design and build key parts of the car themselves.
* What about the drivers? Yes, they’re very popular, extremely competitive, and certainly accomplished athletes—but the harsh truth is that, contrary to other disciplines in motorsports (again, it’s a manufacturer’s championship), they’re only as good as their cars.
* The role of regulation. F1 provides the perfect illustration of the concept of a “neck-and-neck firm”—a business which, when confronted with pressure and challenges, doubles down on innovation. This is exactly how the best teams react to the FIA tightening regulations.
* An entrepreneurial ecosystem. Did you know that there is such a thing as Motorsport Valley? It’s located around Oxfordshire and the Midlands in England, and its very existence explains why Britain is the core of F1 (notwithstanding the occasional French term: grand prix, parc fermé).
* The importance of process knowledge. Usually when there’s such a thing as an entrepreneurial ecosystem, the pieces fit together thanks to people passing process knowledge from one to another. This is a very important feature in a manufacturing world such as F1’s.
* The importance of feedback loops. In an ecosystem in which process knowledge makes all the difference, it is absolutely critical for a firm to intensify said knowledge and circulate it as quickly as possible on the inside. This explains the downfall of certain teams recently.
* The dependence on the supply chain. There are many innovations that don’t endure in F1 because it’s impossible for the manufacturer that’s trying to race forward to force innovation on suppliers up the stream. As is often the case, the first-mover advantage is a myth!
* And then there’s Ferrari. It’s different in many respects, obviously because it’s located in Italy rather than the UK, but also because it’s strengthened by its position as a full-stack manufacturer that builds both the engine and the chassis—and its domestic base of supporters (the tifosi).
* The audience. F1 was a fringe discipline in the sporting world until a guy named Bernie Ecclestone forced it onto everyone’s small screen. It made the sport accessible to literally billions and radically changed the business equation. But what about the transition to social media?
* We need to talk about the US. Just like football (well, soccer), F1 is extremely popular all around the world, except for the US (whose audience seems to be more interested in disciplines such as NASCAR and IndyCar). Why is that? And can we expect changes in that regard?
The 11th note is always a reading list, of which I’m happy to share an extract here to tide you over (thanks to Toni for most of these links 🤗):
* Britain's Motorsport Valley – the home of Formula 1 (Lawrence Barretto, BBC, June 2013)
* Business lessons from Formula One (Alessandro Marino, ResearchGate, October 2015)
* The Top 50 F1 drivers of all time, regardless of what they were driving (Mike Hanlon, New Atlas, May 2016)
* Being a Formula 1 Tire Supplier Takes Far More Than You Ever Imagined (Máté Petrány, Road & Track, September 2016)
* Business isn't rocket science; it's formula 1 (Rafael Aldon, VenturesOne, March 2018)
* The game changed and they didn't: The true cause of Williams' decline (Dieter Rencken, RaceFans, March 2019)
* The Motorsport Valley®: The biggest hub of motor racing in the world (Williams Johnson, Medium, July 2019)
* Driving Growth: 5 Marketing Lessons From Formula 1® Racing (Yannick Bikker, Start it up, August 2019)
* Idée fixe 4.1: Formula One (Toni Cowan-Brown, Idée Fixe, June 2020—see also part 2 & part 3)
* Engineers, not racers, are the true drivers of success in motor sport (The Economist, October 2020)
* F1 - the plane that never takes off (podcast—Toni Cowan-Brown & Benedict Evans, Another Podcast, November 2020)
🎧 Also I plan to invite Toni back on the Building Bridges podcast to go through the whole discussion with her, so expect more than one round on this fascinating topic and its relationship to tech startups.
😀 Sajith Pai’s in-depth writeup about India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem made a big impression on me a few months ago (and I wrote about it here). Sajith just published another great essay about an entirely different matter: 'Exhaust Fumes', or, Understanding Startup Valuations.
🙂 Here’s a phenomenal Twitter thread by Steven Sinofsky, formerly at Microsoft, about the emergence of remote work and the future of work in general:
😏 Sometimes you read an article and learn a new word or concept that you can then put to great and frequent use. Today it’s “toxic positivity”, which comes from Sophie Lawson via Ian Leslie (in this case, about women’s football). I immediately thought about the Paris tech scene. Everything’s going well there, right? Especially with all those unicorns lately. Well, no, everything doesn’t always go exactly well, and it would go better if it was possible to say so, which it isn’t—and that’s “toxic positivity” for you 😨
😐 I’m always on the lookout for interviews with Marc Andreessen, not least because they’ve gotten so rare recently. But here’s a recent and VERY bizarre one (which Tyler Cowen says is authentic): The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen - Interviewed by a Retard.
😒 I wrote a long-form essay about Y Combinator last year. Some of the latest news about it centers on the apparent internal tensions around what can and can’t be said by members of the founder community. Here’s an overview in TechCrunch: Does what happens at YC stay at YC?
😖 I already mentioned Katerra last week—the SoftBank-backed company that was supposed to disrupt construction and is now bankrupt. Here’s a long inside look by a former employee (via Byrne Hobart)—interesting strategic deep dive: Another Day in Katerradise.
🦁 My colleague Oussama Ammar’ post in The Family’s daily newsletter this week, quite simply a book reading list for the summer: Summer is coming! 📚
From 11 Notes on Goldman Sachs (May 2017):
What’s remarkable is how much Goldman Sachs enables innovation with specific features when it comes to design and architecture. First, there’s the managerial legacy of John Whitehead, a key contributor to making more room for innovation through scientific management and designing virtuous financial incentives for employees. Second, there’s the strong, cohesive culture that enables the retention of talent and more fluid communication: together these make it easier for the firm to move toward unknown territories. Third, there’s the preference for innovation rather than entrenchment every time that Goldman Sachs is facing danger or uncertainty. In that regard, Goldman Sachs is really what Philippe Aghion calls a “frontier firm” or a “neck-and-neck firm”, one for which “competition may increase the incremental profits from innovating, and thereby encourage [innovation] aimed at ‘escaping competition’.”
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(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* I spoke with investor Saul Klein about European tech and the New Palo Alto 🎧
* My latest column in Sifted is about the capital deployed in grocery delivery startups
* Thumbs up/down for last week, as well as recent news.
I’ve been connected to Saul Klein for quite some time, because he was a partner at Index Ventures when the VC firm invested in my firm The Family in 2013. But I really got to know him after I moved to London in 2015. His name simply kept coming up as the person I should meet.
* Someone even told me “Saul is the London version of you”. I must say I’m lagging far behind in terms of track record, but it’s true Saul and I have many shared interests: not only startups, but also ecosystem building, the geography of entrepreneurship and venture capital, and the many (and overlooked) interactions between the worlds of tech and policy.
There’s a reason Saul’s name is mentioned so often in London, indeed. He was present at the creation of the contemporary UK tech system, as the founder of Lovefilm and an active angel investor. He then joined Index Ventures, arguably the most accomplished European VC firm, as a partner, before founding his own firm, LocalGlobe, with his father Robin Klein—another prominent figure in London tech.
* In between, Saul was also instrumental, as a cofounder, in launching projects as diverse and impressive as Seedcamp (one of Europe’s most successful seed funds), Zinc (a mission-driven firm that aims to tackle societal challenges), and Newton (a training program for VCs, LPs, angels, accelerators, and tech transfer officers worldwide).
Needless to say he and I talked quite a lot over the years about many tech-related topics. Our conversation in this podcast, however, is focused on something that really stands out in my view: LocalGlobe’s investment thesis, which I wrote about in On Trains and Geography (October 2020),
Part of Saul’s investment thesis is that his firm should invest in tech startups within a 4-hour train ride from London—which includes cities as diverse and interesting as Cambridge, Manchester, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Here are his arguments:
* 4 hours is far from being a random number. It’s enough time to reach a given destination without being away from the office for too long. You can travel 4 hours to your destination, have a 2-hour meeting, and then travel back to sleep in your own bed, back with your team the next morning. (A bit extreme, but it’s doable.)
* You can actually be productive when traveling by train. Not only is it easier to get an Internet connection when on a train (either through wifi or 4G), but traveling by train also comes with many fewer interruptions than traveling by plane.
* Finally, Saul’s is a bet on the future. From what he told me, he expects plane travel to be less and less tolerated in a business context due to climate change, and at some point governments could decide to revisit the whole cost structure (from tax and other perspectives) so as to make planes more expensive...and trains cheaper.
A key implication of this thesis is that tech people in London and Paris, which despite Brexit are still well connected by the Eurostar, can work on building The New Entente Cordiale 🇬🇧🇫🇷 (in reference to a famous episode in the history of European diplomacy): merging the two ecosystems into one, building on each city’s relative strengths and advantages and ultimately building what Saul calls the “New Palo Alto”. It’s a compelling vision which, I believe, really deserved an in-depth conversation!
In the podcast we also touch upon the following:
* How Saul came to work in tech, what he saw in the growing London ecosystem over the years, and his vision of venture capital as a business.
* LocalGlobe’s office, Phoenix Court, and why Robin and Saul decided to settle in the London ward of Somers Town.
* David Ben Gurion’s lesson on innovation, and why Europe, long a frontier market, is finally becoming an emerging market.
👉 Listen to my conversation with Saul Klein in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
(For unknown reasons, the sound is rather bad on my end (microphone saturation) but I did as much as I could to mitigate it, and Saul’s doing most of the talking anyway 😉 Enjoy!)
Even within a generally hot fundraising environment, one sector has stood out in the EU tech scene lately: grocery delivery. Some might look at it as just another part of a broader bubble, but I think there’s something else going on: namely, investors have realized that the narratives that dominated just 5 years ago, such as that around Uber’s presumed destiny as a global leader, have not come to pass. As such, they’ve seen that there’s room in various markets for great companies—and grocery delivery is one sector where that is being borne out.
👉 Read it all in my latest column for Sifted: How much is too much when investing in grocery delivery?
😀 A new essay by Jerry Neumann about uncertainty in entrepreneurship! It’s a topic I covered a lot in the past, and this time it’s been prompted by a guest post by Bill Janeway in my own newsletter. Go and read Jerry’s Embracing Uncertainty in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy.
🙂 The Great Fragmentation, as illustrated by… football. Europeans and Americans still see Asia as the market they need to conquer so as to scale up their business. I still think there’s something there, but in football it’s not working so well: Football’s relentless search for the ‘Asian fan’
😏 There’s this idea of the “Red Queen hypothesis”: the fact that in the Entrepreneurial Age, constant innovation is mandatory if a business wants to stay in the game and not go bust. Here’s an illustration: Microsoft stumbling with Skype and missing the COVID-19 opportunity that Zoom ultimately seized.
😐 Remember the passion economy? I wrote about it here. And you might know that the craft beer movement has long been the most analyzed case study in that field. Alas it seems to not be going so well at the moment: Britain’s craft brewers forced to confront sober reality. Also read this in-depth piece.
😒 Here’s an in-depth discussion by The Economist on how and why Europe is lagging behind in the global corporate world, all accelerated by the shift to the Entrepreneurial Age. Sad, but definitely worth a read (contrasting with Saul’s optimism): Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?
😖 Last year I wrote about startups tackling the challenge of making construction cheaper, faster and more convenient. Well, the flagship company in that space, Katerra, just filed for Chapter 11, which I think will mark an acceleration of the shift 🤔 Read it all in Axios.
🦁 My colleague Oussama Ammar’s post in The Family’s daily newsletter this week: How do you know when your startup idea has failed?
🇫🇷 Nouveau Départ (our small French-speaking family media operation). Check out my conversation with writer Gaspard Koenig about spending half of 2020 crossing Europe on horseback 🏇 and the liberal tradition in France: La liberté après la crise.
From Notes on Britain in the Entrepreneurial Age (June 2020):
It took the financial crisis to change the situation in the recent period. So many bankers lost their jobs and were suddenly deprived of the perspective of getting rich quick that they had to consider founding a startup—which, although ridden with uncertainty, can generate great wealth. Hence a certain archetype on the London tech scene: the former banker attracted by the hype in financial services who then jumps to the next big thing (startups) and successfully raises capital from his (it’s almost always a “his”) former colleagues with a clean-cut business plan backed up by detailed spreadsheets 😅 (This is made all the easier because the infamous EIS, despite its obvious flaws, hedges angel investors against any downside.)
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(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Laetitia spoke with author and Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper about what cosmopolitanism means these days 🎧
* Thumbs up/down for last week, as well as recent news.
* All in all, this week’s a short one 😉
My first memory of Simon Kuper is a column he wrote in November 2013 in The Financial Times about The great middle-class identity crisis. It made a deep impression on me, as we had just started The Family in Paris. The structural shifts impacting the middle class that Simon had written about were the very same I was witnessing working with early-stage startups.
* By definition, a paradigm shift is all about a changing representation of the world, and a corollary is that we often lack words to describe what we do and who we are.
Here’s an excerpt from Simon’s foundational column:
That’s been the middle-class experience for ever: people have a professional identity. We are what we do. We choose professions that suit our identity, and then those professions enhance our identity… But that era is ending. With the economic crisis and technological change (robots are taking over the world), ever fewer of us have satisfying jobs or stay in the same profession for life. People are ceasing to be their jobs. That is forcing them to find new identities.
Over the years, I kept quoting this column over and over, including in my book Hedge (about designing a new social contract for the Entrepreneurial Age):
Today the vast majority of people in the West still identify as middle class. But the very concept of the middle class has evolved through time. When I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, the cardinal value of the middle class was stability. Most people had a fixed place in the world and defined themselves through what they were doing in life.
As for today, being part of the middle class looks more like the main character in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike: laboring during the day as a construction worker, making money as a stripper in night-clubs and private parties, and steadily describing himself as an “entrepreneur”.
As in the case of Magic Mike, gone is the sense of economic security that provided middle class workers with a clear identity. Now we live in a world where job situations are unclear. People are no longer certain about what the future holds or even what their occupation is. Is Magic Mike a construction worker, a stripper, or an entrepreneur? Nobody knows, and so he is forced to decide for himself—in what the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper calls the “great middle class identity crisis”.
All these years, I had no idea that Simon was in fact so close to my world: he had been living in Paris the whole time; he is married to Pamela Druckerman, whose best-selling book French Children Don't Throw Food (Bringing Up Bébé in the US) was often mentioned in French society (we can only rejoice in a book that makes the case that we French are better at raising children). And we’ve had common friends, such as the historian Patrick Weil.
* Then, more recently, my wife Laetitia read Pamela’s latest book There Are No Grown-Ups: A Midlife Coming-of-Age Story, after which she came to me and said “These people are like us in so many ways! We should really try and connect with them.”
Well, now it’s done: Laetitia just interviewed Simon, and I’m set to interview Pamela in just a few weeks. Below is what Laetitia wrote about her conversation with Simon on the Building Bridges website 👇
For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m happy to share my interview with Simon Kuper, a British author, Financial Times columnist, and cosmopolitan intellectual whose latest book The Happy Traitor deals with the story of a British spy, George Blake, who defected to the Soviet Union.
Simon lives in Paris but is about to move to Spain with his family for a new experience of cultural immersion. We talked about building bridges across cultures, his multicultural life and identity, multilingualism, mobility… and a few other fascinating subjects (including football).
Many years ago, he moved from London to Paris surreptitiously because he thought his life had become “too comfortable” and he needed a bit of foreignness to make things more challenging. Thus he became a working-from-home pioneer, paving the way for future generations of mobile workers in search of foreign adventures.
Born in Uganda, raised in the Netherlands, educated in the UK, Kuper is convinced there’s no point in learning a language badly and sticking to superficiality. Instead you should go for excellence:
If you do learn a language, go for excellence. If you have children, immerse them in it from birth. Wall Streeters sending their kids to Mandarin-speaking preschools may be hilarious, but they are choosing the most efficient route (…) A multilingual person can be multiple people, inhabiting multiple worlds. As the linguist Nick Evans wrote, “we study other languages because we cannot live enough lives. It’s a multiplier of our lives.”
Incredibly productive during the pandemic, he has worked on multiple books. His latest book The Happy Traitor was published a few months ago. It deals with George Blake, “a one-man Netflix series, whose life tracked many of the dramas of the 20th century”:
When the 98-year-old double agent George Blake died in Moscow on Boxing Day, my biography of him was long since ready. (…) A Briton raised in the Netherlands, he was a teenage courier in the Dutch resistance, joined the British secret services, converted to communism while a prisoner in North Korea and became a spy for the KGB. He then sent dozens of agents working for Britain to their deaths. His crime so shocked Britain that when he was finally unmasked, in 1961, he was given the longest sentence in the country’s modern history — only to escape in a jailbreak so spectacular that Alfred Hitchcock spent his final decade trying to turn it into a film.
👉 Listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Simon Kuper in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
😀 Foreign languages are a topic I wrote about in the past (here and here), always mentioning the terrible thing that is dubbing foreign movies in the local language. Well, there’s room for progress: Can A.I. help Hollywood dub The Rock into another language? This startup thinks so.
🙂 I was pleased to be intermittently involved over the past years in the project A New Moral Political Economy led by Margaret Levi and Federic Carugati at Stanford University’s CASBS. The whole effort has now turned into a book, a free version of which is available until June 8 on the Cambridge University website (via Tim O’Reilly): A Moral Political Economy: Present, Past, and Future.
😏 In 2019 my colleagues and I hosted new media analyst (and CIA alumnus) Martin Gurri in Paris and London to discuss his book The Revolt of the Public. We’re now 7 years after the first edition of the book, and Martin just wrote a short sequel: The Establishment Strikes Back—For Now.
😐 The cloud is a good thing because it makes computing cheaper for businesses, right? Not so fast, write Sarah Wang & Martin Casado of Andreessen Horowitz in The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox. It explains why large companies such as Dropbox have moved away from AWS.
😒 More Dominic Cummings! Long gone are the days when he was tackling the challenge of reshaping the British state. Now that that state has utterly failed countering COVID-19, Cummings tried to explain to Parliament why: read details here and Ian Leslie’s commentary here.
😖 Is it 2020 all over again? Now that many think the pandemic is over, people in the West have stopped taking precautions, even though they’re not vaccinated. It might lead to a new wave of infections, this time affecting primarily young people: Covid-19: UK in early stages of third wave - scientist.
🦊🦁 My colleagues’ posts in The Family’s daily newsletter this week: The courage in choosing (by my colleague Alice Zagury) & What's changed in entrepreneurship? (by my colleague Oussama Ammar).
🇫🇷 Nouveau Départ (our small French-speaking media operation): give last week’s edition about Royaume-Uni : le parti travailliste est-il fini ? a listen; also check out Laetitia interviewing Judith Aquien about La grossesse : nouvelle frontière du féminisme.
From What Language Should Startups Speak? (November 2019):
I’ve long been obsessed with foreign languages. I grew up speaking only French, then had hours of useless language classes in high school. Later, I got rather serious with learning German. And now I obviously can speak and write in English, but I often have to pause to reflect on how best to convey my thoughts; I make the occasional mistake (which my colleague Kyle is kind enough to correct when it’s in written form); and I’ll never be able to speak with a perfect accent, which is a shame (and a bit of a mystery—why are accents so difficult to erase?).
Maybe I could have done better. It’s true that I never lived outside France until the age of 21, and my family never travelled much. Yet several relatives have always lived abroad. And as I grew up, my grandfather Xavier, a devout Catholic, was dutifully learning Italian from his home in Normandy so as to be able to read L'Osservatore Romano and to listen to Radio Vaticana! So I didn’t lack role models—people close to me who were mastering foreign languages.
Sign up to European Straits if you don’t want to miss the next issues 🤗
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* I spoke with Emily de La Bruyère about industrial policy in China—and how it’s a challenge for the West 🎧
* My Sifted column this week is about Tiger Global and the many deals they’re doing in Europe these days
* Thumbs up/down for last week, as well as recent news.
I first discovered Emily de La Bruyère, a US-based analyst focused on industrial policy in China, through Jordan Schneider’s ChinaTalk podcast. What she had to share was so enlightening I even dedicated an entire edition to it, Industrial Policy: China Gets It, We Don't (now accessible for all).
The key idea that stood out in Emily and Jordan’s conversation was the following:
What matters today is the applications of science and technology––the sort of networks you build with it.
For example, your ability to deploy telecommunications. It’s not that you got the patent; it’s that you’ve got its application internationally.
To do that, what matters is capturing scale and being able to build and deploy. If that’s what you’re going for, it’s okay to have a slight lag in when you get the patent and when you get the really cutting edge, as long as you can apply it to scale to the most people efficiently.
The Chinese orientation appears to be focusing on that rather than on basic R&D, which creates this tremendous asymmetry vis-à-vis the U.S. and really vis-à-vis the entire global system because there’s just a different competition underway.
And that absolutely changes how the U.S. can or should respond to the extent that this is a scientific and technological contest because it’s not a matter of just pouring resources into basic research: it’s about competing for applications.
Emily and I are following up on that in this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast. I was especially interested in her idea that the current industrial competition between nation states at the global level is happening in two dimensions:
* One is about securing control of essential resources, especially energy sources, which fosters a traditional zero-sum competition from a geopolitical perspective.
* But then there’s another dimension, which is about controlling networks and the data that flows through them—which gives rise to a very different kind of competition globally.
I find that there’s no better lens to understand the current rivalry between the US and China in the tech space and beyond. In addition to these, Emily and I discuss the following points:
* How she ended up focusing on industrial policy in China, and what it’s like to study China from a distance, all based on open source material.
* Why international standards matter from an industrial policy perspective, and why it’s about much more than a spy game between great powers.
* What advice Emily would give if she joined the Biden administration to advise the US President on America’s competitiveness on the global stage.
* Why the West remains a thing, and why the US is better off counting on Europe as a strong ally as networks and data redraw the global map of power.
* Why we shouldn't rely on a Cold War framework when reflecting on the state of the world, and why all of this matters for entrepreneurs building companies on the ground in Europe.
👉 Listen to my conversation with Emily de La Bruyère in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
⚠️ My column today in Sifted asks a few million (billion?) dollar questions: How is hedge fund Tiger Global’s blazing arrival on the EU tech scene going, and what will happen to the companies it’s investing in when today’s macroeconomic context of enormous amounts of capital reverses?
* It’s a fascinating example of how venture capital is being upended by the arrival of major players from other financial realms. I’m very curious to see how VCs that are active in Europe, especially tier-1 firms, react to this kind of unconventional investor, both now and in the future.
👉 Read it all in Tiger Global: What happens when ‘normal’ returns? 📈📉
😀 Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital is at it again! After an op-ed in the FT about European universities’ bad practices when it comes to spinning out startups (which in turn prompted my own Sifted column on the topic), he just shared the longer, more detailed version on his firm’s blog:
* Related: Bessemer Ventures’s Gaby Goldberg’s thoughts about Stanford University and its relationship with the VC industry: After a decade of VC influence at Stanford, what’s next?
🙂 About that, an account of my previous writing on deep tech startups, a common friend recently introduced me to Massimo Portincaso, the chairman of Hello Tomorrow and a co-author of this recent report: The Deep Tech Investment Paradox: a call to redesign the investor model (highly recommend).
😏 My colleagues at The Family and I have long been convinced that European founders should focus on ‘hybrid’ startups bringing technology to traditional industries. Well, Roy Bahat and James Cham of Bloomberg Beta came up with a name for exactly that: “hot-swap startups”.
😐 Cryptos: there are booms, and then there are busts. But beyond that, as I’ve argued many times in the past, there’s a dynamic that’s bringing about many innovations when it comes to network protocols, software architecture, and the financial system. My colleague Younès Rharbaoui, CFO at The Family, wrote about the implications in the realm of corporate finance: The DeFi Frontier.
😒 Corporate venture capital is a tough nut to crack, between the conflicting goals and the bad practices when it comes to leading investments and rewarding those who are in charge. Here are some nuances in Institutional Investor: Families Make Corporate VC Investments Better, Research Shows.
* Related: Check out this article about tech companies such as Stripe, Netflix, and Carta setting up their own CVC funds: Complements and Constraints.
😖 Trump did a lot of bad things, and some of the things he broke may be beyond repair. But a positive aspect of his legacy is his ability to inspire engagement on the liberal side, be it on climate change, racial justice, or building liberal institutions in general (via Byrne Hobart): 2016: The Turning Point.
😴 I didn’t contribute to The Family’s daily newsletter this week, but make sure to check out my colleagues’ posts: Employee-friendly fundraising (by Balthazar de Lavergne) and 399 ideas that didn't work (by Oussama Ammar).
🇫🇷 Nouveau Départ (in 🇫🇷): yesterday’s edition was on Warren Buffett : une introduction🤑 and last Thursday’s was on Écriture : nos histoires & nos conseils📝 Also give a listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Fabienne Broucaret: Télétravail : le bon environnement💻.
From Industrial Policy: China Gets It, We Don't (October 2020):
I don’t think you can understand China’s industrial policy if you don’t realize that it’s all pulled forward by the impressive growth of the Chinese tech giants. First, you need the downstream companies discovering new models and new usages and exploring new markets; then you can invest up the stream so as to ensure your nation’s competitive advantage in cutting-edge technology.
This doesn’t necessarily have to be consumer-facing companies. Back in the 1960s in the US, it was the military and the goal was to prevail over the Soviet Union. More recently, in the case of Huawei in China, we’re talking about a company that needs technological assets to deploy telecommunication networks rather than serving consumers. But whatever it is (public or private, consumer or enterprise), you need that direction provided from down the stream.
Sign up to European Straits if you don’t want to miss the next issues 🤗
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Normandy, France 🇫🇷
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Laetitia spoke with historian Anton Howes about innovation and the Royal Society of Arts 🎧
* My essay published last week about the categories of ‘Diffracted Venture Capital’
* A Twitter thread lamenting politicians botching the vaccination campaigns
* Thumbs up/down for last week: female VC partners, university spinouts, the Paris ecosystem
* Five of my tips about how you can become more productive
There are a few institutions in London that no one interested in innovation can afford to miss, and one of them is the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). I’m not sure how my wife Laetitia and I first crossed paths with the many great people working there, but at some point we were quite engaged with the community.
* My first encounter, I think, was when I met Anthony Painter within a Fellowship we both participated in at the Oxford Internet Institute. Then on several occasions Laetitia and I were invited to contribute to the RSA’s Center for the Future of Work: see one of my contributions here, and Laetitia is now a member of the RSA Future of Work Advisory Board. Finally, following a co-optation by the late Miranda Bertram (who was my public speaking coach at the time), Laetitia and I both became Fellows of the RSA sometime in early 2018.
These are all the reasons I was amazed to discover that Anton Howes, the author of the newsletter Age of Invention, which I had been following with great interest from the beginning, was in fact the RSA’s ‘historian in residence’, and working on a book that has since been published: Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation. Needless to say, when Anton and I recently interacted over Zoom (via the Entrepreneurs Network), I immediately followed up to ask him if he would be a guest on our Building Bridges podcast.
* He graciously agreed, and Laetitia interviewed him a few weeks later. Below is what she wrote on the Building Bridges website 👇
Anton Howes is fascinated with the process of invention and what fuels it. I recommend his Substack newsletter, Age of Invention, which is full of interesting pieces about “the origin of patents”, “the birth of the business corporation”, and the maritime technology of the late 16th century.
His current research focuses on why innovation accelerated in Britain in the 18th century, i.e. why the Industrial Revolution happened there and not elsewhere:
One of my key findings is that innovation is a practice that spreads from person to person. I argue that people became innovators because they adopted an improving mentality - and that Britain experienced an acceleration of innovation because its innovators were committed to evangelising that mentality further.
I asked Anton why Britain became the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, if it could have happened elsewhere, who were the entrepreneurs of that time, what motivated them, and what Britain’s institutional recipe was. And of course he talked about the RSA, this “extraordinary society that has touched all aspects of British life”:
From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence how Britons work, how they are educated, the music they listen to, the food they eat, the items in their homes, and even how they remember their own history.
If Britain prospered the way it did, it’s because it developed powerful institutions—norms, best practices & organisations like the RSA—to sustain that prosperity. That history is full of lessons for today as it helps us to understand how innovation works and how we can encourage it.
👉 Listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Anton in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
💸 Diffracted Venture Capital: The Categories
The shift to the Entrepreneurial Age means many positions are being shuffled around, some moves being made earlier in the cycle, some later. One of the industries in which the ongoing shuffle has become quite evident lately is investing, as we’re seeing what used to be a relatively straightforward activity (‘venture capital’) become quite diffracted: VCs expand the scope of their operations and non-VCs push into areas where previously they would have never dared roam.
In a changing environment it’s a good idea to have a map to understand the lay of the land. But before that map can be made, we need accurate categories to describe the ways in which VC is being diffracted; to that end, I used last Thursday’s essay to begin listing the categories I’ve been noticing lately.
These categories are quite diverse, ranging from large-scale indexing (similar to what is being done on the stock market) to revenue-based financing that has emerged with the maturation of the SaaS model. That diversity is also reflected in the types of players involved, from traditional private equity firms to solo capitalists. All in all, it’s a signal that we really are in a world where startups can tackle virtually any industry, especially those that were previously seen as too difficult to break into. And it’s also a signal that there’s a growing need for ‘digestive pills’ that can help software continue eating the world 😋
👉 Read the whole Diffracted VC: The Categories (unlocked for everyone 🤗)
😀 The lack of female VCs in Europe was already pointed out in my What I Learned Curating 32 Editions of Capital Call, and Willy Braun and Vincent Touati-Tomas and I have built a Twitter list to try and have a more comprehensive view. Sifted is now adding firepower to the effort!
🙂 I once wrote that we needed more controversies if we ever wanted Europe to make progress on the tech front. Well, we just had a good one—on university spinouts! Check out Air Street Capital’s Nathan Benaich’s initial op-ed in the FT, my own contribution in Sifted, and this follow-up by Nathan, responding to Alice Gast, President of Imperial College London:
😏 In my essay on The Future of Wealth Management (April 2019), I was wondering if innovation in helping rich people staying rich would contribute to ending upward social mobility. As written by Chris Giles in the FT, we’re very far from it: Relax: trust fund kids are not taking over the world.
😐 In these times of botched vaccination campaigns in continental Europe, there’s a lot of talk about how startups could help governments deliver better public services. I liked this a lot—by Chris Yiu, of the Tony Blair Institute. Also, there’s this in Fortune: Investing where the government is falling short.
😒 Dragos Novac of the (excellent) Sunday CET wrote a whole section on the French entrepreneurial ecosystem and the fact that repeat founders tend to stay as far from it as possible. I couldn’t help but send him my views on the matter, which he quoted (with my permission) in his latest edition:
I think the most critical issue is the cultural and political inward-lookingness (for lack of a better word).
The key to early success in France is to pay tribute to the powers that be: bad angel investors, bad VCs, Bpifrance (the government's investing arm), corporates, even cabinet members (they'll invite you for dinner or events if there's local buzz about your startup), and of course Macron himself. At this point, you may have the impression that your startup is successful but:
* your cap table is a nightmare
* everyone in the company speaks French
* you're failing at international expansion
* in general, you're resting on your laurels
There are very few French founders who are aware of this trap. And those who are are in for a lot of pain, because France will make you pay for your desire to escape and look beyond its borders 😞 (and it'll be impossible to attract international talent anyway, so succeeding at outgrowing France usually means relocating elsewhere, typically the US).
😖 You may have noticed the recent controversy about Antonio García Martínez being abruptly fired from Apple because (?) of a few paragraphs in his (highly praised) semi-fictional book Chaos Monkeys. I don’t know Antonio well (we merely have friends in common), but I feel very sorry for what just happened to him—see my previous writings on related matters: cancel culture and workplace politics.
🏋🏻♀️ In my latest contribution to The Family’s daily newsletter, I reveal all my secrets for getting better at what I do everyday 😉 How to be more productive.
🇫🇷 Nouveau Départ (in 🇫🇷): yesterday’s edition was on Qu'est-ce que la culture d'entreprise ? and last Thursday’s was on Taiwan : nouvelle ligne de front ? Also give a listen to my conversation with Thibauld Favre, CEO of our portfolio company Fairmint, about everything crypto: Tout sur les cryptos.
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* I spoke with The Diff’s Byrne Hobart about basically everything 🎧
* My latest Sifted column is about university spinouts—and Europe lagging behind
* Yahoo is slowly disappearing from sight. I wrote a new episode in my ‘11 Notes’ series
* As software eats the world, founders have to tackle tangible stuff: a few ideas on the matter
* Do you think journalists depict tech as the bad guy? What if we have the context to blame?
Today’s episode of Building Bridges is my conversation with Byrne Hobart, a hedge fund alumnus and investor who now writes the popular newsletter The Diff.
I have Eugene Wei to thank for recommending Byrne Hobart’s newsletter The Diff early during the lockdown in 2020. Byrne was already on my radar somewhat, so I jumped on the occasion and immediately subscribed to the extraordinary, dense, 5-email a week product that is The Diff.
I’m still enjoying it almost one year later because it spans the many different topics I’m interested in, from finance to economic development to industry deep dives to country focuses—with a few powerful recurring ideas and all the depth & breadth we should be looking for in our everyday reading. Should I mention that Byrne’s has become one of the most popular paying newsletters on Substack?
Before you go and explore The Diff, however, listen to the podcast 🎧 My contribution is just a few short questions, with Byrne sharing his thoughts at length on the following topics:
* Why he moved from New York to Austin, Texas during the pandemic, and what it’s like to homeschool your kids like he and his wife have been doing for months.
* His professional journey, what led him to write a newsletter, and whether writing on a regular basis makes him a better investor.
* Why he thinks The Social Network by David Fincher is the most important movie of all time—regardless of accuracy.
* The difference between hedge fund managers and venture capitalists, and what the latter could learn from the former.
* Why America’s financial system makes the country so strong and resilient, including from a global perspective.
* Why there are many things in common between a country that’s developing and a company that’s growing—and what happens at the end of that process.
👉 Listen to my conversation with Byrne Hobart in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
The spark for my Sifted column this week was an op-ed in the Financial Times by Airstreet Capital’s Nathan Benaich centered on the poor performance of European universities when it comes to spinning out successful startups. Nathan’s opinion dovetails with my own, which is that European universities create too many administrative frictions, slow entrepreneurs down rather than speeding them up, and generally have the wrong idea of how startups can benefit the university and its researchers. This is a mentality problem, but perhaps one that can be rectified with a bit of history and a desire to do better.
👉 Read my column here: Universities should serve startups, not the other way around.
😢 11 Notes on Yahoo
News came last week that what’s left of Yahoo is being sold to a private equity firm. Although it’s certainly not much of a household name anymore, Yahoo was one of the Internet’s early tech powerhouses, and there are many interesting aspects of its history that can illuminate both where we’ve been and where we’re headed. So many, indeed, that I dedicated this ‘11 Notes’ edition to the company.
For example, the different approaches taken by Yahoo and Google show the stakes in increasing quality in the face of increasing scale, as Yahoo’s emphasis on curation led to their being left behind at an exponential rate as the number of web pages exploded. Then there is Yahoo’s relationship with Asia, from an early expansion to a complicated situation in which its investment in Alibaba ended up being worth more than Yahoo itself (creating some awkwardness in terms of the company’s tax burden).
In the end, Yahoo may also become notable as being one of the last of those born in the dotcom era to disappear–with the others either long gone (Myspace, Netscape) or in no danger of leaving the stage anytime soon (Google, Facebook). Whether due to failures in leadership, missteps in international expansion, a missing connection with end users, or simply a large combination of factors, Yahoo’s presence over the past 30 years certainly merits reflection on its legacy in the Entrepreneurial Age.
👉 I went through it all in 11 Notes on Yahoo.
🛠 All About Stuff That’s Tangible
As software eats the world, it’s needing to digest industries that are more and more heavily marked by tangible goods. I was reminded of this recently as one of tech’s latest success stories, Peloton, was hit hard by the need to recall a large number of their connected treadmills. Peloton’s stumble shows how producing hardware impacts a company’s strategic positioning and its returns on invested capital.
My longtime readers know that one of the key elements guiding my thinking on this topic has been Amazon, as it bucked the trend of the early Internet era by going directly into the highly tangible, low-margin world of retail. Now, with online commerce having become firmly entrenched, much attention has been turned to manufacturing, where there is an entirely different equation to solve regarding building a business and making profits.
All in all, the need to confront the world of tangible things led me to my conviction that, as software eats the world, it’ll be needing help–digestive pills, if you will, to help it along. I believe that there are many opportunities for startups to grow in that field, and am excited to see how it will change the field of what many refer to as ‘deep tech’.
👉 Dig into the abundant food for thought in All About Stuff That’s Tangible.
🌬 The Media and the Context
For the past few years, there has been a growing sense (especially in the US) that tech has become the bad guy. But as a European, I’d sheepishly note that this seems to be one field in which our tech scene has the lead over the Americans: in Europe startups have long been characterized by many, including journalists, as threatening incumbents, destroying jobs, and not complying with regulations.
We at The Family have always had to work within this kind of antagonistic framework, whether directed at the startups in our portfolio or our firm itself. I myself ended up being sued for libel after saying the owner of the most powerful taxi company in Paris (G7) was a “gravedigger of innovation” (I did, however, win the case 😉).
Thus having a different perspective than many in the US, I believe a bit of startup wisdom can be applied here. Namely, we know that finding product/market fit is a key inflection point, because literally everything in the startup changes: what was true before is no longer true, and what was useless or even damaging before can become a very smart move. Many in the tech world need to grapple with the fact that startups, and the tech world in general, have passed that inflection point, and as such their relationship with the media must be reinvented.
👉 My Tuesday thread notes some other key changes in The Media and the Context.
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
🔥 Next Tuesday, The Family is hosting the First-Time Entrepreneur Summit, as founders tell the real story of what happens when you take the leap and start building. The full program and free tickets are available right here.
👀 In my latest contribution to The Family’s daily newsletter, I suggest founders be cautious as they seek advice from sources across the Atlantic: Read the context.
🇫🇷 More podcasts with Laetitia on Nouveau Départ (in 🇫🇷)! Yesterday’s edition was on Basecamp et la politique au travail, and then there’s last week’s episode on Les hunters et les settlers : nomadisme, 2ème partie. Don’t forget to give a listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Patricia Wendling about remote working: Télétravail : a-t-on tiré les leçons de la pandémie ?
From How Fred Terman Turned Stanford Into an Entrepreneurial Powerhouse (July 2020):
As pointed out by Steve Blank, Frederick Terman inspired the entire Stanford startup community with an obsession for building what customers want (echoing Paul Graham’s famous words). This is why, as stated by this great article in Scientific American, to this day “Silicon Valley is [still] dominated by what we call the “need seekers,” companies that focus on discerning their users’ actual needs, both spoken and unspoken; figuring out how to meet those needs; and then getting the necessary product or service to market as fast as possible.”
And Terman designed and operated a self-sustaining system, with a flywheel turning so fast and churning out successful tech companies at such a high rate that it became a perpetual entrepreneurial machine, supporting the rise of many generations of highly successful tech companies—from Fairchild Semiconductor in the late 1950s to Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore’s Intel in the 1970s, Apple and Atari in the 1980s, Netscape in the 1990s, Google in the early 2000s, and then the likes of Facebook, Airbnb and Uber.
All recent editions:
* The Media and the Context—for subscribers only.
* All About Stuff That’s Tangible—for subscribers only.
* 11 Notes on Yahoo—for subscribers only.
* Economic Insecurity w/ Deborah Copaken. Productive Fragmentation. Multi-Asset. Talent.—for everyone.
* Attracting Talent in Europe—for subscribers only.
* All About Multi-Asset Allocation—for subscribers only.
* Productive Fragmentation—for subscribers only.
* Chinese Tech w/ Lillian Li. Founder Control w/ Bill Janeway. Daniel Ek, Arsenal & the Super League.—for everyone.
European Straits is a 4-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* My wife Laetitia spoke with author Deborah Copaken about healthcare in America 🎧
* Fragmentation has long been a downside for Europe. Can it make us more productive?
* There’s a lot to learn from institutional investors and how they allocate capital
* There are many problems to solve before Europe can attract foreign talent
Today’s episode of Building Bridges is my wife Laetitia Vitaud’s conversation with Deborah Copaken, a best-selling author and screenwriter who shared her experience with the healthcare system in America.
I’ve been writing about economic security almost forever, insisting on the importance of providing a well-functioning safety net to foster a more entrepreneurial society. For more on that, see my book Hedge as well as this compilation of related essays: All About the Gig Economy.
Indeed, the idea of widespread instability is an integral part of what the Entrepreneurial Age is about. The lifespan of companies is getting shorter and shorter due to the acceleration of technological change; corporations have less ability to provide their employees with stability; in turn, these employees decide to break free and go on the hunt, enjoying the upside of flexibility from a worker’s perspective.
What Deborah Copaken reminds me in her conversation with Laetitia is that this kind of instability determined many of her career choices as a woman working in the media industry in the US. Because the US provides affordable healthcare only to those who are employed in a steady job, at many times in her life she had to give up on what she really wanted to secure access to proper healthcare coverage. And because she’s a woman, she’s also experienced the sexism of the healthcare system at every turn.
Deborah’s story is the perfect illustration of the point I make in Hedge: creators, like innovators, need a better safety net to work their magic! In a world of instability, this net is what makes risk-taking possible.
Deborah and Laetitia’s conversation is a must-listen. In addition to just how critical economic security is so that people can move forward and take more risks, you will also hear about:
* Being part of the writing team of the popular Netflix series Emily in Paris, and drawing on Deborah’s own experience of cross-cultural issues to enrich the script.
* What it was like for Deborah to live in Paris for a time when she began her career as a photojournalist—and the sexism she has had to fight ever since in the media industry.
* What it’s like to have to deal with the US healthcare system when your life's in danger and you need thorough examinations and emergency procedures.
* The reality of a life on the edge and having to deal with multiple risks and constraints at every turn—as is too often the case for people who embrace creativity as a career.
👉 Listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Deborah Copaken in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
🇪🇺 Productive Fragmentation
Here’s an idea that matters in Europe: creating spaces where people can come together, regardless of their ‘native’ culture and language, in no way negates the individual experiences of any given country. Nor does the idea of pooling resources mean ending in-group competition; indeed, finding the right balance among these various needs is key to what we can think of as ‘productive fragmentation’.
I’ve been reminded of this quite often lately, in contexts ranging from Netflix’s excellent Drive to Survive series about Formula One to my recent podcast discussion with economist Noah Smith. While Europe certainly has the fragmentation part of the equation down, it hasn’t found the proper way to use that fragmentation to encourage value creation in the Entrepreneurial Age.
That doesn’t have to remain the case, however. When I spoke with Chinese Characteristics writer Lillian Li about the situation in China, she noted the high degree of internal competition and decentralized autonomy there, with Beijing competing against Shanghai and Shenzhen and more for talent and results. That competition, however, tends to end with one proven winner, suggesting that fragmentation is an advantage when starting businesses, before eventually being reined in during the scaling up phase. Could Europe find a new configuration in which that is possible?
👉 I try to bring a complicated and broad topic into better focus in Productive Fragmentation.
⏳ All About Multi-Asset Allocation
While retail investors grab the headlines (as we saw with the Gamestop saga, for example), institutional investors are a better indicator of where things are headed over the long term. Indeed, their job is allocating vast amounts of money across various asset classes, including stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign currencies, real estate, hedge funds, private equity—and, yes, venture capital. Therefore it’s a very good idea to keep an eye on how they’re directing those capital flows.
Today, there are several levers that can be pulled, especially in Europe, in order to facilitate the growth of venture capital by making it a more attractive part of a multi-asset strategy from an institutional perspective. Israel’s Yozma program is a good example of how to do it well, while numerous Asian countries have had their own approach. One key, no matter what a given country decides, is to remember that it is critical to provide viable ways to show that liquidity is coming.
👉 Delve into the history of the subject as well as the current state of affairs in All About Multi-Asset Allocation.
🧲 Attracting Talent in Europe
In our times of transition, it’s only natural for people to move about in search of opportunity. Yet for all the talk about how nomadism is growing as a viable option, moving from one place to another is still very difficult, particularly for anyone who isn’t all on their own.
And so while many, including policymakers, recognize the potential benefits that can come from having talent choose their city or country as a new place to live, very little attention is paid to the real issues that block people from moving. These aren’t just related to administrative technicalities such as a visa; instead, the most difficult ones are related to very practical needs such as finding a home, opening a bank account, even getting a cellphone.
In Europe, there is also the language issue, since there are very few places where speaking English in the workplace is the norm, to say nothing of one’s daily life dealing with schools, shopping, interactions with neighbors, etc. While none of these problems are insurmountable, they are all critical and they all build upon one another. Solving the question of how to attract more talent will mean going far beyond quick administrative fixes, and towards a much broader buy-in on the part of society at large.
👉 My Tuesday thread this week sprang from a podcast discussion with Laetitia, resulting in Attracting Talent in Europe.
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
🛠 In my latest contribution to The Family’s daily newsletter, I highlight an overlooked discipline in the startup world: product management. Check out A key part of your startup team.
🇫🇷 More podcasts with Laetitia on Nouveau Départ (in 🇫🇷)! Check out yesterday’s edition on Économie du football : la transition ? ⚽ as well as last week’s episode on Nomadisme en famille : pas si facile ! Also make sure to give a listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Marylène Patou-Mathis about the prehistory of women: La femme préhistorique gagne à être connue.
From The Bright Future of Craftsmanship (September 2018):
What does the future hold? If the key to individual happiness is no longer a work contract, then we must reinvent what work is about, and Laetitia thinks it should revolve around the values and principles of craftsmanship—autonomy, responsibility, and creativity. Hence the title of the book: Du Labeur (“From Labor...”, which denotes routine, alienation, and pain)... à l’ouvrage (“...to Craftsmanship”, which is all about self-determination, fulfillment, connections...and uncertainty). The norm used to be about being alienated along assembly lines while enjoying “the bundle”. Tomorrow, the norm might be about working on our own, just like craftsmen, yet being connected to others through networks.
All recent editions:
* Attracting Talent in Europe—for subscribers only.
* All About Multi-Asset Allocation—for subscribers only.
* Productive Fragmentation—for subscribers only.
* Chinese Tech w/ Lillian Li. Founder Control w/ Bill Janeway. Daniel Ek, Arsenal & the Super League.—for everyone.
* A Thread on the Super League—for subscribers only.
* All About Founders Being in Control—for subscribers only.
* Bill Janeway on Who Should Be in Control—for everyone.
* Productive Disagreements w/ Ian Leslie. Restructuring. Taxation. Velocity in VC.—for everyone.
European Straits is a 4-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* I spoke with Lillian Li, writer at Chinese Characteristics, about everything Chinese tech 🎧
* What if Daniel Ek buys Arsenal? My latest column in Sifted
* Bill Janeway’s insights about balancing power between founders and investors
* Curating a comprehensive reading list about founder control in a company
* We all have something to say about the football Super League. A thread.
Today’s episode ofBuilding Bridges is my conversation with Lillian Li, a former venture capitalist in Europe who now writes the highly successful newsletter Chinese Characteristics.
I’m not really sure how our paths initially crossed, but I discovered Lillian’s work about technology in China in the course of last year—first on Twitter, and then through the insightful and enlightening essays on Chinese tech companies published on her acclaimed newsletter Chinese Characteristics.
* I had all the reasons to dive in. I think China is a critical area on the global map, one that none of us can afford to ignore. And I think that tech entrepreneurship is one of the things that make China matter even more. On the other hand, we Westerners have to be humble when it comes to China: it’s a very large and diverse country, with a culture that’s very different from ours, and where people speak a language that’s extremely difficult for most of us to master.
Needless to say I had to have Lillian on the podcast: as someone who grew up and worked in Europe, she can relate to the kinds of questions we’re facing on this side of the world; but as a native of China who went back there last year, she has the unique ability to share the details and nuances that elude most of us who are seeking to understand how China is positioning in the Entrepreneurial Age.
Here are the topics Lillian and I covered in our 45-min. conversation:
* Why she decided to go back to China, how life in China compares to that in the UK in the context of the pandemic, and her assessment of China’s economic prospects.
* What makes tech entrepreneurship in China different from that in the US or Europe, and what European entrepreneurs can learn from their Chinese counterparts.
* Why Westerners should focus less on powerful Chinese individuals and more on systems and institutions if they really want to understand what’s happening in China.
* What really happened in the runup to Ant Financial’s interrupted IPO and her explanation of the setbacks encountered by Jack Ma following the fateful speech he made in October 2020.
* The sources she recommends for all who want to learn more, including Rui Ma’s podcast Tech Buzz China and the book China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know by Arthur R. Kroeber.
👉 Listen to my conversation with Lillian in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🎧
⚠️ In my latest Sifted column, I’m taking on a story that many people have commented on during the past week or so: the football Super League.
* The angle I explore is an interesting development following the disastrous announcement and ditching of the plan after only 48 hours: the fact that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is now looking to buy the famed Arsenal club in London (which I’m familiar with because I used to live not far from there in the Borough of Islington).
It’s a development that, in my eyes, could signal European tech having reached a new level. It could also contribute to several positive developments in the European tech ecosystem over the coming years.
👉 Read it all in Sifted: Would Daniel Ek buying Arsenal be a game changer for European tech?
⚖️ Bill Janeway on Who Should Be in Control
One of the joys of writing this newsletter is that it gives many occasions to hear feedback and enter discussions with people whom I greatly admire. And Bill Janeway certainly fits into that category, which is why I was happy to have his pushback on my position that it’s a good thing when founders can keep control over their companies. Even better: he agreed to let me share his thoughts with you.
So this edition, which I sent for free to everyone, is simply the text of Bill’s responses during the conversation that we recently had. It’s well worth your time: not only does it provide a crystal-clear understanding of how a venture capital investor can evaluate the developments and various risks occurring in their portfolio, it’s also rich in sources and examples that go deeper into the subject.
I’d also note, before sending you to read the whole piece, that Bill is a great example of the insight one can get from an investor who has developed clear theses on the world in which they’re living. The mantras that he’s developed, such as “corporate happiness is positive cash flow” and “all entrepreneurs lie”, are direct and revealing, serving as useful signposts while evaluating a given situation.
👉 I stepped back to give Bill’s thoughts center stage in Bill Janeway on Who Should Be in Control.
💪 All About Founders Being in Control
My conversation with Bill has obviously been at the top of my mind, and so for the week’s curated readings I went back into everything related to founder control. As Bill also pointed out, there’s nothing particularly new in this debate, as evidenced by one of my earliest writings on the topic (in 2016), which focused on the case of young entrepreneurs back in the 1950s.
And perhaps the continued existence of the debate is simply an indication of how complicated the question is. Indeed, it’s a topic that touches on a wide variety of issues, ranging from the search for product-market fit to crossing the chasm to building a company in the face of both risk and uncertainty.
For entrepreneurs who are still in the early stages of building their company, it’s critical to be aware of the tradeoffs that can come with accepting investors into your cap table, and the terms that will govern the involvement of those investors. This is especially true for anyone looking to build a startup across borders, as choices made early on can have outsized impacts on your options further down the road.
👉 Refine your view on the topic using the sources in All About Founders Being in Control.
⚽️ A Thread on the Super League
It’s rare to see such a rapid, high-profile explosion as that which occurred with the ill-fated announcement of a new football “Super League”. There have been numerous articles looking in detail at what happened, but I wanted to put things into a particular perspective that I believe is fundamental to the Entrepreneurial Age: namely, how the people behind the Super League forgot that football was one of the first industries to truly shine a light on the power of the multitude, thanks to the implicit contract clubs form with their fans.
Football clubs have long been able to translate the power of their local fan base into benefits for the club and its owners. What was lost in the planning of the Super League was that those fans also can turn their power against the club itself, particularly in a situation where there seems to be a significant downside for them, given that the existence of the Super League would have rendered meaningless the outcomes of its elite clubs’ matches against their many historic national rivals.
Still, despite football having been early in sealing a compact with its multitude of fans, the sport itself has in many ways remained in the old paradigm of mass production, especially in its fascination for live TV audiences. That’s proving all well and good for now, but I wonder where the tipping point in the football value chain is, and how owners and investors will make money when technology has displaced many of the players upon which the sport relies?
👉 I put my two cents into one of the big business stories lately in A Thread on the Super League.
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
🏎 Matthias Hilpert, a seasoned tech investor based in Berlin, just launched a book titled Fast Forward to help founders master the discipline of B2B sales. It includes testimonials from two of our portfolio founders, Nicolas Dessaigne of Algolia and Firmin Zocchetto of PayFit. Discover the book here: Fast Forward: Accelerating B2B sales for startups.
🔍 In my latest contribution to The Family’s daily newsletter, I share a few pieces of advice to help founders identify good investors—ones that are decisive and supportive: Only deal with good investors.
🇫🇷 More podcasts with Laetitia on Nouveau Départ (in 🇫🇷)! Check out yesterday’s edition on Après Merkel : une chancelière verte ? as well as last week’s episode on Travailleurs / entreprises : la distance se creuse. Also make sure to give a listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Denis Pennel about the competing interests of consumers and workers: Le consommateur, ennemi du travailleur ?
From Europe Is a Developing Economy (October 2019):
The most interesting trend in global tech these past few years isn’t anything that’s been happening in the US. Rather, it’s the rise of tech companies in China. Like many Westerners, I had long been uninterested in what was happening in Mainland China. I thought it was too far away, too different, and all happening in the impenetrable language that is Mandarin.
But I changed my mind following Alibaba’s IPO in 2014. That moment triggered my interest, leading me to watch The Crocodile in the Yangtze, a movie that tells the story of Alibaba beating eBay on the Chinese market. I then read many books and articles, met many experts, and even had the opportunity to travel there twice: to Shanghai in 2017 and then to Beijing, Wuhan, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou earlier this year with my colleague Emilie Maret. Today, I’d say that the idea of China as a tech superpower has become widely acknowledged. But that doesn’t make the country any less interesting.
All recent editions:
* A Thread on the Super League—for subscribers only.
* All About Founders Being in Control—for subscribers only.
* Bill Janeway on Who Should Be in Control—for everyone.
* Productive Disagreements w/ Ian Leslie. Restructuring. Taxation. Velocity in VC.—for everyone.
* Velocity in Venture Capital—for subscribers only.
* All About Taxation in the Digital Economy—for subscribers only.
* Restructuring The Family—for subscribers only.
* Around Europe w/ Tyler Cowen. Lobbying. Startups Across Borders. Biden's Global Tax Reform.—for everyone.
European Straits is a 4-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* My wife Laetitia Vitaud spoke with author Ian Leslie about conflicts and disagreements 🎧
* Apply to On Deck Angels, an eight-week fellowship for top angel investors
* Sharing my experience restructuring my firm The Family during the pandemic
* I’ve been writing about corporate taxation in the digital economy since...forever
* Everyone’s obsessed with Tiger Global. My take on a key feature of their model: velocity
Today’s episode of Building Bridges is Laetitia’s conversation with Ian Leslie, a former ad man and author of the recently published Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes.
Ian first emerged on my radar three years ago when I read an inspiring article he wrote about the future of advertising and brands in a more digital economy. I started to follow him on Twitter and then signed up to his excellent newsletter The Ruffian. When he tweeted that he was spending a few days in Paris, I had my colleague Kyle Hall interview him on stage at our then-flagship office in Paris.
And when he more recently announced that he was about to publish a new book, I told Laetitia she had to have him as a guest on the podcast and ask him about why he thinks conflicts can be a good thing.
* I hope you’ll enjoy Laetitia and Ian’s conversation on conflicts, disagreements, and how they can lead to better outcomes. A rather timely topic!
Here’s what Laetitia wrote on the Building Bridges website:
Like a lot of other animals we humans respond to threat with two tactics: fight or flight. Either we become very hostile or we do everything we can to avoid any kind of argument. But both these reactions are completely dysfunctional. The internet isn’t helping: social media are designed to turn what could be productive exchanges into useless cockfights in a public arena.
The counterintuitive truth is that we need conflicts to move forward and live and work together more happily. Conflicts can bring us closer. “Couples and teams are happier when they are in the habit of passionate disagreement. Conflict can draw people together.” That’s why the author devotes the second half of the book to his 10 “rules of productive argument” to help us get better at disagreeing with others.
Establish a relationship of trust with the other person, accept them for who they are, try and make them feel good about themselves, consider that you might be perceived as “weird” by the other person, be curious about their point of view and actually listen to what they have to say...and above all else be real and honest when you interact with them.
The stories told in the book and the insights shared show this guide to productive disagreement is indispensable reading.
👉 Listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Ian in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🎧
⚠️ On Deck Angels (ODA) is an eight-week fellowship for top angel investors looking to hone their investing craft through community, tactical workshops and deal flow.
* ODA addresses topics such as: mental models and investing frameworks, establishing a track record, adding value post-investment, and learning how to build an angel brand.
Some of the founding fellows include Dan Romero, VP of Coinbase; Michael Vaughan, COO of Venmo; and Ann Ferracane, founder of Patch Ventures.
Interested in joining ODA? Learn more and apply here.
🏗 Restructuring The Family
As I’m sure you know, writing this newsletter isn’t my only job at The Family (or at least, I hope you assumed that! 😉) Over the past year, a large part of my time has been taken up by a major restructuring of our firm—one that, although not prompted by COVID-19, was immediately and drastically affected by the broader economic context of the pandemic.
It has been a rather complicated operation. Restructuring a business is something that’s relatively simple in theory and even in the steps to be taken, but quite difficult to actually execute. In no small part that’s because each step requires you to remain absolutely faithful to the plan, even when faced with difficult and/or deteriorating relationships with creditors, suppliers, employees that are let go, etc.
When done well, though, restructuring is a real opportunity to not only get the business onto more solid ground, but also to double down on everything that works well in your organization. You get a better view of which outsider providers are doing a great job (and which ones aren’t), your team can make faster decisions, and your management can refocus on the big picture. In doing so, remember that none of it is simply an end in itself: your goal isn’t survival, it’s to make sure the business can thrive, positioning itself to execute on a sound strategy over the coming years.
👉 I gave subscribers a peek behind the curtain in Restructuring The Family.
🚪 All About Taxation in the Digital Economy
As noted last week, the Biden administration’s push for international coordination on corporate taxation could finally produce results in a field that has been slow to adapt to the digital age. The lack of results certainly hasn’t been due to a lack of interest, however, and there is a rich bibliography for anyone wanting to dive further into the topic of how corporate taxation is and could be structured.
My own writings on this specific topic date back to a report that the French government commissioned from me and Pierre Collin, a respected tax judge, back in 2013 (my participation in that report came following the publication of L’Âge de la multitude with my friend Henri Verdier in 2012). The report was then followed with many (more accessible) articles on the topic, in outlets ranging from Forbes to Politico EU to The Family’s own publication on Medium.
More recently, I’ve directed my attention specifically at how corporate taxation impacts startups and startup ecosystems. Indeed, these aren’t simply questions about how to tax profits; corporate taxation is also critical in subjects such as rewarding employees for value creation through equity sharing, enabling a remote workforce, and generally building startups across borders.
👉 Go further on a topic that I really do find quite fascinating in All About Taxation in the Digital Economy.
🌐 Velocity in Venture Capital
Much talk in the VC world lately has been about hedge fund Tiger Global’s move into venture, with Founders Fund’s Everett Randle’s in-depth article on the topic serving as an excellent base for discussion. For me, this discussion is related to several recurring themes in this newsletter: the diffraction of venture capital, the fact that returns go down as predictability goes up, and new quantitative/indexing methods for deploying capital in venture.
In yesterday’s edition, I concentrated on one characteristic that has its role to play in each of those trends: the velocity with which money flows in the venture space. To keep it short, the idea is that by increasing the speed at which money moves from one hand to another, you can create more value in the economy, even without increasing the quantity of money in the system.
Now, in today’s low-interest-rate world, we know that there is in fact an increasing amount of money in the system. Nonetheless, the lesson remains: by not having money locked up for long periods of time (for example, in the decade that can easily mark the time between a startup’s founding and an IPO) and utilizing methods such as secondary sales from Series B and beyond, startup ecosystems can avoid stagnation and create more value through faster positive feedback loops.
👉 I went deeper into how to use money efficiently in Velocity in Venture Capital.
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
🌤 A while ago I mentioned my involvement in the project to create a new moral political economy by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.
I haven’t been there for a while for obvious reasons, but the pandemic hasn’t slowed down Margaret Levi and her colleagues in advancing the cause. They’ve just published a new website, Fairer Tomorrow, which I highly recommend visiting so as to have a glimpse of all that it takes to make the most out of the current shift:
The COVID pandemic continues to disrupt almost everything that enables us to learn, work, play, and thrive. It also magnifies numerous vulnerabilities and deficiencies that affected governments, economies, and societies well before its onset.
As we envision and, eventually, forge together our lives after the pandemic, we do ourselves a lasting disservice by returning to the pre-pandemic status quo. Instead, we can move toward a new political economic framework that serves a more prosperous, equitable, and human-centered society. A good way to start is through exploring lessons we already have learned and ideas we have generated during the pandemic.
That is the core concept motivating Fairer Tomorrow: Solutions to the Issues Highlighted by COVID, a website presented by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. Specifically, it is a product of the Center’s flagship program, “Creating a New Moral Political Economy,” led by CASBS director Margaret Levi.
⎈ In my latest contribution to The Family’s daily newsletter, I share a few pieces of advice for founders about the unique position they’re in: You're the one in control.
🇫🇷 More podcasts with Laetitia on Nouveau Départ (in 🇫🇷)! Check out yesterday’s edition on Faillites d'entreprises : une tempête à venir ? as well as last week’s episode on La solitude : l'autre pandémie. Also make sure to give a listen to my conversation with Rogervoice founder Olivier Jeannel about making the world a better place for people with a hearing disability: Rendre le monde plus accessible.
From Cancel Culture: A Systemic Explanation (July 2020):
It’s a matter of scale. If it’s me that’s caught in a public controversy regarding tech in Europe or French politics, I can write conciliatory DMs to the three people who are my most fervent contradictors and find some room for agreement.
On the other hand, a “famous and powerful” person such as Andrew Sullivan simply can’t deal with the thousands of Twitter users who are shouting insults at him—not only because he’s not used to being on an equal footing with the rest of us, but also because it’s practically impossible to exchange 1-on-1 messages with literally thousands of angry people on the Internet.
In this case, what choice do such personalities have (apart from reflection and contrition, which doesn’t really fit their character) except to wage an all-out war and risk cancellation?
All recent editions:
* Velocity in Venture Capital—for subscribers only.
* All About Taxation in the Digital Economy—for subscribers only.
* Restructuring The Family—for subscribers only.
* Around Europe w/ Tyler Cowen. Lobbying. Startups Across Borders. Biden's Global Tax Reform.—for everyone.
* A New Corporate Tax—for subscribers only.
* All About Crossing Borders—for subscribers only.
* Building Startups Across Borders—for everyone.
* Reinventing Housing w/ Diana Lind. Amazon's Politics. The Gig Economy. Centralization.—for everyone.
European Straits is a 4-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Economist and blogger Tyler Cowen on everything Europe 🎧
* Founders, investors, and governments: all can contribute to upgrading regulations—in Sifted
* We need to learn to solve ‘hard’ problems when building startups across borders
* I’ve written so much over the years about the difficulty of crossing borders: here’s an overview
* Joe Biden is about to bring the reform of corporate taxation to the finish line
Today’s episode of the Building Bridges podcast is my conversation with Tyler Cowen, an economist, director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, blogger at Marginal Revolution, and host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler.
I first met Tyler back in 2019 when my colleague Zineb Mekouar and I spent a few days in Washington, DC to promote my book Hedge and to connect with John Dearie’s Center for American Entrepreneurship. We had lunch with Tyler and his colleague and co-author Alex Tabarrok in a Chinese restaurant near George Mason University. Most of our conversation that day was about exchanging ideas and impressions about the relative situation of America, Europe, and the rest of the world.
Since then I’ve kept reading everything I could find about the political situation in the US, the state of the transatlantic relationship, and recently how COVID-19 was impacting the distribution of power and wealth across the world. Then last year, I realized something: Americans are, by far, the most inspiring contributors to this conversation—yet alas they’re mostly speaking about America, leaving the rest of the world untouched, uncommented on, almost undocumented!
In this context, how about launching a podcast series in which I’d interview American thinkers, but having them focus the conversation on Europe?
Fast forward to today: my 2020 idea has morphed into the Building Bridges podcast which I’m co-hosting with my wife Laetitia Vitaud. The value proposition of our podcast is to provide a platform for anyone who has interesting ideas to share with our vast community of “unapologetic globalists” (to quote my recent guest Chris Schroeder).
* Not everyone that’s part of this roster has much to say about Europe. But whenever I catch one who does, I make sure to focus our conversation on that very subject—and I must say Tyler is one of our recent guests who has the most to say and to share about the Old Continent!
And so if you’re interested in Europe, economics, libertarianism, or the prospects of various other regions in the world, I urge you to give my conversation with Tyler a listen. Here’s what you’ll hear:
* What Tyler likes and dislikes about Europe, and the various countries he’s lived in or traveled to here (which is most of them!).
* Why he thinks Europe is one of the least fragmented regions in the world—which is the exact opposite of how I view Europe!
* Why Americans should be present and invest in India if they want to retain some influence in the future.
* What advice he would give to young Europeans and young Americans who want to prepare themselves for our coming world.
* Why he expects Europe to remain a wealthy and prosperous region, despite, well, everything. And many, many more interesting topics and ideas.
👉 Listen to my conversation with Tyler in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🎧
⚠️ In Sifted this week, I take up a problem that most startup founders find extremely difficult to navigate: regulatory barriers and how to lobby regulators for updated standards that take our now-digital economy into account.
* As more startups move into industries such as finance and healthcare that are (for good reason!) quite highly regulated, founders and investors both need to step up their game in terms of effectively interacting with regulators. And on the other side, regulators—especially in Europe—need to realize that upgrading the regulatory framework can be a competitive economic advantage that boosts value creation.
Read it all in my column: Lobbying: it’s high time startups up their game.
🏗 Building Startups Across Borders
Last Thursday, I took on a topic that I consider critical for everyone interested in European tech: how startups can build their business across borders. It’s a subject that my firm The Family is interested in both for our startups (since our reason for existing is to help ambitious entrepreneurs grow the best companies possible) and for ourselves (since we knew from very early on that in order to achieve that goal, we ourselves needed to expand beyond our beginnings in Paris).
So from experience, both that of our firm and that of our startups, I can tell you that it’s not easy. And it’s made even harder by the general lack of good information available on the topic. It made me realize something: despite our perception of the economy being global, not many companies have actually succeeded in being truly multi-geography. In turn, that means that the number of people who have been on the ground doing it successfully is quite low.
Yet such hands-on experience is critical when it comes to the “hard” problems which companies face when trying to do business across borders: corporate structuring, employee equity, work contracts, proper accounting, etc. There is a real dearth of open source knowledge on these topics, and this essay serves to open a new stream of content that we at The Family want to produce for founders facing these problems. By the way, the essay is free for everyone!
👉 I do hope you’ll read the whole thing (and welcome any thoughts you may have) in Building Startups Across Borders.
🚪 All About Crossing Borders
My own writings on startups’ attempts to grow across borders and the issues they run up against have mainly discussed the “soft” problems relating to culture, language and the like. These were the subjects of some of the earliest long-form essays that I wrote when The Family switched to producing all of its content in English back in 2015.
More recently, these topics have focused on fragmentation, both in Europe and around the world in general. As I’ve become more familiar with different ecosystems around the world, it’s striking just how many founders, whether they’re in India, Spain, or wherever else (that isn’t the US or China), are facing very similar problems.
My real question now is which countries are going to step forward and make things easier for their local champions to expand across borders? This obviously becomes a question of industrial policy, and so perhaps it is no surprise that the most enterprising countries so far seem to be smaller ones that recognize the opportunity presented in the shift to the Entrepreneurial Age: Estonia, South Korea, and Israel, for example.
👉 The potential reading list was quite long this week in All About Crossing Borders.
🌐 A New Corporate Tax
For several decades, the global tax structure (or lack thereof) has been the cause of many grumblings in many places, with the associated noise only getting louder as software has continued to eat the world. But for all the talk about “double Irish with a Dutch sandwich” and headlines about corporations paying no taxes on their profits, there has been very little actual change in corporate tax codes.
That may be ending, however, with a new proposal for a global minimum tax coming from the Biden administration. Following on the heels of a Trump administration attempt to have companies repatriate profits via a lower corporate tax rate, the Biden administration’s proposal benefits from a multilateral approach (as opposed to a change affecting the US only) and a context in which corporations, including many tech companies, are facing mounting PR problems over their lack of tax contributions despite soaring profits.
Of course, as always, the road is long and nothing is finalized yet. And in terms of the outlook for Europe, such changes likely won’t put more tax dollars into the coffers–unless European companies, and specifically startups, can start to create and realize more value right here on the continent.
👉 I put together a quick 30-point outline of the situation in A New Corporate Tax.
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
😓 In my latest contribution to The Family’s daily newsletter, I share a few pieces of advice for founders about how to raise funds for their startup: Fundraising is hard.
🇫🇷 We’re resuming our bi-weekly podcasts with Laetitia on Nouveau Départ (in French) for paying subscribers: check out yesterday’s edition on Suppression de l'ENA : une mesure populiste ?
From A Founder's Handbook for Lobbying the Government (January 2021):
Many founders have a naive view of government, thinking that a 10-minute meeting with some cabinet minister will help them see the light, letting the problem be solved once and for all. After all, how can any government official be against progress?
In reality dealing with regulators is hard, and there’s no magic bullet. But I now have a lot of experience dealing with startups in The Family’s portfolio, and after hundreds of hours spent advising them on the best approach, I realized there are recurring themes and approaches that have all been validated in action. I’ve tried to organize them all into a coherent 10-point list.
All recent editions:
* A New Corporate Tax—for subscribers only.
* All About Crossing Borders—for subscribers only.
* Building Startups Across Borders—for everyone.
* Reinventing Housing w/ Diana Lind. Amazon's Politics. The Gig Economy. Centralization.—for everyone.
* What Should Be Centralized?—for subscribers only.
* All About the Gig Economy—for subscribers only.
* Amazon’s Strange Politics—for subscribers only.
* Discussing Europe (& Rabbits 🐰) w/ Noah Smith. Deliveroo. Delaware. Defensibility. Software Digesting the World.—for everyone.
European Straits is a 4-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Author Diana Lind on the future of housing 🎧
* Is Amazon left-wing or right-wing? Actually, it’s a bit of both
* Will the gig economy get its social contract? I’ve written so much on that topic
* As proven by successful vaccination campaigns, you shouldn’t centralize everything
Today’s episode of the Building Bridges podcast is a conversation between my wife Laetitia Vitaud and Diana Lind, author of the remarkable Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing.
We all sense how housing is a cornerstone of our social contract. In most countries, a house is many things at the same time: a shelter for one’s family, but also an investment for old age as well as collateral against which we can borrow and consume.
* As a result, we shouldn’t be surprised by the following: on one hand, the shift to the Entrepreneurial Age is a direct challenge for housing as we know it; on the other hand, it’s very difficult to change anything in housing because it’s so ingrained in our culture, our collective psyche, and our social contract.
The pandemic has been revealing in this regard. With many schools closed and many people stuck at home, there has been a widespread realization that the housing market doesn’t really match our needs and expectations anymore.
* The model of a single-family home, which became dominant during the post-war period, is ill-designed for today’s economy. Two-income households, longer life expectancy, less predictable careers, more and more jobs (whether high-skill or low-skill) concentrated in urban areas: all of these call for a dramatic upgrade of the housing market and our very conception of ‘home’.
It so happens that history is the most fertile ground there is to help us broaden our perspective when it comes to housing. By going into the past, we can see that communal housing, short-term rentals for highly mobile workers, and multi-generational households were the norm in the vibrant cities of the 19th century. What if those are a frontier we should try and (re-)explore?
Indeed, in her landmark book Brave New Home, Diana Lind acts as a guide to the history of housing and reveals that what we take for granted is in fact very recent and very dependent on a specific cultural and political context. Thus our vision of housing is also much more precarious than many people assume. It could very well be that the pandemic, as an accelerant of the shift to a new techno-economic paradigm, marks the end of housing as we know it—and the beginning of a new approach to providing shelter, investing in assets, and living together in our more urban world.
👉 Listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Diana in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
📦 Amazon’s Strange Politics
The past few weeks have seen some heated commentary regarding Amazon and a union drive at its Alabama fulfillment center. As someone who supports both a strong social safety net and admires Amazon’s performance as a company, I understand how people can be surprised at the contrast: Amazon has generally progressive cultural and political legacy, but now it’s taking a turn toward defending its interests as a now highly labor-intensive business.
Amazon’s position is unusual indeed. When we step back, most businesses in the past have moved being labor-intensive to being capital-intensive industries, becoming able to produce just as much, if not more, with a smaller and smaller workforce. On the other hand, very few corporations have gone the other way like Amazon, and this might explain the company’s strange politics.
In any case, it’s clear that balances must be struck. There are industries in which capital is unable to replace labor, for instance in proximity services where many workers are on the front lines interacting with many customers. And then there are industries in which capital can exist on its own, creating a highly stratified world of a few haves and many have-nots. And so the question is there: can we as a society (and Amazon as a company) have the best of both worlds?
👉 I reflect on the current situation and capitalism’s politics in Amazon’s Strange Politics.
🚲 All About the Gig Economy
Reflecting on labor-intensive industries and the spectacle of the Deliveroo IPO led me to think that collecting together resources on the “gig economy” could be quite timely. I started by noting, however, that I don’t particularly use that term (except with the associated quotation marks) since I think it’s about much more than that, namely the entire world of flexible work powered by tech platforms.
My first writings in English on the topic date back to 2015, when I wrote an article in Foreign Affairs with my friend Bruno Palier. A year later I talked about it as part of one of my most read pieces ever, “Enough With This Basic Income B******t” and then it became a critical part of the research and material for my 2018 book on building a social safety net for the Entrepreneurial Age, Hedge.
Throughout, I’ve been convinced that the move to a more entrepreneurial economy will carry with it the rise of the gig economy, simply because of the ability for information to move more and more quickly among interested parties. This is also what underlies the growing need for an upgraded social safety net, which was a key part of discussions around the Deliveroo IPO.
👉 Read on about what is needed to make flexible work good work in All About the Gig Economy.
⛪️ What Should Be Centralized?
In my home country of France, which has just headed back into another lockdown period, the headlines over the last few days have centered on the opening of new mass vaccination sites. Yet in the US, which has been one of the fastest at vaccinating its citizens, such mass vaccination sites have been largely abandoned in favor of distribution through the vast network of local pharmacies.
It got me thinking about how organizations manage the balance between their centralized and decentralized levels. I don’t believe that it’s so simple as positing centralization vs. decentralization as a general theory; every organization has elements of both, and so the real question is how to optimally distribute assets, functions and risks between the two.
A big challenge is that the functions that are optimally centralized (or decentralized) in the age of computing and networks are not the same ones that were optimally centralized (or decentralized) in the age of the automobile and mass production. As such, many organizations are struggling to reshuffle things, especially when they are trapped in a centralizing mindset such as that which dominates France’s government and institutions.
👉 I also tested out a new format for gathering these ideas together in What Should Be Centralized?
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
🚀 In my latest contribution to The Family’s daily newsletter, I comment on Deliveroo’s IPO and lessons that early-stage founders can draw from it: Three lessons to keep in mind about your (future) IPO.
🇪🇺 A few weeks ago, I wrote a column in Sifted about the difficulty that Europe has in growing successful companies in the social media space. It inspired interesting counterpoints earlier this week:
* Sameer Singh, an angel investor with Atomico, also took to Sifted to share a convincing Blueprint for building social media giants in Europe.
* Sarah Guemouri, a Senior Associate at Atomico, expanded on Sameer’s thoughts on Twitter:
* Then Akhil Gupta, a startup founder based in Bangalore, offered an inspiring comparison with building social media companies in fragmented India:
From Solving the Housing Problem: Hunters and Settlers (March 2018):
One way to mitigate problems on the housing market would be drafting zoning rules that favor the constant mingling of hunters and settlers, rather than doing the opposite (as they currently do). There wouldn’t be a crisis of suburban housing if suburban areas were attractive for hunters—which they aren’t. Likewise, there wouldn’t be a crisis of urban housing if it was easier to settle in such areas.
The stakes are high. New legal frameworks should make it possible to harness technology and achieve a radical upheaval of the way of life for both adventurous hunters and settling families—in each case at every level of the income ladder. If they fail to accommodate both populations, the danger is for every large city to be inhabited only by very rich hunters and very old settlers.
All recent editions:
* What Should Be Centralized?—for subscribers only.
* All About the Gig Economy—for subscribers only.
* Amazon’s Strange Politics—for subscribers only.
* Discussing Europe (& Rabbits 🐰) w/ Noah Smith. Deliveroo. Delaware. Defensibility. Software Digesting the World.—for everyone.
* Where’s Europe’s Delaware?—for subscribers only.
* All About Defensibility—for subscribers only.
* An Investment Thesis: Help Software Digest the World—for subscribers only.
* Growing Your Network w/ Kelly Hoey. Europe. Stripe. Accelerators vs. Seed Funds.—for everyone.
European Straits is a 4-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Bloomberg columnist (and writer, and Twitter extraordinaire, and owner of rabbits) Noah Smith on Europe in the Entrepreneurial Age
* Why investors shouldn’t shun Deliveroo, in Sifted
* Software is eating the world, but can we facilitate its digestive capacities?
* A business’s defensibility is what investors are most interested in
* US tech companies have Delaware. But what’s Europe’s equivalent?
First of all, it’s now official: my wife Laetitia Vitaud and I have decided to merge our respective podcasts under one single brand, Building Bridges. From now on, we’ll take turns interviewing inspiring guests about the state of our fragmenting world. The resulting podcast will be syndicated across this newsletter, Laetitia’s own Laetitia@Work, and the Building Bridges hub on Substack.
🐰 Today, I’m pleased to share a new episode of Building Bridges in which I interview Noah Smith, an opinion columnist at Bloomberg and writer at Noahpinion, which I highly recommend subscribing to since it covers so many topics that resonate with this newsletter—from economic development to immigration to the current paradigm shift to industrial policy to economics in general.
My idea was to focus the conversation on Europe, and indeed Noah has many insights to share. One of them, which I find particularly compelling, is the idea of “optimal fragmentation”. There was a time, in the 19th century, when Europe actually benefited from being a fragmented continent. Britain, Germany and France were of roughly equal sizes; the world was the stage on which their rivalry played out; and the technology of the day made it so that each could grow their national industrial champions and claim to be part of the club of the more advanced countries.
* Today, the situation in Europe is very different, however. The advanced technologies of the day (computing and networks) call for growing corporations whose scale far exceeds the size of any European market. And because they have realized fragmentation isn’t much of an advantage anymore, European countries have been trying to join forces under the umbrella of the European Union—alas encountering many frictions and obstacles along the way.
Here are the other topics I discussed with Noah:
* The various places he’s lived, including Texas, Japan, New York, and the Bay Area—and what specifically attracted him to Japan, where he spent 5 years in total.
* Industrial policy: what it is, why it is so difficult to design and implement during a paradigm shift, and how Europe has been performing on that front.
* Texas and its (so far) failed attempts at catching up on Silicon Valley: it’s all about non-compete clauses, urban sprawling, and universities.
* Where to look for inspiration: Noah shared his assessment of how various European countries are doing and what other regions in the world we should all study.
* Finally, I made sure to ask Noah about his pet rabbits, and he shared the reasons why everyone should consider adopting their own—tl;dr, “they’re like clumsy, vegetarian cats”.
👉 Listen to my conversation with Noah using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
⚠️ While the European IPO market hasn’t necessarily been as hot as its US counterpart, one tech company has plans to go public as early as TODAY: Deliveroo. Unfortunately, it seems that investors are a bit skeptical, as the floatation is meeting strong headwinds.
* I believe the bear cases against Deliveroo are a bit shortsighted, however. Just like Uber before it, investors will be well-served to remember that Deliveroo’s total addressable market isn’t restricted to food delivery, but instead the entire realm of things that people want delivered to them–both now and in the future.
And that’s not all; read the whole thing here: Deliveroo: Is It Worth It? 👀
💊 An Investment Thesis: Help Software Digest the World
For years, Marc Andreessen’s thesis about “software eating the world” was a solid one indeed–and in general, it still is. But for investors looking at the industries that are still early in the process of being eaten, it’s clear there are quite a few in which software alone can’t finish the job. In ‘hard’ industries that are heavily tangible, whether due to personnel needs, physical infrastructure, complex regulations, or whatever else, software sometimes runs up against problems in digesting its meal.
This has been the case (so far, and to varying degrees) in industries such as energy, agriculture, construction, and space. But just because these industries are more difficult for software to consume, that simply means that there’s more opportunity for startups to arrive with solutions that are designed to facilitate the arrival of more and more software.
To give you one of the most evident examples of how this can occur, the iPhone was so revolutionary not because of what it brought to communications, but because of how it quickly enabled software to extend much, much further into our lives. This wasn’t just because the iPhone brought its own software and hardware into the equation, but because it also directed all that power into being a vehicle for all the software that developers around the world could dream up. In effect, the iPhone served as a digestive pill, making it much easier for software to keep right on eating.
👉 Dive deeper in An Investment Thesis: Help Software Digest the World.
🏰 All About Defensibility
The idea of a company creating a ‘moat’ is nothing new. In the 20th century, businesses were able to do so through various means, whether by investing in physical infrastructure, building privileged relationships with key players, or encouraging politicians to enact regulations that just so happened to make it extremely difficult for anyone new to come along and push their way into the game.
In the Entrepreneurial Age, some of the methods for digging moats, or erecting ‘barriers to entry’, have disappeared completely (physical infrastructure in, say, the music industry), changed (access to key players is still needed, but it’s much easier to contact someone via email than by phone or an in-person meeting), or stayed much the same (tech giants certainly aren’t above lobbying politicians to make things difficult for newcomers, such as we’ve seen with the GDPR regulations in Europe).
Given my interest in business strategy, it should come as no surprise that my attention has quite often turned to ideas of moats and how companies can incorporate defense strategies while still concentrating on growth and increasing returns. So this past week, following further reflection inspired by Gil Dibner of Angular Ventures, I pulled together a set of resources on the topic.
👉 Remember that we don’t build moats, we dig them, while reading All About Defensibility.
🇪🇺 Where’s Europe’s Delaware?
A while back, I and my colleagues at The Family were excited to support the #NotOptional campaign, led by our friends at Index Ventures. Given the importance of employee equity in growing a thriving startup ecosystem, we’ve been similarly disappointed to see more recently that the enthusiasm the campaign generated hasn’t turned into beneficial changes in Europe’s corporate laws—yet, at least.
So I started thinking about how tech startups in the US have the good fortune to be able to incorporate in Delaware, why that is, and whether or not a jurisdiction in Europe could take on that same role. And let’s just say that while I don’t think it to be an impossible feat, it is true that it takes more than simply changing some laws and regulations.
Indeed, one of the key aspects as to why Delaware is so attractive for incorporation is the case law that has been developed in the Delaware Court of Chancery during the course of more than 250 years. And no country in Europe would be able to provide that immediately, but… does that mean that no one is willing to even try?
👉 Find out more on why the attempt is needed in Where’s Europe’s Delaware?
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
🇫🇷 The latest podcasts (in French) with Laetitia on our family media operation Nouveau Départ: Ces 20% de diplômés qui se détachent (interview w/ Jean-Laurent Cassely) 🎓 Le foyer à l'épreuve de la longévité ⏰
🚀 My latest contribution to my firm The Family’s newsletter is about the hybrid nature of every tech company: Every business has two sides.
From Will Fragmentation Doom Europe to Another Lost Decade? (January 2020):
Here’s an enigma: historians teach us that fragmentation is what made Europe strong and prosperous in the past. So why is that long-time asset now a liability? To understand the reasons, we need to go back in time. In Guns, Germs & Steel, Jared Diamond explains why fragmentation once helped Europe rise as the main Eurasian power at the expense of China, which was much more monolithic than fragmented Europe and thus depended on the (occasionally stupid) decisions of a single sovereign.
All recent editions:
* Where’s Europe’s Delaware?—for subscribers only.
* All About Defensibility—for subscribers only.
* An Investment Thesis: Help Software Digest the World—for subscribers only.
* Growing Your Network w/ Kelly Hoey. Europe. Stripe. Accelerators vs. Seed Funds.——for everyone.
* Accelerators vs. Seed Funds—for subscribers only.
* All About Stripe—for subscribers only.
* 10 Hypotheses As To Why Europe Is Lagging Behind—for subscribers only.
* Investing Across the World w/ Chris Schroeder. Stripe. Consulting. IPOs. Digital Government.—for everyone.
European Straits is a 4-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Author Kelly Hoey on what becomes of personal networks in the digital age
* Apply to On Deck Catalyst ten-week remote program
* Europe is sliding behind. Here are 10 potential reasons as to why.
* Stripe continues to impress: a curation of all I’ve written about them
* Can seed funds and accelerators work together? Views differ
I’ve long called the current period ‘the age of computing and networks’:
* The ‘age of computing’ because we are all equipped with a growing number of digital devices whose computing power is increasing exponentially.
* And ‘the age of networks’ because we use these devices (our computers, our smartphones) mostly to connect with one another.
Many online connections with other individuals are implicit and invisible. For example, we’re connected to one another when we read reviews posted by other customers before buying a product on Amazon. Or take our daily habit of asking Google questions, which are then analyzed to suggest, in real time, better ways to pose those questions. This is possible because we are connected in a network whereby each individual’s contribution helps to improve the Google search engine for all.
What happens to personal networks—which, contrary to the examples above, are formed consciously and explicitly—in a world where interconnectivity is the norm? Things change on various fronts.
* First, the ability to connect everyone together tends to devalue individual connections. In the past, having someone’s business card had a lot of value. It indicated that you had met that person and that they had judged you to be trustworthy enough to share their contact information. Today, however, that same information is available to everyone via LinkedIn. The business card has thus lost its economic value, as well as its symbolic value. It takes much more than a business card to indicate that someone has entered the inner circle.
At the same time, developing a relationship with another person no longer implies that you’ve met that person ‘in real life’. Twitter has gotten us used to the idea of having interesting conversations with people we’ve never actually met. And for the past year, the pandemic and the difficulties in moving around have further anchored the idea of getting to know one another from a distance.
What will happen to all these long-distance relationships once the pandemic is over? Will we go back to how things were, returning to our old network of acquaintances who all live nearby? Or will we continue developing these relationships regardless of physical distance, using more and more apps that let us connect more and more easily with others? It’s not just Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter anymore, but also TikTok, Discord, Clubhouse—and others that we haven’t discovered or even invented yet.
This latter hypothesis is what Balaji S. Srinivasan foresaw in his 2013 article Software is Reorganizing the World (in Wired). For him, the Internet is less about nourishing relationships that initially developed in the real world, and more about developing new relationships with people that we may eventually meet IRL later, only then perhaps deciding to live near one another. Balaji gives the example of Silicon Valley: a location where people (entrepreneurs, investors, operators) go to live because they first connected with one another via the Internet and then later decided to use the San Francisco Bay Area as the place to meet up and work together at building tech companies.
* In that regard, it’s clear that the pandemic has changed things. With it, we’ve learned how to build companies remotely, a shift that devalues the idea of collecting everyone together in Silicon Valley in order to succeed. But that, of course, won’t impede individuals who connect with one another from deciding to move to a given area based upon other shared affinities.
All in all, the economy of personal networks was upended by both the digital transition and the pandemic. Kelly Hoey, author of the book Build Your Dream Network: Forging Powerful Relationships in a Hyper-Connected World, discusses the new state of networks with my wife Laetitia Vitaud in the latest episode of the Building Bridges podcast.
👉 Listen to Laetitia’s conversation with Kelly using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
⚠️ On Deck Catalyst is a ten-week remote program for young leaders who want to solve the world’s most pressing problems and take an unconventional path to building their career. The curriculum includes:
* Deep dives on how startups work: what core positions look like day-to-day and why that role is important to the business.
* Learning the ins and outs of founding and investing in companies alongside the best in the industry.
* Speaker sessions from Keith Rabois, Aileen Lee, Jack Altman, and others as part of the Leaders and Protégés track, an in-depth look into mentor and mentee relationships, and a launchpad for eventual success.
* How to create your own opportunities—make roles that previously didn’t exist at any startup you join, launch a startup from scratch, or break into the world of venture capital.
⏰ Their next cohort kicks off on June 5. You can apply here before May 4th. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
📉 10 Hypotheses As To Why Europe Is Lagging Behind
For all the debates about Europe and how it’s doing, one indicator certainly shows that things aren’t going swimmingly: GDP per capita, which is going in the wrong direction in multiple key European countries. But why is this happening? How is it that in the last 20 years, the average French, English, Italian citizen is getting noticeably worse off than many of their global counterparts?
Observers posit various hypotheses, some of which I find more convincing than others. For example, I don’t think that Europe is necessarily slow in adopting technology, and I also don’t think that the problem comes down to an excess of regulations.
Still, it’s undeniable that something’s going on, and identifying the proper hypotheses as to why it’s happening is critical to turning things around. Europe would certainly benefit from taking a more outward-looking view on business, using the entire world as its stage rather than remaining within the borders of the EU. And given the current repositioning that the US is undertaking, not least because of the chaos that grew out of the Trump White House, there could be an opening for Europe to rediscover industrial policy levers–so long as those levers match the requirements of the Entrepreneurial Age.
👉 Read on in 10 Hypotheses As To Why Europe Is Lagging Behind.
💰 All About Stripe
The big news in the startup world last week was Stripe’s new fundraising round which brought the tech giant’s valuation to $95B. The company’s rapid rise since its founding back in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison is part of the process of constructing the foundations of the digital economy, in Stripe’s case by focusing on payments.
But beyond the eye-popping valuation and inevitable musings about when the IPO could occur, Stripe is definitely worth knowing more about, quite simply because of what it reveals about that ongoing digital construction process. Namely, the Entrepreneurial Age is showing just how much larger markets can be when they’re truly digital, with returns on invested capital getting much, much higher than ever was the case in the 20th century.
So while companies such as Visa or Mastercard did quite well for themselves in processing payments, their reach was necessarily restricted by physical constraints (credit cards, payment terminals, phone lines, etc.). In shrugging off those constraints thanks to digital tools, Stripe, on the other hand, is playing a different game indeed.
👉 Dive further into fintech with All About Stripe.
🏎 Accelerators vs. Seed Funds
As entrepreneurship spreads throughout the globe, more pressure builds throughout the system. One of the places where that is most felt lately is early-stage investing. More and more money is flowing as investors attempt to back startups that might turn into tomorrow’s tech giants.
That led London- and Tel Aviv-based investor Gil Dibner to recently question whether the accelerator model was doomed, given the multiplication and increased sophistication of seed funds like his Angular Ventures. Indeed, this new generation of seed funds now competes for some of those same early percentage points in a startup’s cap table, with a proven ability to add as much (if not more) value than accelerators.
I think that Gil’s idea of conflicting interests between seed funds and accelerators is accurate, although I don’t think the conclusion is necessarily that accelerators don’t have a part to play. For one, accelerators still have some advantages that seed funds don’t, including one that we at The Family treasure: the ability to work with many more founders since their entry into The Family doesn’t involve us signing a hefty check. Another important nuance is whether it’s about a mature entrepreneurial ecosystem or one that is still in its infancy—and where the toxicity requires as much help as possible at the pre-seed stage.
👉 Think more about the ongoing shift in Accelerators vs. Seed Funds.
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
🇫🇷 The latest podcasts (in French) with my wife Laetitia Vitaud on our family media operation Nouveau Départ: Le piège du couple à deux carrières 👫 Singapour, cette cité-État érigée en modèle 🇸🇬
🚀 My latest contribution to my firm The Family’s newsletter is a tribute to Jeff Bezos (and Kevin Kwok): Learn to draw flywheels.
🎧 I was invited by Odin for a one-hour conversation with their founder Patrick Ryan. You can listen to it, and read the transcript, here: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.
From Fixing Today's Economy Is About Humans, Not Technology (November 2018):
Today’s power is vested in the mighty “multitude”—the billions of individuals who are now equipped with powerful computing devices and connected with one another through networks. And it inspires a lesson in strategy and management that every corporate executive needs to keep in mind: the businesses that succeed in the digital economy are the ones that realize how power has been redistributed outside of their organizations. The winners are not the companies who use the most technology. Rather, they are the companies that best use technology to harness human power, which in turn fuels growth and generates profits.
All recent editions:
* 10 Hypotheses As To Why Europe Is Lagging Behind—for subscribers only.
* All About Stripe—for subscribers only.
* Accelerators vs. Seed Funds—for subscribers only.
* Investing Across the World w/ Chris Schroeder. Stripe. Consulting. IPOs. Digital Government.—for everyone.
* Government in the Entrepreneurial Age—for subscribers only.
* Moneyball in Consulting Services—for everyone.
* All About Companies Going Public—for subscribers only.
* Playing Video Games w/ Rachel Kowert. Consumption. Delivery. Profitability.—for everyone.
European Straits is a 4-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Global investor Chris Schroeder about startups in the Middle East and beyond
* Today’s column in Sifted: would Stripe have succeeded without Silicon Valley?
* A deep-dive into the future of consulting, inspired by the book (and movie) Moneyball
* A curated list of all my past writings related to companies going public
* A Q&A with a research firm about how governments are faring in the Entrepreneurial Age
This week I’m delighted to share a conversation I had with Chris Schroeder, an American entrepreneur, global investor and author of the book Startup Rising about the thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Middle East. Chris and I met 2 years ago when I was visiting Washington, DC, where he lives, all thanks to my friend Ian Hathaway (co-author of The Startup Community Way with Brad Feld).
Chris, Ian, and I share a deep interest in entrepreneurship as a global phenomenon, specifically the fact that as technology becomes available across the globe, founders can succeed not only in Silicon Valley, but in every entrepreneurial ecosystem that’s emerging on the global map. Chris was led to write his book (whose first edition dates back to 2013) after attending a startup event in Dubai where his mind was blown by the sheer scale and passion of the startup community he encountered there.
* His background was also a contributing factor, however. Before becoming an entrepreneur in the media industry and later focusing on investing in startups around the world, Chris worked as a staff member for then-Secretary of State James Baker, right when the world was undergoing the most radical transformation in our lifetime. He criss-crossed the world with his boss, practically witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War that the US waged against Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, and many other (incredible) things.
As he tells me in our conversation, Chris emerged from this experience with an unapologetic global outlook and a deep interest in what is happening in the rest of the world. It was only a matter of time before this interest converged with his passion for entrepreneurship, and now he’s one of the best experts and practitioners I know when it comes to knowing entrepreneurial ecosystems and working with founders based all over the world—a rather unusual positioning for an American.
I hope you like this podcast! If you want to dig deeper into Chris’s thoughts and works, check out his newsletter as well as his book, now in its second edition, Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East.
👉 Listen to my conversation with Chris using the player above or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🎧
The latest headline-grabbing fundraising round happened this week, with global payment company Stripe raising $600M in a round that values the business at $95B.
Founded by the Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe is an example of a startup with European roots that has found success in the US and is now aiming directly at Europe as its second base (and key market). Those European roots have put a big question out there: Can a European startup follow a Stripe-like path to success, but without the (long) detour in the US?
👉 Read it all in Could a Stripe today succeed without Silicon Valley?
⚾️ Moneyball in Consulting Services
My Thursday deep dive last week looked at how an industry that has never enjoyed increasing returns to scale, namely consulting, could perhaps find new business models in the Entrepreneurial Age that would allow for those higher returns–even in the face of their clients’ desire to pay less while simultaneously demanding more of them than ever before.
Building and/or working at a successful consulting services firm was long one of the easiest ways to get rich, particularly during the latter half of the 20th century. Clients were willing to pay very high fees, fresh talent was continually knocking at the door, and since one of the services you were providing was plausible deniability for the client in case things went wrong, nobody was particularly upset if they did.
But now all of that has changed. Since 2008, clients aren’t willing to pay exorbitant fees anymore; talent has much better options for building an exciting career (not least in the startup world); and both clients and the public-at-large are starting to really hold consulting firms to account for both their advice and who they provide it to. So the question is looming larger and larger: Can the industry find new approaches that allow it to move from the market economy to doing capitalism?
👉 Read the details in Moneyball in Consulting Services (free for everyone!)
💸 All About Companies Going Public
On Friday, I curated an edition that is a critical part of developing startup ecosystems and successfully investing in tech companies: IPOs and other methods of taking a company public. The reason why it’s so important is because it directly relates to injecting liquidity into the system. Without companies going public, you can have a lot of value being generated, but that value won’t contribute much to increasing the velocity of money flowing within the system.
I started writing more frequently about this topic back in 2019, when the market for taking companies public was still stagnating and where the one big potential IPO–WeWork–turned into a catastrophe. Since, quite a bit has changed, as the IPO market loosened up, several key companies went public via direct listings, and the SPAC craze arrived as well.
No matter how it’s done, it’s clear that a critical step in the development of the European tech ecosystem will be finding ways to generate the liquidity that arrives by taking companies public. Doing so will provide a big boost in creating a self-sustaining virtuous circle, with founders, employees, and investors encouraged to utilize their gains to invest in the next generations of startups, and the public at large seeing that there is indeed a great deal of value being created and realized all around them.
👉 Dive into the journey in last week’s ‘Friday’s Digest’: All About Companies Going Public.
🏛 Government in the Entrepreneurial Age
I recently sat down for an interview regarding how governments are adapting to the digital age. It’s not necessarily an easy topic, as there can be a real disconnect between how governments frame their efforts and advances and how things are actually changing in the everyday lives of citizens and residents.
I saw that gap, for example, while living in the UK for five years. Although the UK is relatively strong at communicating regarding their desire to innovate via technology and digitize services throughout the country, the truth is that I still found myself often having to wait in line, or bring a printed document to a particular office, or wait for a password to be delivered by post, etc. And while many governments try to explain this away in the name of “privacy” (or even, in the case of a country such as France, “equality”), the end result for the user continues to be one that comes up very short and only inspires more mistrust in citizens who don’t believe the government can deliver what they really need.
So what would an advanced government look like, digitally speaking? In my eyes, it needs to fulfill three key demands that every individual now has with the arrival of the Entrepreneurial Age: being convenient, customizable, and responsive.
👉 Read the full Q&A in Government in the Entrepreneurial Age.
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
📺 We at The Family are now hosting a weekly show, In Good Company—two directors at a time. I was a co-host in the latest two editions, where we were with Christoph Janz, a founder & partner of the seed VC firm Point Nine Capital, and then John Thornhill, the innovation editor at the Financial Times and cofounder of the pan-European startup outlet Sifted. You can watch the videos here:
* In Good Company w/ Christoph Janz (hosts: my colleague Balthazar de Lavergne & me)
* In Good Company w/ John Thornhill (hosts: my colleague Alice Zagury & me)
🇫🇷 Latest podcasts (in French) with my wife Laetitia Vitaud on our family media operation Nouveau Départ: Enfance : les transitions de la famille 🧒 Médias : la nouvelle génération 🗞 Productivité : pas de recette miracle 😵
🚀 My latest contribution to my firm The Family’s newsletter is about the critical difference between customers and clients—and why it matters for founders: It’s better to serve customers than clients.
From European Startups as an Asset Class (February 2020):
There is now a plurality of models when it comes to growing tech giants (Silicon Valley, China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, soon Africa), and so there’s no reason why Europe can’t discover its own, different way. Another argument, echoing Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, is that Silicon Valley is doing so well that it’s bound to be disrupted by rising entrepreneurial ecosystems (and their happy investors) elsewhere in the world.
All recent editions:
* Government in the Entrepreneurial Age—for subscribers only.
* Moneyball in Consulting Services—for everyone.
* All About Companies Going Public—for subscribers only.
* Playing Video Games w/ Rachel Kowert. Consumption. Delivery. Profitability.—for everyone.
* Funding Profitable Businesses—for subscribers only.
* All About Delivery—for subscribers only.
* The Future of Consumption—for subscribers only.
* More About SPACs. The 'K-Shaped' Recovery. Crypto Digest. A Tribute to Texas.—for everyone.
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
European Straits is a 4-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com -
The Agenda 👇
* Rachel Kowert on why we should let children play video games 🎧
* What becomes of consumption in the Entrepreneurial Age
* Everything I ever wrote about the delivery business
* Indie.vc is closing shop, but I’m sure they’ll be back at some point
Our children spend too much time staring at screens—at least, so “they” say. The debates around screens have only intensified in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns and school closures have contributed to increasing screen time at all ages, adding fuel to parents’ worries as well as to the debates among researchers.
* My first reaction, nonetheless, is skepticism. The debate around screens certainly didn’t wait for the pandemic to come to the forefront. We’ve always wondered whether our children aren’t passing too much time in front of the TV, too much time in front of the computer, too much time on their phones, too much time playing video games.
The same fears even existed prior to the invention of screens. As my wife Laetitia Vitaud notes in her conversation with American research psychologist Rachel Kowert on the Building Bridges podcast, at one point we were saying that some children (and here we can include Laetitia’s own mother’s experience) were spending too much time reading books, instead of being outside playing with the other kids!
Where do these debates come from? These days, they’re nourished by various articles suggesting a link between time spent playing video games and rising violence in our societies. Another factor are best-sellers by authors such as Nicholas Carr, who ask whether the internet isn’t working to make us all a bit stupider. And then, a few years ago people were debating the ways in which some Silicon Valley personalities raise their children. Even if these people owe their fortunes to the time that we all spend looking at the screens they’ve dreamed up and using the apps they’ve developed, it would seem that some forbid their own children from using screens!
* But once again, this kind of “revelation” left me skeptical. To me, the journalists writing about the subject tended to pass into generalities quite quickly thanks to the anecdotes found in a few particular cases. Before turning the decisions a few billionaires make in banning (so they say) screens for their children into an example to follow, shouldn’t we wait to see what happens to those children once they’ve become adults? (And, at any rate, can we really extract many lessons in terms of childhood education when starting from a sample that is in no way representative of the rest of society?)
The reality is that there doesn’t seem to be any causal link between screens or a lack thereof during childhood and later experiences as an adult. I myself was largely deprived of television when I was a child; we did have a TV set in the house, but besides the fact that it was in black-and-white (the 1980s!), it was shut up in a cupboard, only making an appearance for a few very specific shows.
When I later met my wife, she explained to me how she had passed a great deal of time during her childhood and adolescence in front of the TV set. And if we look at her success in terms of schooling and professional life, it would be difficult to draw the conclusion that time spent watching television will be a problem later on! And if I look back on my own experience, I’d be hard pressed to say that I somehow did better than Laetitia, and certainly not because I was kept far from the TV during my childhood.
Beyond that, one essential lesson I’ve seen with my own experience as a parent is that there’s nothing that makes young children happier than imitating their parents (with the means at their disposal, of course). If the parents spend most of their time in front of a screen, which is the case for both Laetitia and me, then you can easily predict that the children will do the same.
Children’s mimeticism goes much further, though. A screen doesn’t have one single use: we can use it to learn new things, to discover new information, to watch films and TV shows, to talk with friends, to try to gain social clout. This is why it’s important to never underestimate kids: if they see their parents spending lots of time in front of a screen, they’ll want to do the same; but they’ll also imitate their parents and try to spend that time in more or less the same ways.
It’s always a good idea for parents to learn to ignore splashy, alarmist headlines and instead take a clear look at what they themselves are doing: what example are they setting for their kids? And on this specific subject, it’s right to not worry. The serious research on the subject shows that there’s no link between screen time (for example, playing video games) and individual fulfillment. That’s exactly what Rachel Kowert explained in detail with Laetitia in the interview of this episode of Building Bridges.
👉 Listen to Laetitia and Rachel’s conversation using the player above 👆 or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🎧
💐 The Future of Consumption
My Thursday deep dive last week looked at a topic that is a central part of many discussions taking place these days: on the environment and climate change, social justice, the relationship between work and personal lives, and simply the arrival of the new paradigm brought on by the Entrepreneurial Age. Just as production patterns are changing, our consumption patterns, in terms of both goods and services, are also changing quite dramatically.
* Using my “11 Notes” format, I looked at various aspects of what exactly is changing. This includes blurred lines between production and consumption, the shift in power as consumers become part of the multitude, new definitions of quality, and the impact of data that lets consumers better understand their own behavior.
The key takeaway for startup founders is that we’re still directly in the middle of a shift that is remaking the entire economy. Changing consumption patterns create a feedback loop that is only becoming more and more powerful, reaching into every corner of our everyday lives. This is also a cautionary tale for any legacy businesses and institutions, who are running out of time to apply the old adage of “Adapt or die”.
👉 Read the details in The Future of Consumption.
🚴♀️ All About Delivery
On Friday, I curated an edition focused on one of the industries that has clearly accelerated during the pandemic: delivery. Restaurants, groceries, e-commerce… they’re all predicated on the very detail-oriented and labor-intensive (for the moment) world of delivery.
* My own writings on the subject date back to 2015, and it’ll come as no surprise that a large part of that was looking at the development of Amazon. But that really was just the beginning, and not just for new players. While several major retailers have been unable to make the transition to the Entrepreneurial Age, there are also quite a few others, including Target and Best Buy, that are far from giving up in the battle for consumers’ hearts and dollars.
One interesting thing to note is that delivery is one of the few areas where a European champion has acquired a major US-based player, with Just Eat Takeaway’s purchase of Grubhub last summer. Having a business grown in Europe win out over one developed in the US is a happy moment indeed, and one that can serve as encouragement for the current and coming generations of European entrepreneurs.
👉 Discover the implications in last week’s ‘Friday’s Digest’: All About Delivery.
📈 Funding Profitable Businesses
It was a sad day in the venture capital world recently when a bold yet obvious experiment in finding different ways to fund businesses, Indie.vc, announced it was closing down. Part of Tim O’Reilly’s AlphaTech Ventures, Indie.vc was dedicated to funding businesses that arrived at profitability much earlier than traditional VC-funded companies—an example that I often cited of how the venture industry was diffracting and experimenting with new ways of investing capital.
* Unfortunately, the Indie.vc example seems to be (for the moment) an example of how innovation can run up against obstacles coming from many different directions. In their case, it wasn’t a problem relating to returns, per se, but rather reluctance on the part of Indie.vc’s own limited partners to have exposure to those kinds of businesses rather than more traditional VC-compatible companies. Put simply, institutional LPs weren’t enthusiastic about steady smaller profits when compared to the possibility of exponential returns.
I do wonder, however, if this isn’t more of a pause for Indie.vc (or other efforts following a similar path) rather than a complete cancellation. After all, the wildly hot markets, both public and private, that investors are currently enjoying when it comes to tech companies will, at some point, cool off. And at that point the lessons learned by Tim, Bryce and the rest of the team at Indie.vc could prove quite attractive indeed.
👉 Get more details on how it all happened in Funding Profitable Businesses.
Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!
🕹 Want to dig deeper into video games? Read my wife Laetitia Vitaud’s latest edition of Laetitia@Work, published last Thursday: Video Games: my new frontier?
Also have a look at my colleague Younès Rharbaoui’s excellent edition of Chasing Paper on the topic: 10 Thoughts on the Gaming Industry 🎮 (June 2020)
🇫🇷 You’d rather listen to our (=Laetitia and I) conversations in French? Give the latest editions of Nouveau Départ dedicated to Tout comprendre sur la crise au Texas 🤠 Notre nouveau projet : "La Flamme et le vent" 🔥 Vaccins : pourquoi les États-Unis vont-ils si vite ? 💉a try.
🚀 My latest contribution to my firm The Family’s newsletter is about the impossibility of knowing if your business will be scalable or not at the early stage. Have a look: The quest for scale.
🦊🦁🦢 Finally, don’t miss the latest installments of The Family’s newsletter:
* Vote for entrepreneurs! (Alice Zagury)
* The explosion of weirdness (Mathias Pastor)
* The rise of the software conglomerates (Balthazar de Lavergne)
* Thinking patterns (Oussama Ammar)
All recent editions:
* Funding Profitable Businesses—for subscribers only.
* All About Delivery—for subscribers only.
* The Future of Consumption—for subscribers only.
* More About SPACs. The 'K-Shaped' Recovery. Crypto Digest. A Tribute to Texas.—for everyone.
* We All Need a Lone Star State—for subscribers only.
* All About Crypto—for subscribers only.
* How Governments Can Deal With the 'K-Shaped' Recovery—for subscribers only.
* Europe & Silicon Valley w/ Toni Cowan-Brown. Capital Call. AI. International Expansion. Consumer Goods.—for everyone.
* Some Quick Notes on SPACs—for subscribers only.
* Vaughn Tan on Uncertainty—for subscribers only.
European Straits is a 5-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!
From Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Nicolas
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.europeanstraits.com - もっと表示する
