Fred Destin

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Seedcamp 2008: entrepreneurs, sharpen your pencils

Seedcamp, for those who do not know it, is the marquee event for seed startups.   If you have a killer product prototype but no money yet, this is the place for you.

The online application process will open in late June (stay tuned).  In the meantime the Seedcamp team has published the application guidelines, which you will find here.

Key dates for Seedcamp week are:

• August-10 -- Online applications close
• September 15-19: SeedCamp Week

Some of the great mentors you will meet at Seedcamp 2008 include Robin Klein and Michael Smith

Annoucing NTR Global, a $34M SaaS deal with Kennet

We just hit the wires with my latest foray into the wonderful world of entreprise software, NTR Global.  NTR Global is a Software-as-a-Service company that operates out of Barcelona and Dallas and has offices in all the major markets, selling remote support, access and admin solutions.

As you know I mostly focus on early stage digital media and e-commerce, but this was a deal I was extremely keen to do:

• Fantastic technology platform from tech visionary Joan Pons
• Proven commercial traction and fast growth
• Extremely impressive capital efficiency for a SaaS business
• Significant portion of the business coming from the US
• Great management team with strong US experience lead by Lluis Font

We are going to be disruptive on price, product and strategy with this one, particularly in the IT admin market, so watch this space.

For me (a) it's a great company to invest in and (b) it's good diversification from all the e-commerce and disruptive digital media work I have done.  Oh.  It's also clean teach really.  No more travel :-)

Max at Kennet has led this round.  Both he and I will be joining the board alongside fellow VC Xavier Lazarus.

Huge coup for Balderton: Bernard Liautaud !

Respect for what Barry Maloney is achieving with Balderton on the team side.  Besides my friend Bonanzinga and Tim Bunting, the latest addition to the team is none other than the founder and CEO of Business Objects, Bernard Liautaud (per PE HUB).

Liautaud brought BO from startup to IPO (an Atlas Venture investment) then from IPO to acquisition by SAP for $6.7 billion.  The original founder who took all the way, a rare animal.  OK, don't quote me on my recent post :-)

Althouth Bernard is an Atlas alumni (from Philippe Claude's days), I don't know the man.  I met him on the Eurostar once and we had a chat;  I expressed my admiration because of what he represents to younger guys like me, and he was extremely gracious in receiving the compliment.

Balderton also recently added Dharmash Mistry, former EMAP.

I must admit I had some serious doubt after the inamicable split from Benchmark US and the departures of Ynon and George.  But Maloney, Evans, Bunting, Bonanzinga et al and now Liautaud: what a line up!  As with all new teams they will have to gel and get their momentum flowing, but with this list of ingredients I am sure the resulting venture feast will be worthy of the great Bras.

 

Bernard Liautaud @ LeWeb (courtesy here)

Farewell to DailyMotion's co-creator Benjamin Bejbaum

Benjamin Bejbaum, the original founder of short-form entertainment site DailyMotion, has withdrawn from day-to-day operations at the company.  Many of you or guessed what is now official news after our PR release.

Ben will remain on the board and I know we will continue to benefit from his input, in particular on product strategy but on all other topics as well.

We (as in Atlas Venture) first identified DailyMotion in March 2003 when one of our guys (Pierre Festal) noticed their traffic uptick.  We did not move immediately (damn) and only proactively re-engaged in June.  I first met Ben at Les Deux Magots in Paris in spring 2005.  He was deeply engaged with two other venture firms and did not want to speak to us.  Through Jeremie Berrebi via Mark Oiknine, we managed to get 20 minutes with him which turned into 3 hours and an interrupted conversation since.

From the get-go I was impressed by a singular product vision that was both personal and credible, and an incredible ability to pitch the DailyMotion mantra and message.  Ben is a born communicator with some radical insights.

From the get-go it was also an astonishing roller-coaster.  I remember we passed top 100 around new-year 06/07, around the same time as the DailyMotion team stole the Xmas tree from our neighbours at Metro (Sapingrerie !).

One of the things that amazed me with Ben is a singular ability to pitch this business to anyone, including some fairly senior folks.  When he was in the zone, it was just a joy to behold.  One other, as I mentioned, was a a very pure and original product vision.

"Me, I like to share, you know"

Like anyone who has been that intensely involved in a business, I guess it is tough when you do not run anymore.  Ben is a 100% guy and he will be, I am sure, coming back to market shortly with his next disruptive idea.  Sure we had our moments, as with any hypergrowth company, but it certainly was a great kick for me to work with Ben from the early days and see this company evolve.

 

Why it's so hard being a Founder in France

I know we are going to get a ton of speculation about why he's leaving and the role of VCs and so on, particularly after the Tariq Affair (or here) so I would rather address this upfront. 

I already see a lot of nonsensical commentary (with all due respect) for example in the comment thread of Ouriel's post here: "triste nouvelle pour Benjamin".  Why ?  How do you know ?  Why is it sad to build a great business and pass it on to an experienced guy going forward ?

I had a chat with Mike Butcher on this topic recently who repeated my concerns on the Techcrunch UK blog.  Many folks will tell you that it's hard doing business in France because of social law or stock option rules.  This is only very partially true and there are workarounds to most issues.  The one big issue that keeps dogging us is that in France, only the boss seems to matter.  In the US, original founders are the real heroes and subsequent management, whilst also lauded, are fundamentally seen as highly competent hired guns.  The real gold dust is the founder.  But then founders often leave when the company grows, especially in highly product focused companies as is typical of Web2.  In France, everyone keeps getting upset when founders have to leave the CEO role.  This puts some kind of moral pressure on everyone and a feeling that somehow it's a failure on the part of the founder to let the CEO post go.  Let founders do what they are good at.

Let's repeat what everyone knows:

• the real value is company creation; that's the hardest thing to do.  Innovating in hostile environments take raw talent and complete suspension of disbelief.  The founders who make this happen are the heroes of our industry.
• Unless you are Dell, Jobs or Bezos (or some guys in our portfolio such as Liautaud, Ahlberg, Patel), you just won't be the right guy to be CEO.  When you are a technically minded founder, is your dream job really to have a queue of people constantly in front of your office complaining about their compensation, lack of resources, why tech isn't delovering on the roadmap, the necessity to have tighter processes etc.  No !  Of course not !  And guess what, that's what being the CEO of a larger company is mostly about.  Founders don't often make great late stage CEOs, let's get over it.

I urge you to read Ouriel's great post on this topic, featuring Steve Austin.

Building a company to a large size and then passing it on to experienced managers is great -- it's a mature statement. 

I look forward to seeing Ben's great new adventure as it emerges.  Ben, just don't push that RT 1200 too hard huh ?  And thanks again for all the hard work.

 

Memories ....

Above: This is Ben's orginal profile photo on Daily -- boy does he look younger !  4 years of hard startup work later ...

Below: Da First Video !  6M video assets later ...

camera ?
Uploaded by RobertDeRosny

 

Goodbye Microsoft ! Yahoo Google !

Seems like Techcrunch and Wall Street Journal get to beat everybody else on the really BIG news.  TC/WSJ have forced Yahoo to confirm in a press release that it had ended talks with Microsoft today for any kind of deal, with Techcrunch leading on an expected Yahoo / Google search tie-up and other rumours (such as senior execs leaving).  But ... markets don't move for a full 3.5 hours...

A deal with Google on search is now widely expected.  Techcrunch's Mike A himself broke that one but it seems his timing was ambitious (he was claiming a big announcement on this at 1.30 PST -- none so far).  Probably trying a touch too hard to outdo the old media folks he ?

Two things are for sure:

• Mr Icahn must have used some flowery language at around 10.38AM today
• The anti-G alliance just won ~ 120 million new converts

What's also interesting to me here is the timelag between the rumour release and the stock impact.  It really take a company press release and a Reuters hit to make the markets move. 

• 10:37AM PST TechC
• 11.38AM PST PaidContent
• 14:05 Full story on Reuters
• Stock really goes down at around 2PM

Why ?  Simple.  Credibility !  Question: can someone tell me how often breaking news from Mike A are actually on or directionally correct ?  Can you derive a public market informational advantage from reading Mike A ?  Look at the volumes traded below: does not like a serious seller even took a risk.

Technorati Tags: yahoo,google,techcrunch,wsj

Seedcamp in Paris

Last Friday the Seedcamp train was making its scheduled stop through Paris. 

Thanks to the good work of folks like Gilles B, Codor, Leafar, Jacques etc there was a good crop of startups that have been covered in detail by Mike B at TC.

SC continues to excel with the quality of its mentors; many startups were amazed to be able to interact with folks like Remy Amouroux.

For my part I had great fun moderating a panel with Dom Vidal (Index, Yahoo, Kelkoo), Gilles Babinet (Musiwave, Eyeka et. al.), Jerome Touze (WAYN), Jean Schmitt (Sofinnova) and Dider Kuhn (Screentonic).  I won't bore you with pearls of semi-wisdom but having folks that have built, financed and exit businesses around the table was great.  As is the style for Seedcamp, we tried to keep the discussion deeply pragmatic and practical.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Leafar, people as above.

Daniel Kahn (with J Bouteiller) shows French lawyers are Mac-cool

Technorati Tags: seedcamp,paris,startups

Sweet! Two sites in the French top 25 !

Big is not necessarily beautiful, but two of the companies I am involved with, DailyMotion and PriceMinister, show up in Nielsen's April 08 audience measurements for France.  Nice, both because DailyMotion is still edging ahead of the YouTube behemoth (look! no advertising!) and because, on the ecommerce side, PriceMinister comes in at the same size as FNAC both being behind a site you may have come across before, eBay.  Well done to PKM and team at Price, 6M official uniques for e-commerce is an awesome achievement !!  All that is left to do is to match to turnover of SNCF.com now :-))))

With the recent acquisitions of Doctissimo, AuFeminin etc we are also the only independents left on that list with Skyrock.

The less francophile amongst you will have noticed that 1/2/3/6/9/10/13/14 are all US players...  Time to wake up guys...

 

Nielsen Unique audiences (000), France, April 2008

Elvis has left the building: Good Coelho leaves Balderton

The rock star wannabe turned venture capitalist, the "uncle" to many a rising star in the European venture market, George Coelho has left Balderton and focus on the emerging opportunity for the next 250 years, i.e. cleantech, with Good Energies.

George will be a Managing Director heading up the venture opoortunities from Zug.  He was a founder of Benchmark Europe and behind companies such as Kalido, Orchestria, Video Island (Saul Klein's business which merged with ScreenSelect and later Arts Alliance's Lovefilm) and as I understand it Codemasters (though I think Ynon was on the board).  George was previously with ETF Group as CIO and with Intel Capital as head of the international strategic investment group.  He is also hilarious.

<--- Can you recognise this man ?

From where I am sitting this make a lot of sense; when you were the Managing Partner of Benchmark Europe, moving to another fund seems to make limited sense.  Moving sideways to a next-gen investor that also allows you to work out of Switzerland (George is based in Lugano) is undoubtedly a logical next move.  I wish him best of luck !  After all, clean tech is overhyped, overfunded and overexposed (as one example the SPPV index of solar businesses was up a whopping 2,300% over the last 4 years), so it will take all his wits to keep the right deals rolling in.  Good Energies was ranked as NEF's top cleantech investor in 2007 (ok, by number of deals :-)), so this should be a good platform from which to rise above the noise.

Ventech awarded

Congratulations to my friends at Ventech for their French "Venture Capital House of the Year" award (Les Echos - Capital Finance).   The tech team is Jean Bourcereau, Alain Caffi and Eric Huet.

Ventech raised a €150M Fund III in 2006, making them one of the key players in the French market and recognising good performance post bubble.  Their previous fund was a 2000 vintage.  Like Wellington Partners (or Atlas :-)) it's great to see names that have navigated through difficult times to come out stronger on the other side.

On the tech side they have done well on the back of companies like MeilleurTaux, Alapage, Musiwave etc (I don't know which are the key return drivers).  They also keep doing really gutsy deals like MRAM stalwart Crocus (wow).

I assume they are going to be drinking great wine ordered from Emery's gem of a wine store, 1855.  Here's to you guys !  Well done.

 

Here is Jean Bourcereau trying to look older then he is :-)

Eric "au naturel" Huet

Alain Caffi