Our own Maximilian Wilhelm hosted a panel last month on how to raise venture capital in the French versus the German ecosystems. Keep scrolling to read the insights and highlights below. 👇
Insightful thread from Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch, on the lessons learned along the journey of building Twitch. Quick takeaways include: ignore your competitors, but don’t ignore their customers and do the job before you hire for it.
Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Coda and ex-VP of product at Youtube, on what it was like being acquired by Google and the key processes used by the company as they scaled through a period of hypergrowth.
Great post by Lenny Rachitsky on how to choose your north star metric, based on a survey of employees at over 40 of today’s most successful growth-stage companies.
The second in a series of blogs we are publishing on how to ace your marketplace fundraise, here are our top tips and investor insights for how to ace your seed-stage marketplace pitch.
Great post by Sangeet Paul Choudary, co-author of The Platform Revolution, on all things virality, including how to build virality into products and startups and how to increase it.
Lollipop, the newest addition to our portfolio, uses AI to autosuggest tailored recipes and build your shopping cart. The round was led by Speedinvest Network Effects, with the participation of JamJar Investments and several high-profile angels. The app launched in public beta last week - the first 10K beta testers to sign up will get access to premium features for life.
GoStudent, our Austrian portfolio company that provides a marketplace for K-12 students to connect with tutors, has raised a $244m Series C round at a $1.7bn valuation. The round was led by DST Global with participation from SoftBank, Tencent, Dragoneer and all major existing investors.
Lizee, our French portfolio company that provides a white-label rental platform to brands, has raised a €1.3m round to continue to support brands in their transition to the circular economy. The round was led by Ring Capital with participation from several high profile new angels and all major existing investors.
TIER Mobility, our German e-scooter portfolio company, has raised $60m in the form of debt from Goldman Sachs. The funds will be used to expand its multimodal fleet and network of battery charging stations dubbed TEN - TIER Energy Network.
June was a busy month for marketplaces with lots of new funding announcements and acquisitions, and over $3.5bn in transaction volume from marketplace deals. Here is a selection of the ones we found interesting…
Our portfolio companies are always hiring exceptional talent! If you or someone you know would love to work in a fast-paced marketplace startup, check out the open jobs at our startups here.
We hope you enjoyed this issue, brought to you by Alexandra on behalf of the Speedinvest Network Effects team ✌️
Comments, questions, tips, feedback? Give us a thumbs-up or thumbs-down below, we look forward to hearing from you!
The Speedinvest Network Effects team invests in SaaS-enabled platforms and marketplaces and other Network Effects-driven businesses where the value of a product increases with every new user. Enabled by new technologies in areas we cannot even imagine today, the team believes these are the businesses that will continue to revolutionize the world.
