Henrik Torstensson's Weblog

Forbes ranks the most successful venture capitalists in Europe in 2023.

Charlie Munger, the 99-year old vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and often quotable investor died yesterday.

A PDF with a collection of Charlie’s writings and Q&A sessions at shareholders’ meetings. His interview with Acquired is only about a month old.

Atomico has released the 2023 edition of State of European Tech covering startups and venture financing in Europe.

A startup, and for that matter all organisations, have limited resources. To get customers to adopt a new behavior or a new product you need to be a lot better on a few things (let’s say 10x). To achieve that requires an intense focus. This means there is limited time to do everything else, so it should be done but not more (let’s call it good enough).

A startup should try to do some things 10x better and most things just good enough. Figuring out which areas needs to be 10x:d and doing them really well is very difficult.

(This was inspired by a lunch discussion with Stockholm-based entrepreneur.)

Peter Thiel on four ways to “build a monopoly“:

• Super fast distribution on a very thin product (e.g. Twitter)
• A technological advantage that is continually built upon: you come up with something new and steadily improve (e.g. enterprise SaaS software)
• A truly brilliant breakthrough (e.g. Bitcoin)
• Complex coordination—where you take a lot of little pieces and coordinate them into something new

Sumeet Gajri writes about the tail ratio and how big the potential outcome of an individual company investments need to be for a venture capitalist to “return the fund”.

Article by Preface Ventures with benchmarks for VC funds, similar Point9’s napkin for SaaS companies.

Breakit has made a list of 55 individuals that they believe are key players in the Stockholm startup ecosystem (Swedish, paywall). It’s a good initial sketch, but doesn’t give the complete picture as Stockholm is a large ecosystem and there’s a bunch of helpful people that are not really in the media.

But the fact that Alliance VC’s analyst Robin Wänlund made the list is good journalism.

According to Ravio, as reported by Tech.eu, European startup hiring is down 40 % this year. And about 50 % for later stage startups. Given the overall environment that is no surprise, and one driver for the higher revenue per FTE numbers that OpenView reported.

Next week is the Slush conference in Helsinki. I will be there, as will the full Alliance VC team. Reach out if you are going!