Month: March 2023
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Slow things down
Harry Stebbings interviewed Mike Maples of Floodgate on 20VC. Discussion covers some learnings for startups from the SVB debacle. One discussion topic towards the end of the program is around deployment speed for a venture fund. I find this interesting as it is, as Mike says, one of few things a venture firm can fully…
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A long life
At the age of 94 Intel co-founder Gordon Moore has died. After working at Shockley Semiconductor and co-founding Fairchild Semiconductor, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce co-founded Intel in 1968. He made the prediction, in 1965, that transistors on an integrated chip would double every year, which became known as Moore’s Law. It’s a reminder that…
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Humanoid robots
Today it was announced that Alliance VC, together with OpenAI, Tiger Global and others, has invested in Norwegian 1X. 1X makes androids (humanoid robots), which is a more futuristic business than most startups we invest in. My colleague Arne Tonning has written a Medium post about how Alliance got to the investment in 1X. Go…
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History rhyming
Streaming continues to be a competitive arena, so rumors that Apple is considering going for rights to UK Premier League football are not surprising. Especially given how Sky used Premier League football to scale its then new satellite tv in the 1990’s and how Amazon has secured premier sports rights in both US and UK.…
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Simple stories
Building a company has a lot of nuance and dealing with people and technology is complex. But when it comes to fundraising from venture capitalists (and others) a big advantage is to have a simple story of what you are going to do. Not shallow, but simple (and ambitious). To take every different variable affecting…
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High standards
Ravi Gupta is a partner at Sequoia and former COO/CFO at Instacart. His blog post The Real Competition is the Water is worth a read, especially in the for startups difficult environment of 2023. What matters is moving your company towards excellence. What does that mean? Look at your 2023 plan and be honest with…
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When small is big
In the Swedish reporting around Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic and Signature, they have often been referred to as niche banks (or in similar ways). Especially in the reporting around Alecta’s move from Swedish banks Handelsbanken and Swedbank to the mentioned banks. However, it is worth remembering that everything is bigger in the US. A…
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More layoffs likely
As we are closing in on the end of the first quarter of 2023, I’ll do a prediction for the rest of the year. I think we will see many public technology firms follow in the footsteps of Meta and make another round of significant layoffs so the total layoffs are, at least, in the…
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Algebra of Happiness
I thought Scott Galloway was a bit hyperbolic with regards to Big Tech a few years ago, so I haven’t followed his writing or podcasts closely. However, I liked this author’s talk on his book about the algebra of happiness.
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Copilot needed for search
An example of that the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed is that as Microsoft is launching Copilot for Microsoft365 (a.k.a. Office), search still feels like pre-Google in LinkedIn and Outlook. Which areas adoption of AI-powered software will move quickly in and which will be slow will be very interesting to…
Henrik Torstensson's Weblog 