Month: December 2023

I hope you’ve had a good 2023 and that you will have an even better 2024!

Earlier this year I wrote about the temporary death of digital consumer startups. That was mainly about larger, heavily-funded startups.

I see several founders bootstrap (or friends and family/angel fund) digital consumer products with a clear path to $2-10 million in annual revenue and good profitability.

Not big enough for significant venture funding, but great for founders if they haven’t raised a lot of capital.

Tomorrow, December 27th, it is one year since I started blogging again. My goal was to publish daily, but I came up a couple of days short and the number of posts got to 360.

Three takeaways:

• Writing daily for almost a year has forced me to think more clearly about topics related to startup and venture capital. It takes time and focus, but overall writing has been a positive.
• Consistency is key. I missed my first day in November, and once I did that I started to miss more days.
• Being timely on subject and thinking about good headlines work, especially when sharing on social media (where LinkedIn has been the far strongest source of readers).

If you have any feedback, please reach out.

Hopefully 2024 will be economically better than 2023, but if it isn’t here are some ways to identify early issues for SaaS companies.

It’s been an eventful 2023, and as the Holidays I hope you get some time with family and friends over the next couple of days and over New Year’s.

20VC interviews Gustav Söderström (Spotify), Scott Belsky (Adobe) and Tomer Cohen (LinkedIn) about AI, product and design. Very good listen.

After 15 months Adobe has canceled its $20 billion acquisition of Figma, as it has had problems getting approval from regulators in EU, Britain and the US. Adobe will pay Figma $1 billion as a break-up fee.

The European Commission has released a statement on the canceled acquisition, saying: “It is important in digital markets, as well as in more traditional industries, to not only look at current overlaps but to also protect future competition. This applies in particular to transactions by which large, established companies acquire successful disruptive innovators.“

While protecting competition is important, there will likely be unintended consequences to the funding of innovation if large technology companies cannot acquire companies that today build related products, just because they could build directly competitive products in the future.

I think that to some extent regulators are getting the lesson of Meta’s/Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram backwards. I think a key reason Instagram managed to become enormous (vs just very large) is largely due to being operated by Meta. It is likely that without the acquisition Instagram would been much smaller (like Snapchat, Pinterest or Twitter) and been unable to build an ad platform that could compete with to Meta/Facebook.

Alliance VC is looking for an analyst. Great job for a young professional interested in startups and venture capital.

The tougher economic climate has gotten media conglomerates to focus more on cash flow today than future revenue growth, which means that the traditional studios are once again licensing tv and movies to Netflix.

It seems like the traditional studios want to be arms’ dealers to improve short-term financial results in addition to having a direct-to-consumer relationship, which I wrote about in February. Also worth noting, Netflix doesn’t see itself licensing its content to anyone else.

Meta has launched Threads in Europe and it is a completely chaotic experience. I guess it has an algorithmic approach to the content displayed in the feed by combing content from people I know with content from random people (technology, politicians, influencers).

Avoiding a blank screen is a good design principle, but this implementation is wild. Especially coming from an experienced team from Instagram/Meta.