I enjoyed Google’s Startup Day Stockholm 2024 today. Firstly I found myself nodding in agreement to most things Instabee founder Alexis Priftis’ said about startups and venture capital. Including his skepticism of venture capital and investors (after himself having raised significant amounts of money). His skepticism also included many other things, to be fair.
The VC panel I was on together with Rebecka (Inventure), Magnus (byFounders) and William (Northzone) I think resulted in an interesting discussion for the audience (it was at least fun to talk to a room filled with smart entrepreneurs). Some things I mentioned:
- Venture capital is an ‘extreme sport’. It’s best when aiming to build a very large company extremely fast. The mindset should be to reach €100 million in revenue in 7-10 years. This means getting to €1 million in revenue within 12-24 months, then triple revenue two years in a row and then double revenue for three years. This is not ‘normal’ nor something that is a good fit for many companies.
- Raising venture capital is simple but very hard. Some rough metrics is that Alliance VC look at 2000+ presentations per year, meet 300+ companies and invest in 5-10 companies. Reaching out and having meetings with a partner is easy compared to building a very good product/startup, which is the basis for raising capital.
- Alliance VC partners with ambitious founders that use technology to solve big problems, which most often makes us back startups in Climate & Sustainability, Digital Health, Fintech and Business/Enterprise software.
- 3 of 6 partners at Alliance VC have each been part of building a digital health company, so if you are building in that area we can be a knowledgable partner.
- For pre-seed and seed companies, it is a good market to raise venture capital.
