Month: September 2024

Carta has created a site called Data Desk for all their reports in private markets, startups and venture capital. A good reference site.

To get a daily pulse of such data, follow Carta’s Head of Insights Peter Walker on LinkedIn.

I find Meta’s Orion smart glasses to be really interesting. The glasses form factor combined with AI, voice commands and sound has a good chance of creating new platform after the smartphone. Even if it is likely some time off before it goes from internal use at Meta to general release.

Swedish battery-maker Northvolt will let 20 % of its staff go. The company is looking to lower costs as it seeks new financing after delays to scaling up initial battery production.

For people following Swedish and international business media (or the company’s own communications a few weeks ago), the news is not surprising. Björn Jeffery gives a good overview on the situation in SvD (in Swedish).

I haven’t followed Northvolt closely, but it is clear to me that there will be a bunch of learnings (not all new) and a few challenges that are difficult to avoid will have been highlighted when the situation is over.

Factories and new production systems are/can be very expensive to get going. Northvolt has managed that by being amazingly good at raising capital (truly one of the best). But when big projects are not ready on time, it is difficult to construct a financing setup that is resilient. Especially when the ambition to grow fast has been extremely high.

I’m honored to have been named to The Nordic 100 – 2024, which recognizes the 100 most impactful and influential figures in the Nordic tech scene.

Mastercard has acquired Recorded Future for $2.65 billion. This makes it one of the largest Swedish-related technology exits of all time.

It’s slightly more than eBay’s acquisition of Skype in nominal terms ($2.6 billion in 2005), but adjusted for market valuation levels and inflation I’d say it’s a smaller acquisition.

It is larger than Microsoft’s acquisition of Mojang (makers of Minecraft) at $2.5 billion, PayPal’s acquisition of iZettle at $2.2 billion and Visa’s purchase of Tink at $2.15 billion.

The larger outcomes that come to mind went public on the stock exchange (e.g. Spotify and King (makers of Candy Crush)).

First episode of the the startup investor podcast This Won’t Last. Topics include Founder Mode, Swedish and Norwegian tax systems, state of venture and AI investments.

S3 has followed up last week’s interview about 1X’s Neo with putting one in their home and seeing how it behaves.

Financial Times writes that private equity group TPG is eyeing to acquire a stake in marketplace Vinted at a $5 billion valuation.

In 2023 Vinted had sales of €596 million (+61% from 2022) and made €18 million in net profit.

One of Sweden‘s most experienced, if not the most experienced, angel investors Lars Lindgren has written the book Mitt liv som affärsängel based on the experience from more than eighty investments. Having received a copy today, I’m looking forward to read it.

One of the core elements in Paul Graham’s Founder Mode is that well-meaning people (which I assume include investors) had given Brian Chesky (at Airbnb) poor advice on how to organize and manage the company.

I think that reflects the fact that one size fits all advice usually doesn’t fit. Both the person giving advice and the founder taking advice need to think deeply how general rules apply to the specific founder and company.

Viktor Nyblom said it well in a LinkedIn comment:

“I think it’s about culture. One a founder stops being true to who they are and how they act (eg to start managing “properly”) the culture in the company changes. This could be a good thing if the org was stressed by a founder who is medling too much. But it could also be a bad thing if nobody steps in to say “this is not good and/or fast enough”.”