Month: October 2024

The Swedish government should use smarter employee stock option legislation to create a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining Europe’s most promising startups and technology companies to establish tens of thousands of qualified, high-paying jobs in Sweden.

The rules for qualified employee stock options (QESO) were a clear improvement, but it is time for tweaks to improve the legislation. Because we should be ranking higher than place 13 among European countries when it comes to treatment of stock options and employee ownership in startups.

Adjustments to the legislation should include eligibility for larger startups (that employ hundreds of people or more) to use QESO (qualified employee stock options) and making sure fintech companies (including banks), that is a Swedish ecosystem strength, can use them.

But it should also include shortening the vesting cliff from 3 years to the market standard of 1 year cliff and 4 year vesting. That would be fair to employees and not excessively have the state lock them into one employer for three years if they want to keep their well-earned equity

Thomas takes an overarching look at venture capital, IPOs and unicorns (in similar vein as Coatue’s EMW presentation).

Nothing new for people thinking about startup and venture capital investing (regardless of founders, venture or growth investors or limited partners investing in funds). But delivered as a tightly packed 20 mins covering many of the most important points, including data and benchmarks and a good description of how public market investors think when they look at unicorns.

A round-up, after not blogging for a while of some interesting reads.

Iconiq: Scaling SaaS: Forging Excellence Through Fundamentals – Topline Growth and Operational Efficiency (and pdf)

Counterpoint Global: Measuring the Moat

Iconiq: 2024 State of AI report (and pdf)

Accel: Euroscape 2024: AI Eating Software (and pdf)

Sequoia: Generative AI’s Act o1

Brian Halligan, founder and formerly CEO of Hubspot, has written A Startup Founder To Scaleup CEO’s Journey from $0 to $25 billion (Halliganism’s).

A bunch of short snippets (“Halliganism’s”) on founding and building a startup including leading, culture, team, strategy, decision making, crisis management, improving your CEO craft, managing yourself, exits, planning and stepping away.

This will likely be a classic, and it is only a long blog post and not a book like The Hard Things About Hard Things or a very long presentation like the original Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility presentation (the 2024 version is a shorter document).