On Thursday February 22nd I will participate in the jury at the startup pitch competition Pitch40 at TechArena.
I’m looking forward to join the session for digital health/health tech startups.
Digital health is one of Alliance VC’s four focus areas and an area where three of the six partners at Alliance VC have recent founder and/or senior management experience.
Also, if you are in Stockholm for TechArena and want to meet, please reach out.
I am amazed, while not surprised as the direction of AI development has been quite clear, of the quality of the videos created from text with OpenAI’s Sora. A wow moment.
Richard Sandenskog, formerly an investor with Schibsted and a product manager with Yahoo, has started a Swedish-language interview podcast called Dagens Tech about the Swedish technology ecosystem (available on Spotify and Apple).
Richard has been doing a couple of episodes about a topic, e.g. data tech/data journalism, games, music tech and space tech. Some of the people interviewed have been Jens Nylander, Jonas Bonde (Car.info), Stefan Hanna (Coffee Stain Studios), Adam Schaub (Seidr), Niklas Agevik (Reason Studios) and Henrik Lenberg (Auxy).
I like the focus on Swedish tech, the 30 minute format and the depth/history/context Richard brings to the interviews.
Ilkka Paananen, co-founder and CEO of Supercell, has written an article about what’s next for Supercell: Comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s a very good read, including thoughts on how to scale a successful company’s operations without losing the culture and becoming bureaucratic.
Another thing worth reading is Ilkka’s description of how great products make companies profitable, and how profits let companies build great products. That rings very true to me.
Before I get to the actual results from last year, I want to explain how we think about financial results in general. We see them as something that enables us to do more of what we’re passionate about. We have been lucky to be very profitable for years now, which is important because it enables us to take a very long term view on everything, including keeping the quality bar for our games very high and enabling us to try new risky things.
However, we don’t see financial results as the end goal but just means to the end, which is to create better games for our players. The financial results are an important signal, however, as to whether we are doing a good job for our players. If we’re not creating content and experiences that players feel are worth paying for, then bluntly put we’re not creating good enough content and experiences.
Ilkka Paananen
Alliance VC, together with angels, has invested in Norwegian/Dutch company Ciloo.
Ciloo helps multinational companies facilitate a shift from centralized mass production to local and on-demand production of products supporting e.g. employer branding, sales and marketing, recruitment, loyalty programs and corporate branding. Ciloo’s platform for internal e-commerce let companies better manage this, leading to reductions in carbon emissions, enhanced brand control, and lower costs.
Norwegian Simployer Group has acquired the Stockholm-based human resources system AlexisHR, an Alliance VC portfolio company. More in Breakit (Swedish) and Finansavisen (Norwegian). Congrats to Nima Samimi & team!
Helsinki-based short-term rental company Bob W has raised a €40 million Series B from Evli Growth, founders of Supercell, Wise and Teleport and previous investors like byFounders.
Bob W is like a vertically integrated Airbnb experience, controlling everything from booking to operating the rooms and buildings. The capital will be used to expand into more European cities.
I like Michael’s recommendation of starting with clearly telling the investor what the company does.
What I have been thinking about is his recommendation that the second thing should be most impressive thing about the company, not the “standard thing”.
I.e. if you are growing very fast (have traction), lead with that. If the product is great, lead with that. If the team is very impressive, lead with that.
This is not the most commonly recommended approach, but resonates with me.
Brad Gerstner (founder Altimeter Capital) and Bill Gurley (former partner at Benchmark) have started a new podcast on technology, startups and investing called BG2Pod (Spotify | Apple | YouTube | X).
Still early with only two episodes published (second episode had Box founder and CEO Aaron Levie as a guest), but I like the focus on company building, valuations and investing.