?????? Investing in European unicorns

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In the latest episode of my podcast, I spoke to a dear friend of mine and one of the leading seed investors in Europe, Reshma Sohoni. Reshma is the co-founder and managing partner at Seedcamp, Europe's leading fund for early-stage startups.

>>>> To hear our full discussion, go here

You've been investing in tech in Europe for more than a decade. How has the European tech investment scene changed in that time?

Looking back, we knew what was making Silicon Valley successful. It was the early funding, the mid-stage funding, the scale-up funding, all of that was there. You had some incredible role model companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, and they were acquirers as well, so there was a whole ecosystem there.

I think the big change in Europe in the past decade is that you have access to capital, including capital flying in from China and the US. You have acquirers. Most of our companies have exited to Amazon, Apple and Google, actually. You have talent already homegrown in Europe or coming in from abroad. You have some of the most highly regarded engineering institutions literally spread across the European footprint. So the talent is there, alongside capital institutions like London, for centuries at this point. So the infrastructure is there, too.

One of the biggest things is that we have countless villages and at least twenty-seven different cities across Europe that can claim to be centers of tech innovation and investment, whereas in the U.S., for such a massive continent, it really is just Silicon Valley. It's always seen as the Valley. Talent has many places to go across Europe. You don't have as many of those housing problems and cost of living problems and so on and so forth. I think the rise of remote work works particularly well in Europe. So I think Europe’s building its tech industry very differently. 

Of the thousands of start-ups you look at every year, you must get a very good view of the kinds of ways entrepreneurs are looking at the world, the sorts of problems they see emerging and the ways in which they want to solve them. What are the trends you're seeing today?

There's a massive structural change in what is an employee and employer. That's only happened in the last century or so, and it's changing again. We didn't use to have such structured organisations and workforces, and I think we're going back to the unbundling or companies. 

A lot of the startups we see are addressing that fact. The entire stack of what it means to be an organisation is opening up, and everything from salary and salary finance, to benefits, to pensions, to the physical environments of desks and buildings. It's all changing.

When we see un-bundling, what we try to do is actually go after the lowest common denominator. So for us that was in fintech was TransferWise and Revolut, which is easy for people to adopt.

>>> Listen to our full discussion here