'venture capital' Category
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Content is King; Distribution is King Kong
September 22, 2015I love the expression by which I titled this post, though I cannot take credit for it. That goes to Laurens Rutten, CEO of our portfolio company BoosterMedia, a leading network for cross-platform mobile games. The importance of digital distribution has been on my mind a lot lately, and bubbled up again last week as […]
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France has its tech Unicorn. Next it needs its Unicorpse.
September 15, 2015France allegedly crowned its first unicorn last week when BlaBlaCar raised a new funding round led by Insight Venture Partners of $160 million at a post-money valuation of $1.2 billion. Actually, there is some debate on whether BlaBlaCar represents France’s very first unicorn (some argue that Vente-Privée should hold that title, but that’s beside the […]
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“My Venereal Disease” (and other startup naming blunders)
September 8, 2015{Note: This post is meant to provoke but is not intended to offend. Most of the startups I mention, and I’ve met a lot of them, have pretty good products. Moreover, I credit their founders for their creativity and daring in a language that is not their native tongue: important traits of successful entrepreneurs.} Over […]
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Should I accept an unpaid internship? (and other musings on working for free)
September 1, 2015From time to time people ask my opinion on whether they should accept an unpaid internship offer. My answer to the question usually involves more questions: Is the job with a startup that is hard-pressed for cash, or rather with an established company, investment bank, or VC fund? Is the uncompensated period clearly delimited in […]
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If I could travel back in time, I’d…
August 4, 2015How would you complete this sentence? It’s deep summer here in Europe right now, so let’s hold a little creative thought experiment. Imagine you met someone with a time machine that could help you travel backward in time to a single point earlier in your life. What would you do? To which point in time […]
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How a Scrabble champion reflects our new era of disruption
July 28, 2015The Championnat Mondial de Scrabble Francophone (the French-language world Scrabble championship) crowned its winner last week: Nigel Richards. If that name doesn’t sound French to you, that’s because it isn’t. Nigel Richards hails from New Zealand. In fact, he doesn’t even know how to speak French! New Zealander wins French Scrabble Championship sounds like a […]
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Nikkei acquires FT, and debunks several myths
July 27, 2015As rather recursively reported in the FT last Thursday, Japan’s largest media company, Nikkei, will acquire the Financial Times Group from Pearson for a handsome £844 million. The eleventh hour offer for the London-based global news organization stunned rival bidders, and debunked several myths along the way in my opinion: Myth #1: Japanese acquirers are […]
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Summer reading list 2015
July 22, 2015Time for the RudeVC summer reading list again. The only guidelines for qualifying for this list are: i) to have some connection to startups, technology, VC, or Europe; and ii) to not be too heavy or overbearingly intellectual (it is summer, after all). It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower. I […]
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When engineers mix with artists, amazing things can happen. So why segregate them?
July 7, 2015Skimming through the alumni magazine of my undergraduate engineering school, I stumbled onto an article about a student project from a course called Data as Art. Data as Art is a course that groups students from my engineering school alma mater with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in a combined art-meets-engineering curriculum. […]
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Is corporate VC a KPI for a bubble ?
June 23, 2015It feels like there are an awful lot of corporations setting up venture capital departments these days. I say ‘feels’, because my evidence was purely intuitive and anecdotal… until now. Compiling the data for global corporate venture deals all the way back to 1995 proved challenging. In fact, there were so many conflicting sources that […]
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Did Apple just hobble Criteo’s achilles heel ?
June 16, 2015Apple caused some reverberations last week among ad-tech companies when it revealed that iOS 9 will permit “Content Blocking Safari Extensions”. In other words, the next release of iOS will allow users to install ad-blockers on its mobile browser, according to the documentation provided to developers at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Criteo’s stock plunged more […]
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France labor law: the cliff of 50
June 13, 2015People that read this space regularly know that I’m not one to shy away from criticizing the French government’s policies when I believe they’re anti-startup or anti-innovation. So it’s only fair that I applaud the government when it acts to reform antiquated rules. In my opinion, Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ announcement this week of some […]