Our First 18 Months
Find out what we have been doing in the last 18 months:
Our First 18 Month
Blog
A picture paints a thousand words.
About a year ago, I received an email from Florian, introduced through a mutual friend, with the subject line “Do you know Usersnap?”. I didn’t. We met, Florian pitched me the service, an incredibly easy to use yet super useful way of doing screenshots right in the browser, with the ability to handle even complex Javascript, awkward DOMs and the option to add notes and markers to the screenshot without any effort – the ideal tool to enable everybody to give continuous feedback.
Simple, effortless, useful. Those were my first thoughts. I remember going into our weekly Pipeline meeting, where we discuss startups we’ve seen and take an immediate decision whether to dig deeper or not. I presented Usersnap in exactly that meeting, about an hour after I met Florian and we all gave it an immediate “Go”. Product was good, team was a great mix and we could clearly see a global market.
We started talking about a potential investment, first Florian wanted to take some time to perfect the product and learn more from the early users that were already using it, than we had our hands full with other deals and the always stressful but superb Pioneers Festival, but then, around that time, our talks became clearer and converged to a deal that we signed soon afterwards.
Yesterday we signed the final papers, including some co-investments by Business Angels Usersnap had lined up, a scenario that is frequent in our investments. And although we call ourselves Speedinvest, sometimes good things happen to those who wait. We are very happy to welcome Florian, Gregor and Josef to our portfolio and we look forward to working with you.
Go ahead! Try it! A picture paints a thousand words.
Leave a comment
Navigation specialist indoo.rs receives funding from tecnet equity, SpeedInvest and Techinvest
Vienna, Austria – 20th February, 2013 – indoo.rs, a technology leader in the rapidly growing field of indoor localization and navigation, received a significant 6 figure equity investment in a seed round by Austrian funds tecnet equity and SpeedInvest joined by strategic investor Techinvest.
Indoor positioning and mapping is expected to be the next big innovation shaping the mapping and localization industry and one of the ‘Top 15 Emerging Technologies To Watch’ according to Forrester Research (1). Existing “outdoor” solutions, such as from Google, Nokia, and Microsoft, are ubiquitous on today’s mobile devices and critical for the success of any mobile platform. However, people spend 90% of their time indoors, where existing solutions that rely on GPS rarely function.
To determine a user’s indoors location, indoo.rs‘ mobile technology combines available signals from the device sensors (including accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer, and compass) with ambient electromagnetic signals such as Wi-Fi, geomagnetic fields and Bluetooth. The indoo.rs platform allows for the rapid creation and scalable management of indoor maps as well.
The technology of indoo.rs is used today by customers and partners to deliver on B2B and B2C use cases, in venues such as airports, shopping malls and convention centers, and in segments ranging from retail to public safety.
The indoo.rs platform and SDK enable application developers to incorporate indoor positioning and navigation capabilities into their applications and deliver end-to-end solutions to their customers. indoo.rs also allows device and chip manufacturers to run computationally intensive and sensor fusion code natively in their platforms for increased speed, higher accuracy and optimal battery power efficiency.
“Our technological lead has been confirmed repeatedly by leading industry experts. The feedback we obtain in discussions with hardware manufacturers and indoor mapping providers during a roadshow facilitated by SpeedInvest in the US validates our approach.” says Bernd Gruber, co-founder and CEO of indoo.rs. “This investment round combines the financial strength of the tecnet fund, the active involvement of SpeedInvest and strategic opportunities offered by TechInvest to support the expansion of indoo.rs’ technology lead.”
Investors providing capital and know-how
“This technological lead was a crucial factor in the investment decision”, said Werner Zahnt, Partner at SpeedInvest. “We have been following and assisting the indoo.rs team for two years, and are pleased to now have taken another step forward in the relationship. SpeedInvest has intensified its activities supporting the indoo.rs team and is increasing their presence in the US market. “
(1) Forrester Research Blog “Forrester’s Top 15 Emerging Technologies To Watch: Now To 2018”
http://blogs.forrester.com/
Pioneers Festival
Last years’s STARTUP WEEK has been a huge success with lots of top speakers, smart start-ups and international attention. One year later, STARTeurope presents the follow-up event now called “Pioneers Festival”, which will be held at the prestigious Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna from the 29-31 October 2012. SpeedInvest is proud to support STARTeurope and is looking forward to a 3-day marathon of high-tech innovations and entrepreneurial spirit.
What to expect?
The three day program kicks off on the 29th with the exclusive Investors Day, by letting the top 50 startups (out of 850 submissions from 58 countries) gather with investors at the Haus der Industrie. Only eight of those Top 50 startups will be chosen to present to a crowd of more than 2500 international guests at the “Startup Challenge”, which will take place on the following two conference days. The Winner faces 25.000€ in cash and the media attention by winning the Pioneers Festival Award. Speedinvest rewards the winner with an additional four week program in Santa Monica including free housing and full support.
Other key elements will be discussions, world–class speakers and interactive workshops about the latest topics. Since STARTeurope didn’t call the event a “Festival” for no reason, extraordinary activities such as extreme sports sessions, gaming, a Hackathon and a closing Halloween party will take place.
SpeedInvest @ Pioneers Festival 2012 and After-Show-Party
You will have the chance to see two of the Speedinvests´-founders in action:
Oliver Holle (CEO) will appear at the panel about “What the media won’t tell you: insights into the tech industry” (Day 2 starting 11:55hr @ Trailblazers Track) and as a member of the Award Ceremony (Day 2 starting 18:05hr @ Trailblazers Track).
Erik Bovee, our US-satellite responsible for Business Development, will be up for a panel discussion about “Thanks for the Seed Capital… Now what do we do?” (Day 1 starting 16:30 @ Startup Academy).
Our customized Pioneers Festival rugby shirts arrived on time! If you are interested in Free Drink Vouchers for our Day1-after-show-party, the shirts might help you to find us even faster 
We invite you to hang out with us @ Alte Postzentrale (opening 21:30, Doninikanerbastei 11, 1010 Vienna).
The entire Speedinvest team is looking forward to this unique event with good talks and cool Startups. May the games begin!
Leave a comment
Startup Spirit
This weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in Startup Live Bucharest, which reminded me of the power and dedication young people show, when it comes to working on fresh ideas.
Over 60 people gathered at the HUB Bucharest (very nice location!) and worked their asses off to deliver pitches on their ideas that they brought to the venue on Friday evening. Many ideas hovered around urging topics in Romanian society and the teams tried to figure out how to package them into products, estimate the market and create a sustainable business.
Those events really are instrumental in creating an ecosystem and getting entrepreneurial thinking and talent into society. They encourage and enable people, from diverse backgrounds to try out building something from the ground up. The spirit of this event and the outcomes are simply amazing.
In about 10 minutes the final pitches should start and I am looking forward to that, finding out how the ideas evolved in those three days.
Leave a comment
Hail the hidden champions: why fringe markets may beat Silicon Valley
In January, Speedinvest, our first time seed fund, turned half a year old. Even in startup life, that’s quite young, yet it feels like ages. In this first of a series of observations, I want to share my specific experiences and hopefully learn from your feedback.
When I speak with friends in Silicon Valley, they don’t explicitly put it that way, but I get the feeling that’s how they still judge startups from Europe, especially from regions outside the so-called hotspots like London and Berlin.
Are we really desperately behind in following the hype cycles and trends, is all the exceptional Central European talent already living in studio apartments in San Francicso or NYC? Well, quite a few talented teams from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have moved into larger markets. But this isn’t the rule.
Leave a commentMetrics for Startups – Speedinvest Insights
When we started Speedinvest we had one ambition that we are trying to fulfill every day: be as entrepreneurial as an investor as possible. This is easier said then done, because the day to day business is truly different than that of the average entrepreneur. We have looked at over 200 companies in the past 6 months, made over 100 personal meetings and invested in less than a hand full of companies, meaning that we are more driven by our calendars and email inboxes, than by product development. What is the “product” of a successful investment fund anyways? We think that it is the value and the specific services we can offer to the companies we invest in. That is what we need to work on, because after all the startups are our clients.
Thus being entrepreneurial means not only to understand the trials and tribuluations of a startup, but also to provide meaningful help to portfolio companies and others in our region along the way. That is why last Friday we hosted our first Speedinvest insights, a get together planned to be hosted regularly, focusing on a different topic (like “Performance & Metrics” this time) where startups and experts would exchange their views and experiences in a friendly surrounding, helping everyone to get better.
We were exited how well it went, here are some impressions.
I am looking forward to future events in this series that is definitely going to be an important part of our “product” in the future.
Leave a comment
The Internet is still a Series of Tubes
… or How Ageing US Lawmakers get it Wrong Again with SOPA.
Those of you who aren’t familiar with the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ (SOPA) now facing the US Congress, or the earlier ‘Protect IP Act’ (PIPA), and haven’t noticed the flurry of urgent discussion following the Wikipedia Blackout or the many online protests and petitions in the last week, please take the following steps:
- Locate your computer’s C: drive in Windows
- Right-click on the drive icon, then click on the ‘Format…’ option in the drop-down menu
- Follow the steps, and ignore any warnings
- Sell your computer on eBay
- (Macbook users – simply set your machine on fire because this is about to destroy its resale value)
For those of you who have been paying attention, please read on (and those who have actually read the text of the SOPA bill http://1.usa.gov/xCRQr4 and can summarize the heinous section 105 – IMMUNITY FOR TAKING VOLUNTARY ACTION AGAINST SITES THAT ENDANGER PUBLIC HEALTH with a short essay on the broadly poisonous implications of subsection ‘a’ can claim a cash prize from Oliver Holle)
I wanted to highlight pertinent discussions on the Web that reveal the implications of the bill, and its many dangers, and also to add a few points of my own that reveal two things that haven’t been widely discussed: 1) bad actors involved in the bill’s genesis, and the irrelevance of its ‘bi-partisan’ support; 2) the misrepresentation of the dangers of two factors driving the bill’s creation – illegal online pharmaceutical sales, and the online sale of illegal military equipment.
There has already been quite a lot of explanation of the bills’ dangers. Trevor Timm, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, does a great job of summarizing some of the bill’s more harmful provisions and likely consequences. The National Venture Capital Association already strongly oppose the bill (as of the writing of this post, their Web site was still black); SpeedInvest also oppose SOPA (our Web site remains unchanged because of our unwavering, primary commitment to our limited partners; we have real work to do, etc.). Even many Hollywood artists, ostensibly one of the groups the bill is designed to protect, have offered a cautiously worded opposition statement.
Everything seems stacked against this “poorly thought out” law. Could the necessity of opposing SOPA be any clearer? Well, yes.
The bill’s title explains its purpose ‘To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.’ Those other purposes are the elimination of online trafficking in counterfeit drugs, and the illegal, online sale of military items. It appears that the bill was written in such a way as to assure support from patriots and pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors and resellers. The bill counters piracy, terrorism, and drug trafficking all at once. Who would oppose it?
One statistic used in discussion of the bill is that the global market for counterfeit pharmaceuticals was 75 billion USD in 2010. This statistic, which is quoted widely, comes exclusively from the ‘non-partisan’, ‘non-profit’ research institute – The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. ‘The Center’ is funded by pharmaceutical companies, and ‘was originally a project of the Pacific Research Institute, an older corporate front established in conjunction with Philip Morris to fabricate academic support for the tobacco industry.‘ The real statistic is this – USA Today estimates that in any reasonably regulated pharmaceutical market, the percentage of counterfeit drugs hovers at about 1%. Actual law enforcement statistics bring that number much lower – there were 433 seizures in the US of counterfeit pharmaceuticals in 2010, with a stunning street value of 5.6 million USD.
The fear that stolen or misappropriated military gear might end up on eBay or clandestine auction sites, and fall into the hands of terrorists, adds another strong impetus to the bill. But the US Deputy Undersecretary for Defense, Alan Estevez, doesn’t seem to agree, arguing in 2008 US military internal equipment rules do the job quite well. The Army’s own criminal investigation department (DCIS) ran a sting operation in 2004 ‘Operation High Bidder‘, at a time when illicit trade in military body armour was supposed to be rife due to supply shortages in Iraq. The outcome appears to have been the uncovering of 150 online sellers of body armour (although the report doesn’t indicate how many were subject to criminal prosecution). In 2004 eBay had approximately 3.4 million sellers. And much of this body armour was purchased by families of US soliders in Iraq, hoping to supplement the inadequate provisions of their sons and husbands. One conclusion of the DCIS initiative was to instigate a joint program of keyword filtering with eBay, which seemed to do a good job. Almost too good. In 2008 eBay caught 4,000 suspected body armour purveyors, but only removed 1,000 listings. 75% of the alerts were false positive. For matters of scale, eBay carried over 13 million listings in 2008.
The inclusion of ‘anti-terrorism’ and anti-counterfeit-drug measures in the bill is pure distraction, and addresses problems that are hardly relevant on a national scale, and not even recognised as urgent issues by the DCIS and law enforcement agencies. What really motivates this bill are the media and publishing corporations who provide large financial backing to Howard Berman and John Conyers, two of the bill’s Democratic authors, and the two congressmen who provide the ‘bi-partisanship’ that would normally signal broad political acceptance. You would expect support from Lamar Smith, Republican, whose largest backers include TV/Movie/Music industry and healthcare industry professionals; and from Bob Goodlatte, who has been a crusader in enforcement and expansion of online copyright legislation, and is chair of anti-piracy and both bi-partisan and republican internet caucases.
Howard Berman is the congressional representative from Los Angeles districts, and has often been called the ‘representative from Hollywood‘. His political career is underwritten by media and entertainment companies. John Conyers has courted controversy by opposing public access to publicly funded research at the behest of large publishing companies (who profit massively from such research, sold back to the very institutions who provide the data for free, at the expense of the US taxpayer). Large publishing houses are among his strongest financial backers. I enjoin the reader to track the money trails (and the falling approval ratings) here – http://www.opencongress.org
If there weren’t already enough reasons to oppose SOPA, here are two more: it addresses problems that are hardly of an international or national scale, and shouldn’t require fundamental changes to the Web to address; and its ‘poorly thought out’ provisions, rather than being a bi-partisan and honest effort by US lawmakers, are simply products of a small group of congressman acting as mouthpieces for the publishing and entertainment industries.
Update January 23, 2012 – As of last Wednesday Rep. Lamar Smith has announced the postponement of SOPA consideration in the US Congress, and hinted at broad changes to the bill. This is likely the death of the bill in its current form, and reason to celebrate!
Leave a commentCan we stop talking about European clone startups now?
My fiancee, who is a violinist, and takes no interest in my work with startups, except to express the opinion that people who work in business (and particularly finance and hi-tech) are overpaid, and probably dishonest, came up with a second observation recently:
Fiancee: ‘I hear most European tech startups are just copycats of successful US companies.’
Me: ‘What?! Wait! Where did you hear this?’
Fiancee: ‘Mike Butcher wrote about it in TechCrunch.’
Me: ‘How do you know Mike Butcher? Why are you reading TechCrunch?’
Fiancee: ‘It’s great! It keeps me from thinking about Mozart all day, and has tons of good gossip. Did you know that Mike made Oliver Samwer cry?’
Me: ‘No. And you’re not allowed to read TechCrunch anymore!’
There followed a long argument, but I’ll summarize my winning position: ‘Who cares? Can we stop talking about this now?’
The fact that Europe has copycat or clone startups should be irrelevant. The real issue fueling this whole conversation is that people don’t like being made fun of. A natural reaction is to turn the ‘copycat’ accusation into a term of pride that you are not one (see, ‘The Pirate Summit’), to deny the accusation, or, in rare cases, to walk out of an interview in tears (or perhaps there was just a misunderstanding. These are all emotional reactions that don’t address the substance of the accusation.
Let me put it to you this way: who today complains about Japan’s copycat auto industry? No one. That is because Japan learned from the models of others, as everyone must do, and became an economic powerhouse in its own right. And anyone who dares repeat the old canard that the Japanese, as a whole, make good copycats, but are unable to innovate (…because of their stifling education system, their cultural homogeneity, their bland diet, blah, blah, blah…) needs to take a hard look at the recent 30-years’ history of consumer electronics, or Japanese world-leading innovation in robotics today. Any remaining doubters can spend some time investigating the glorious Kajimoto Lab!
Bill Gates himself spent his early teen years pulling printed source code out of rubbish bins so that he could copy other people and become a better programmer himself. A period of ‘copycatting’ characterizes almost any individual or collective route to success.
The recent Euro troubles pose a far greater, long-term threat to the EU tech ecosystem than any reliance on copycatting. The fundamentals remain strong for creating a European nexus of innovation, and a technical and economic engine to rival Silicon Valley: Things happen fast. Ten years from now, this entire little flurry of name-calling will be forgotten, Europe will likely have a couple of mega-successes under its belt, and the tears will have long since dried on Oliver Samwer’s cold, German cheeks.
This post also appeared on Techcrunch.
Leave a commentBuilding a brigde from Central Europe to San Francicso
Slowly, but surely, Vienna is building its own reputation as a startup hotspot. There has been a bunch of massive exits driven with Austrian founder DNA (Cumulative value of the exits from UCP, Jahjah, 3united or last.fm exceed 1 billion USD), but recently the news flow from this region has jumped up with companies such as Wikitude, Runtastic, Lookk, 123people or just recently MySugr being international success stories.
Vienna, as the logical hub for Central Europe’s startup scene is now making a move. Next week, the five day startup festival called Startupweek (www.startupweek2011.com) is nailing this ambition.
Now, this region also has its first Super Angel fund.
Speedinvest aims high and comes with a very distinct model, that may show a 3rd way between the wave of incubators / accelerators on the one side and the traditional VC model on the other.
The idea is, besides cash from the $10 M fund, to staff our portfolio companies with part- or full time entrepreneurs from our team and thereby fill gaps that almost all startups have to a degree, especially in a region with a much thinner talent ecosystem than the US. We think that a 3 month program is a nice start, but will not move the needle for a small team from Vienna, Lubljana or Prague. What they need is an experienced co-entrepreneur that works for the company day in day out until they are successful. Much more engagement, that hopefully also yields better returns.
Specifically, we aim to build a bridge between Central Europe and Silicon Valley. Erik works as an outsourced biz dev operations in the US until either a series A round provides the cash to build up own operations or the company fully moves to the US.
See the announcement on Techcrunch.
Leave a comment