How times have changed in twenty years…
It was 20 years ago next month that we started JustBooks, creating a marketplace that connected buyers and sellers of used, rare, and out-of-print books. We initially launched in Germany before expanding into the UK and France, and then sold the company to our North American competitor AbeBooks in 2001. My co-founder Hannes Blum and […]
Charting return multiples over time
Last week I blogged about the return multiples for our Fund I and how they perfectly illustrate just how much the power law drives VC return. Alex Norman from AngelList asked how these return multiples have changed over time and what insights could be won from that data. It was a great question and I […]
Seven years into Fund I: charting the return multiples
We raised our first fund in summer 2012. It was a $15m early-stage fund that we invested in 20 portfolio companies over the course of two and a half years. We’re now seven years in and the portfolio is maturing. I plotted the return multiples (as of June 30, 2019) for all 20 portfolio companies […]
Do distributed teams need new tools?
A question I have been pondering for some time now, especially since a lot of our portfolio companies are now distributed organizations… This tweet sparked a lot of thoughtful reaction and discussion. Here’s where things have landed at the moment: According to the responses, entrepreneurs running remote organizations seem pretty happy with the current software […]
Balancing the upside and downside of data sharing
This year we have seen privacy become top of mind for the general public, the media and “big tech.” The business model of Google and Facebook (collect as much data as possible about users for highly targeted advertising) is under attack. Europe’s legislators were addressing some of these privacy concerns when they put into effect […]