Top 3 trends to watch out for in Deep Tech, according to fellow 4 European investors who spoke at Frontier DeepTech:

👇 👩‍💻 New Algorithms

"We have only just started to scratch the surface of what we can do with data and new algorithms" - according to @mickhalsband from Lunar Ventures

"Nothing we are doing online is basically safe."

I think this quote from @zama_fhe 's founder @randhindi yesterday can sum up the 1st day of @f_deeptech

#cybersecurity was a recurring theme throughout the 1st day in a way: It was mentioned during the #quantumcomputing panel I chaired yesterday, where I was joined by ORCA Computing's Richard Murray , @QuantinuumQC 's Waseem Shiraz and @aegiq_tech 's Max Sich

It was of course the key theme of Rand's talk on homomorphic encryption

Physics is about to be eating the world.

Software is finishing up the appetiser, before the the main course arrives.

Happy for you all to quote me on this one 10 years from now.

If one day my VC ever gets to the levels of @a16z - this would probably be the reason. Their founder's "software is eating the wold" classic quote underpinned their "contrarian" investment thesis at a time when the world was recovering from the dot-com crash.

What I learned from this week​: most startup investors forget the 1st VC principle ─the Power Law.

Especially the "outsider money".

Outsider money is growing in the industry and peaked in 2021.

Now it seems to have come down, somewhat, but it's still going strong. Outsider capital is pretty much any investor who is not a VC or has not been a professional angel for 5 years or more. Most high net worths and Family Office investors fall into this category (but not all!)

To all my fellow Europeans who moan about big tech regulations all the time. Sometimes it's actually GOOD. And the US is copying it. The US is crawling closer to passing the Journalism Competition and Protection Act: which would allow publishers to bargain with Meta and Google and force them to pay for news.

Similar legislation is being discussed in the EU and in particular in France.

Is it just me or the made up title "serial entrepreneur" mostly attracts HNWs and repels VCs?

Logic:

👇 Assumption 1) unsophisticated rich people trying their hand with venture may love the idea of a "safe bet" and quick returns.

Did you know that a machine learning model trained without human labels can predict physics even when information is lacking?

I was geeking around to discover examples of self-supervised learning (i.e. not using labelled data for AI training) on recurrent neural networks.

Why? Because if you think about it, the brain is full of feedback connections.

Training a recurrent neural net (i.e. a system with loops) is not always easy (feedback tends to blow up stuff like when microphones and speakers feed back on each other).

We've just reached the peak of financial hypocrisy.

Central banks are losing the grip on the economy.

Look at the UK: One one hand the BOE increase rates to try and stop inflation.

On the other they print money to try and "fix the market". Today it's in the UK. But if fascist Italy or any other unexpected issue spooked the markets... I'm pretty sure other central banks would act similarly.

Let's not forget what happened in 2008

Banks don't want recessions to happen.

Do you think a PE firm can be a good VC too?

In my experience the answer is normally 'no' but PE investors have been entering the VC game, especially at growth stage for a long time.

But today we need to ask the OPPOSITE question: Part of the pre-IPO frenzy last year was due to PE firms trying to make quick 2-3X deals by flipping growth deals into hyped SPACs.

Today Bessemer is flipping the attempt: can they, a VC firm be a good PE investor?

Because that's what they have just launched.

What's more important? That A.I. systems can get things done, or that their actions can be 'understood'? British self-driving car company @wayve_ai recently announced their software can learn to drive different vehicles in different situations without the use of lidar sensors.

What is a Value Metric? And why it Matters in SaaS biz models?

I invest in Deep Tech, where a lot of seed companies don't really sell traditional subscriptions.

But some do. Especially in cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and those rare cases of AI companies I still consider deep tech.

Finding out more about what a Value Metric is can help these businesses.

Want to find angels to add value to your business in your field and geography?

I'm going to tell you in 10 simple steps you can go implement right away.

Thanks to @ravijanapureddy who asked about his field over on @LinkedIn

But the answer is the SAME for all fields!

👇🧵 @ravijanapureddy @LinkedIn 1/ Start with @crunchbase -it's an inexpensive way to find & filter startup rounds by size, industry and date.

Start from the most recent ones and go backwards.

You want to find founders in your field and your geography that raised 100m+ as they may have done a secondary sale.

You should NEVER pitch as a pair or a team. When fundraising, you've got to pitch.

Always have only ONE person doing this.

It's (barely) OK if multiple people fundraise, especially in the very early days. But you should always let 1 person lead any given relationship. Don’t co-pitch.

Once the company is off the blocks, one person should then lead ALL fundraising activities.

Two people (or more) pitching means more possibilities for a fuckup.

All an investor needs is a bad feeling about 1 of the co-founders and it’s over.

In startup building and venture capital it's key to know you're often wrong and embrace it.

Because you're bound to be wrong.

👇🧵 Socrates famously said he knew he knew nothing.

That was one of his biggest lessons.

CVCs seem all the rage these day.

And for a good reason.

Corporations who do venture investing right get a LOT value from it. However it's also easy to do it wrong and I've seen many horror stories from founders in my tech community over the years. I was reading a @crunchbase news article the other day on the topic.

I found a couple of interesting gems for companies looking to build their own CVC successfully.

Global AI funding sank by 44%+ year over year, from $33. 6 billion to $18. 8 billion according to Pitchbook data shared reported on Emerging Tech Brew (Q2 2022) This is in contract with the overall global VC funding that declined "only" 25% - from $176 billion to $131.7 billion. The explanation they came up with based on @PitchBook experts was that:

Innovative, disruptive, world-leading, exciting: it's all bullshit and it's killing your VC open rate

Stop using adjectives.

If you're adding them to your subject line, it will hide your true secret sauce on mobile screens. If you're filling up your presentation deck with them, you're cluttering the view and creating useless distraction.

If you're using them in your email or message text, you're wanting precious attention span.

The time of monolithic venture capital is over. The great unbundling has begun. Back in the days, there were VC firms. 👴

There were big institutional LPs who would back those firms. And there were startups who would get money from these VCs. Or not. 👩‍💻 It happened the same to Excel in the SaaS world, where specialist apps took over what people used to "force" excel to "also do".

Working with founders in deep tech has taught me this: deep tech has 1 striking similitude with B2C consumer products. You've got to be a great storyteller in your early days. Most people wrongly assume that launching a deep tech startup is closer to traditional B2B tech businesses because it's mostly B2B in nature.

They fail to capture 1 important difference.

👇

Unpopular consideration: Maybe there should be limits to the "democratisation" of venture.

Especially if it involves defence and crypto. I'm currently writing an article on the benefits of democratising access to the VC asset class together with European pioneer @AndreasEUVC ─and I'm all up for the trend.

But! Recent headlines made me wonder: how much should this be pushed?

A few days ago I was on a founder intro call who just... nailed it.

I was hooked. I will stay in touch. I'll definitely review the opportunity as a potential investment.

Here is what they did right.

👇 3 top tips you can implement TODAY and will give you guaranteed results 😱 It will work on me. And it will work on plenty of other investors. 💸