European Founders at Work

257 Pages·2012·0.73 MB·English

by  Pedro Gairifo Santos (auth.)

European Founders at Work

Pedro Gairifo Santos
European Founders at Work
Copyright © 2012 Pedro Gairifo Santos
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work.
For Nastia and Evan.
The two stars in my universe.
Contents
Foreword ...........................................................................................................................vii
About the Author.............................................................................................................ix
Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................x
Introduction..........................................................................................................................xi
Chapter 1: Jos White, Notion Capital, Founding Partner................................................1
Chapter 2: Barton, Inghelbrecht, Mukherjee, and Wang, Shazam.....15
Chapter 3: Lars Hinrichs, XING................................................................................41
Chapter 4: Bernard Liautaud, Business Objects.....................................................49
Chapter 5: Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck.................................................................................59
Chapter 6: Giacomo Peldi Guilizzoni, Balsamiq................................................71
Chapter 7: Olivier Poitrey, Dailymotion...................................................................91
Chapter 8: Richard Moross, Moo.com...................................................................101
Chapter 9: Felix Haas, amiando................................................................................111
Chapter 10: Peter Arvai, Prezi...................................................................................121
Chapter 11: Saul Klein, Video Island (LOVEFiLM)........................................................135
Chapter 12: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, The Next Web..........................151
Chapter 13: Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp..................................................................163
Chapter 14: Ilya Segalovich, Yandex........................................................................175
Chapter 15: Richard Jones, Last.fm..........................................................................187
Chapter 16: Alex Farcet, Startupbootcamp................................................................201
Chapter 17: Martin Varsavsky, Fon.......................................................................209
Chapter 18: Brent Hoberman, lastminute.com...................................................................219
v
Chapter 19: Loic Le Meur, Seesmic and LeWeb.......................................................225
Chapter 20: Eric Wahlforss, SoundCloud................................................................241
Index .......................................................................................................................251

vi
Foreword
The fact that there is a book about European technology founders is a mile-
stone and one we should take a moment to celebrate. Just like Founders at
Work (Apress, 2006), Jessica Livingston’s US-focused predecessor, this book
takes you inside the mind of some great European tech founders and helps
you gain insight into the highs and lows of creating a business. If the next
generation of European founders can make new mistakes rather than old
ones, this book will be worth its weight in gold.
When you read some of the stories in this book, it’s easy to feel we have
made amazing progress over the last 15 years in Europe—especially since
this book covers only the tip of the iceberg. There have been many great
companies built and many great outcomes. But in the next 15 years, if we
aspire to the creation of businesses capable of supporting hundreds of thou-
sands of new jobs and $10 billion in new revenue and enterprise value, we
need to do more than just recognize, support, and reward innovation. We
need in Europe (including Israel) to learn how to develop the conditions to
create serious scale.
Right now, Silicon Valley is peerless at both supporting innovation and creat-
ing serious scale. There’s been no master plan, but the 60-year interplay of
government as an early catalyst; academia and established companies as
early customers and sources of talent; and of course, investors willing to
take risks and a long term view, have given entrepreneurs fertile ground to
sow seeds and try to grow monsters with dragon’s teeth ready to conquer
the world.
You need every element of this ecosystem working perfectly to create
monsters—and Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Twitter, VMware, and Zynga
have all been recent beneficiaries there.
In fact, the capacity for serious scale is almost part of the muscle memory of
Silicon Valley’s residents. As a newly-minted founder, you have unparalleled
access within a 10-mile radius to a living ecosystem of talent and investors
who have been part of businesses in almost every technology sector. Some
of these went from start-up to superstar—HP, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Oracle,
and Google—the list goes on and on, each one at different speeds and with
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different approaches, creating tens of thousands of jobs, over $10 billion in
annual sales, and over $100 billion of enterprise value.
Of course, there are examples of extraordinary value creation driven by vi-
sionary founders who were able to build great organizations in the last 30
years outside of Silicon Valley, including monsters like Amazon, Dell, and
Microsoft. Even in Europe we can point to SAP. Start-ups can grow to mon-
strous scale in spite of their environments, but the chances of success—
which are slim to begin with—increase vastly with a supportive and a cohe-
sive ecosystem.
The good news for Europe is we are now producing great founders in
abundance. There are teams determined to go out and create monsters.
They have been inspired by the likes of ARM, Autonomy, AVG, Business
Objects, Checkpoint, Playfish, MySQL, LogMeIn, Skype, TomTom, and Qlik-
Tech. In fact, if you go to almost any European city, you can find independ-
ent start-ups like Criteo, Fon, Gameforge, Klarna, Moleskine, Privalia,
SoundCloud, Spotify, vente-privee, YOOX, and Wix, all capable of global
category leadership, creating thousands of new jobs, $1billion in new sales,
and billions in new enterprise value. In London alone, you can see compa-
nies like ASOS, Badoo, Betfair, Graze, Just-Eat, King.com, Mimecast, Moshi
Monsters, PhotoBox, and Wonga.
This is serious progress. But the straight facts are that while we are unques-
tionably masters of invention in Europe, we don’t yet have the ecosystem—
or perhaps the attitude—to really support our current and future genera-
tion of founders to create serious scale.
We are on a long journey, and to succeed we need more than just great
founders; they are only the baseline for success. We will also need patience,
vision, and long-term thinking from every part of the ecosystem to get to a
place where we can produce monsters to conquer the world. For me, the
big question is if we are truly able to do this.
—Saul Klein, Founder of LOVEFiLM and The Accelerator Group

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About the Author
Pedro Gairifo Santos is a co-founder of Beta-i, a
NGO (non-governmental organization) based in Lisbon,
Portugal, that supports entrepreneurship through a
series of initiatives, including a seed-stage accelerator
program. He is also the curator of the i9 Conference
and a Startup Weekend organizer and facilitator. Santos
holds an MBA from Rotterdam School of Management
and he worked in the IT sector for ten years.

ix
Acknowledgments
First of all, thanks to my wife, Anastasia Volkhovskaya, for her love, support,
patience, and help in making this book a reality.
Also, big thanks to my parents, as I was brought up being taught that any-
thing is possible if you work hard enough at it. And in reality, it is. Love you
both; thanks for giving me all the opportunities in the world.
Thanks to Ekaterina Sizova and Paul Jesemann. Without their support this
project would not have been made.
Thanks to all the founders that I interviewed for sharing their stories,
knowledge, and time. I learned immensely from their experiences and liked
to talk to them all. I was pleasantly surprised at how “down to earth” and
friendly all of them were.
Thanks to Saul Klein for writing the foreword for the book and to Peter
Cohan for his quote and sharing his experience on publishing books.
Thanks to Nuno Morgadinho, Ana Aires, and James Page for brainstorming
with me about which founders were best to interview.
Thanks to Jeff Olson and Jeffrey Pepper for believing in the value of this book
and their willingness to publish it. Also big thanks to all the team at Apress
that helped me turn this book into reality. Special thanks to Jessica Belanger
for “holding my hand” all the way through the new world of publishing.
Thanks to Ekaterina Zhilina for chasing down founders for me to interview.
Even when they proved to be quite hard to track down, she found a way to
do so.
Thanks to everyone that helped with introductions: Clément Cazalot, Syl-
vain Theveniaud, Carlos Silva, Pedro Rocha Vieira, Robin Klein, Ricardo
Sousa, Michael Jackson, Melissa Darker, and Samuel Mensah.
Thanks to everyone at Beta-i and Startup Weekend for their amazing energy
and commitment to bring entrepreneurship to the world. This book would
not exist without them. I’m also thankful for the lessons I learned while in
contact with these two great NGOs.
x
Introduction
The idea to write this book came from the knowledge that most books on
start-ups focus on North American companies, and while I found great value
in reading those books, it made me wonder how different, if at all, the per-
spective of European companies and their founders would be. It’s quite com-
mon to read about the differences between Europe and North America, par-
ticularly the United States of America, but is it really so different to start a
company in the United States than in a European country?
In isolation, this book gives founders’ views of starting a venture in Europe;
but in conjunction with Founders at Work, we see the differences and simi-
larities between starting a venture in the United States vs. in a European
country. My view on this is that there are many similarities in the entrepre-
neurs’ mind-set, but that the context changes, leading to different decisions
while creating and growing their businesses.
In compiling this book, I noticed several patterns between stories. One was
that entrepreneurs looked to capitalize on international markets very early
because their home markets were usually too small. Some decided to ex-
pand using white labeling, others by changing the platform or raising more
capital, but all with the vision that the only way to succeed was to grow in-
ternationally. One example of this is Shazam, which, until the rise of the
iPhone, grew internationally using a white label strategy.
The second pattern is that many start-ups began with an idea that morphed
over time to its current state, or that the idea remained the same, but the
method to turn it into a reality changed. Take Fon, for example, where the
objective was always the same, but the business changed from an NGO to a
hardware seller to a partner of their perceived main competitors. Then
there’s Yandex, a giant company with the biggest IPO in the NASDAQ since
Google, which got its start doing Bible search algorithms in DOS.
Other recurring themes that I noted in the interviews included the position-
ing of companies as global companies—not as French companies, or Italian
companies, or English companies, and so forth. Also noted is that there is a
clear realization of the advantages of a having a foothold in Silicon Valley, a
clear focus on profitability over expansion, and the view that it takes double
xi