EUVC

Today, we're happy to welcome you to Andrea Traversone, Managing Partner at Amadeus Capital Partners. Since 1997, the firm has raised over $1bn for investment and used it to back more than 180 companies. Andrea’s experience as a VC is something to envy, having lived and invested through the boom and bust of three bubbles!

What you’ll learn in this episode:

- The views and reflections on the current market - by a man who has lived and invested through the boom and bust of three bubbles!

- Why Andrea loves their operational model of having a strong in-house backoffice, involving them early and creating cross-fund deal teams for each investment.

- Andrea’s thoughts on carry distribution in VC funds, why junior personnel should be included in the scheme and how they’re setting aside significant carry reserves for employees growing in the firm
- Why they define DeepTech on the company level and what’s behind the three core pillars of 1) tech must be a key differentiator, 2) the startup must own the IP, and 3) tech must be the key to the company’s operational leverage.

- How the 3 P’s of Power dynamics, Post-rationalization and Persistence creates a virtuous cycle for VCs building their fund narrative

Today we’re welcoming Johan van Mil, co-founder and managing partner of Peak to The European VC 😍 Johan is a life-long entrepreneur, who has built, bought, and sold over 11 companies, from data marketplaces and social marketing software, to email marketing platforms, and more. Making the move from founder to investor, Johan founded Peak with 5 fellow entrepreneurs in 2008, which now invests in fast growing marketplace, platforms and SaaS companies.

And what we REALLY love, their LP base is all operators putting their money to work to change the world - absolutely amazing 💕😍

In this episode you’ll learn:

- All about Johan and Peak’s journey from their first fund to today.
- How Johan thinks about brand building in VC (and they’re great at this! So pay attention! 👀)
- What’s behind the quote “Don’t try to please everybody, look for alternative ways to get things done, give 100% on one big goal – and do not move on before it is done.”
- Why Johan and Peak have chosen to build an LP base of operators and founders, what value that brings and how they use them to deliver value to founders

Today we're happy to introduce you to Mike Reid, Founder and senior partner at Frog Capital, a growth stage fund focusing on the opportunity emerging between venture capital and private equity. Mike brings perspectives on a part of VC that we rarely speak about, but many founders need; the intersection point between VC and Private Equity.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

- All about Mike and Frog’s focus on risk capital without the pressure to grow at all cost
- Why Mike bets on M&A deals of 150-250 M€ rather than unicorns and how this relates to building a portfolio of Ferraris, Landrovers and BMWs
- Deep dive on Mike’s and Frog’s scale-up methodology

We’re excited to bring to you the EUVC LP roundtable! We’ve gathered three of Europe’s master minds in VC fund investing for a candid, upfront discussion about topics core to European VCs. In this episode, we’re joined by Chris Wade, exited entrepreneur and founding partner of Isomer Capital, David Dana, head of ICT Investments at the EIF, and Ertan Can, founding partner of Multiple Capital.

In this episode you’ll learn:

- What the GP of the future will look like
- What trends are driving the EUVC landscape today
- Why secondaries are on the rise and likely to grow stronger
- What bad LP behavior our panelists see in the market and which GPs should pay attention to and be wary of

Today we’re happy to welcome you to Radu and Andrei, founders of SeedBlink - one of Europe’s upcoming platforms enabling investors to easily syndicate and participate in deals. Radu has a 30 year long experience founding and developing companies and have exited to companies like Microsoft, Naspers and Fitbit. Andrei comes from 20 years in banking but with the insights and ambition to build new experiences and solutions for the financial world - and what better place to do that than by democratising access to VC?

In this episode you’ll learn:

- The mission of Seedblink and what made Radu and Andrei bet on building a platform for deal syndication in Europe
- What learnings Radu brings with him from his time as a founder and VC to building Seedblink
- Where Seedblink are in journey to democratize access to VC, where they see the platform in 10 years and what benefits building out of Romania gives them.

With this special memo episode we’re launching the 3rd investment opportunity in the EU🔵VC Investment Club 👉 As always we dive deep with the GP team going through all the specifics of their fund - investment thesis, strategy, team, track record, deal flow, value add, etc. 🕵️‍♀️

The TL:DR just for you is 👇

Acrobator Ventures is an operator-led fund backing Eastern founders building global software companies. Focus is on arbitrage opportunities in data heavy B2B pre-seed/seed companies sourced by a combination of proprietary tech & insider networks in the tight-knit Eastern diaspora tech founder communities.

The mix between operator experience and AI-expertise, allows the team to be a constructive partner and earn the trust of founding teams quickly which grants the team unparalleled access to these initially undervalued, yet proven unicorn builders.

The team has an absolutely sick track-record of 70+ investments over more than 15 years in the Baltics/CEE/CIS-region yielding a double digit DPI and TVPI from another world [won’t spoil the fun here! You’ll have to listen to the episode or join our investment club to get those details 🤐 !] Suffice it to say that pitchbook rated Acrobator as the #2 Dutch fund by IRR in 2021 📈

We love their investment strategy focusing on early access by allocating significant capital to acquire defendable entry ownership positions in target startups and retaining relevance across stages by allocating super-pro-rata rights via SPVs for the LP-base. Backed by institutional LPs, the fund has been actively investing through the fundraise with called capital already marked-up significantly.

Intrigued? Join us in backing this amazing team in the EU🔵VC Investment Club at http://theemergingvc.substack.com ✊ We’re always looking for new amazing operator LPs to join our syndicates 💪 Minimum commit at 1k€ 💸

We're psyched to introduce you to Marc McCabe, founder of Nomad Capital and one of the latest and greatest European micro VCs in our opinion. We love Marc and are sure you will too. Marc has done angel investments for more than a decade in consumer tech and has held operating roles at AirBnB and been part of the team at SV Angel as well as a **Sequoia Scout.** He has worked on investments in Stripe, Pinterest, Kaggle, Hipmunk, ElaCarte and many more. Marc has also co-managed a **Y Combinator** focused micro-fund where he invested in 50 companies across 3 funds including **6 Unicorns** and leading their seed investments to be followed by many great funds like **A16Z**, Founder's Fund, Tiger and Spark Capital.

With Nomad Capital, Marc focuses on finding SaaS tools built by incredible teams that can help the next generation of companies build better products, faster and more effectively. We hope you will come to love Marc as much as we do.

In this episode you'll learn:
- What Marc learned at AirBnB and SF Angels and how he applies it in Nomad today
- Marc's take on scout models and reflections from having been one for years
- All about the thesis behind Nomad Capital and how he as a solo GP executes multiple deals per month
- Why Marc doesn't lead rounds with Nomad and what kind of value he as an Operator and hyper connected investor brings to the table

In the 61st episode of The European VC, we're introducing you to Sapphire Ventures’ founding partner Andreas Weisskam and general partner Kevin Diestel.

Many newcomers to European VC don’t know this, but Sapphire was actually originally established as the corporate VC arm of German software giant SAP, before becoming an independent VC in 2011. They now have $8bn funds under management. Andreas led the launch of Sapphire's first European office last summer, bringing the fund back to the continent 💞 and they've been busy since 💪 having established a team of 7 investors and having invested in companies like Cazoo, Wise, [Monday.com](http://monday.com/) and CurrencyCloud and many more household names.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

- What drove Sapphire’s decision to double down on Europe and what learnings Andreas & Kevin have made leading the charge
- How the European Sapphire team leverages the connection to Silicon Valley to deliver their value add
- What the team thinks they’ve brought with them from the Valley that’s especially valuable and what has surprised them in the European ecosystem
- Why consensus decisions don’t always make for the best investment decisions and how the team thinks about the necessity to be make non-consensus decisions to make non-consensus investments.

It is with great excitement that we announce the second investment by The European VC Operator LP Syndicates 😍 In this special “Memo episode” we’re diving deep on Pacenotes with the founding team: Jeroen Van Doornik and Menno Rijnsburger. The TL:DR being 👉 Pacenotes gives us access to a proven strategy of investing in top tier funds and co-investments in the winners of their portfolio for strong risk-adjusted returns.

To sprinkle some hotness on it, Jeroen is an exited founder and tech investor who, together with Menno, has built two tech funds of €285 M, which gives them a much coveted skillset of the next generation of FoF investors.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

- How a top-tier fund of funds strategy leverages direct investing to create strong risk-adjusted returns that actually rival top-quartile VC funds.
- What Pacenotes looks for in their managers and why they focus on the more established VCs with a proven ability to replicate multiples of 3x and above.
- How Jeroen thinks about diversification in their strategy.
- How Pacenotes use SPVs to expand beyond the fund’s main strike zone on direct investments.

Today, we're happy to welcome you to a slightly provocative episode on VC Memes and well-intentioned founder-advise from VCs. It all started with David and I wanting to bring Julius Bachmann on to shed some light on the world of a founder coach who had formerly been a VC. But he declined! However, a couple of months later, Julius came back with something to say to the VC ecosystem 👉 Think less about doing VC memes and consider staying quiet a bit more often! We hope you’ll enjoy this episode as much as we did making it.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

- What problems Julius most often have founders coming to him with as a coach.
- Why VCs should recognize that they can’t always be as good a friend to founders as they want to be (and pitch that they are).
- How Julius would wish more VCs would behave in the board room and how they can make room for founders to be more candid.