🦄 The DART Weekly #14 ~ Founder & Drive

Go back to the DART archives
January 23, 2021
Hej Folks,

Less than 1 month to Valentine's Day. Time to fetch some flowers for your partner. The goal? Not ending up like corps and innovation. Such an on-off relationship. Google shuts down Loon, its side bet on remote connectivity, while Microsoft participates in Cruise's last capital raise.
Anyway, did the Clubhouse frenzy reach you already?

I have decided to remove Ventures 101 to deliver you an even crispier DART. Do you approve? Help me understand it by filing this tiny wee 30-sec survey. As Isaac Newton would say: "I owe you, mate!".

A new episode of The DART Bullseye is out on Monday. A hint: it's about IPO*.

Entrepreneurship Chronicles

£1M in 96 seconds.
Not an Olympic Game record, but Tom Blomfield's first great achievement at the helm of Monzo in 2016 (Monzo). The Briton wasn’t a rookie; he had under his belt the experience at Auctomatic, GoCardless (as a founder) and a stint as Starling Bank’s CTO. The founder and CEO had an intuition: to apply the lean startup approach for the development of its banking products (infomation-age.com). Thanks to its full transparency and customer focus, the challenger bank received amazing feedback from its users who stuck with it… and they lived happily ever after.

Not quite so.
In May 2020 Tom stepped down as CEO role, taking the role of president. In June of the same year the scaleup completed a down round. Layoffs followed. Finally, in January 2021 Tom announced that he will quit the digital bank (sifted).

THE TAKEAWAY
Talking about his entrepreneur drive: “[...] the things I enjoy is working with small groups of passionate people to start and grow stuff from scratch. [...] Getting to profitability and IPOing it [...] are huge exciting challenges, just honestly not ones that I was interested in or particularly good at.”

🎙 The DART Bullseye

A weekly podcast on innovators, entrepreneurs and investors. AKA people familiar with the matter.

The DART Bullseye? Is that a podcast about pubs? Not really.
Tune in to have a taste of it from the hosts themselves: Federico & Matthieu.
 
    

Of Unicorns and Cowboys

🦄 The Rounds

The deals worth knowing in Europe and beyond - ordered from coolest to coolio

🇩🇪 HR caput mundi: Munich-based Personio raised $125M at $1.7B valuation. The fresh unicorn is on the trajectory to becoming the leaders SME's HR software.

🇬🇧 Incoming: Deliveroo is on a roll. After being boosted by the pandemic, the delivery company raised $180M from current investors. Next up: IPO.

🇪🇸 Beyond code: 2200 business customers and counting, Landbot closed a $8M Series A. The startup developed a no-code chatbots builder.

🌈 The Pots

The exits you should follow in Europe and beyond - IPO, direct listing, SPAC, bankruptcy ... all awesome stuff

🇸🇬 Appetite: Grab is considering an IPO in the US. The Southeast Asia ride-hailing and food delivery giant could raise $2B.

🇺🇦 CI/CD: $195M worth of GitLab shares were sold in secondary sales. The operation valued the DevOps platform at $6M.

🇺🇸 Privacy: Telehealth scaleup Hims & Hers went public with a SPAC. Focused on sexual wellness, it launched 4 years and plans to turn profitable in 2 years.

🤠 The Funds

The tales of unicorns' hunters you should know about - particularly relevant if you are a founder looking for backing

🇨🇭 Yummy: Blue Horizon Ventures closed its first flagship. €183M of dry powder will be used to invest alternative proteins, synthetic biology, cell-based food...

🇮🇳 Validation: Salesforce Ventures led $15M investment in HR platform Darwinbox. By 2050 India will home 18% of the global working age population.

🧑‍🎤 ... and The Quirky Ones

The crazy stuff we gossip about while sipping our chai latte - it's like others, but better

🇨🇳 FinTok: Bytedance launched a new payment system in TikTok Chinese twin Douyin, as someone predicted. When will the globall roll out occur?

🇬🇧 Padawans: Multiverse raised $44M in funding. Led by Euan Blair, it's an edtech platform preparing apprentices and connecting them with businesses.
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