VC Perspectives

The 48 hours I spent Mon-Wed in Paris were extremely rewarding. Thanks to the brilliant turnout among entrepreneurs and investors (big congrats, Loic!), time was easily spent meeting new and old aquaintances in the web industry. Few if any other events in Europe can stack up against this. Special thanks also to Andreas Lazar @ Allen for arranging a very tasty and really interesting dinner on Tuesday.

There were no time between meetings to check out the startup competition on site but did so last night on ustream after my flight back. The engineer in me was really happy to see Viewdle winning - very impressing demo - but the VC side of me is still sceptical. The amount of promising voice/image/video recognition technologies that fail to make it to a commercial level is simply enormous. Very few succeed.

It was also really encouraging to hear everyone I spoke to praise Spotify: also those who (as more questions revealed) hadn’t in fact tried the application but didn’t want to appear like they didn’t know all the details about the next big thing…

Heading down to Paris for a 48 hour shot at this year’s le web. Impressing participants list and I’m sure to catch both old and new acquaintances. Particularly curious to see how the organizers manage to hold the crowd together or if the massive turnout has moved more of the 1-on-1 meetings off-site. For myself, I have almost half of the daytime hours allocated to meetings outside of the premises.