VC Perspectives

Just got back from a few days in Barcelona having attended the Mobile World Congress 2009 (formerly known as 3GSM). It’s a pretty hectic place with some 55′000 visitors ranging from operators, vendors and start-ups. This year we had two portfolio companies attending, Xtract and Aito both from Finland. It was great fun spending some time with them especially since they both managed to attract significant interest from potential customers.

From a start-up perspective, I am usually a bit sceptical to these large, general exhibitions but here are some things that I have seen work for companies attending:

• Start with defining an objective and goals for attending. Are you there to meet investors, customers, partners, competitors and/or the press? What should be achieved for it to be worthwhile spending the time and money?
• Identify the people you want to meet and book meetings in advance. I cannot stress this one strong enough. Although people may not be willing to commit themselves to set meetings beforehand, at least agree on that you should meet and make sure you have their contact details.
• In addition to track down the people you really want to talk to, be open and talk to as many people as possible. Your friends and colleagues you can talk to at home.
• Only have a booth if you have plenty of meetings booked in advance. Otherwise there is a risk that you’re tied to your booth rather than being out hunting down interesting people to meet. Sure, there will be people attenting your booth but are they really the ones you want to talk to? You are a small company so the odds of you attracting the right people to your booth are smaller than the other way around. And only have a booth if you have attented the exhibition before so you know where it should be placed, what it should look like etc.
• Try and associate yourself with someone more well-known; it could be a customer, partner or some other companies from your country.
• Have someone well-connected singing your praises, a third-party saying you’re great is usually stronger than you saying so yourself.

We’re already well into 2009 and we can look back at a turbulent 2008 with a financial crisis, economic recession but also exciting company developments and new investments.

During 2008, we looked at around 400 companies eventually investing in 4 companies and now have 7 portfolio companies in our latest fund. The companies we invested in covered a wide range of technologies:

• IPtronics (Denmark). A semi-conductor company founded by some of the people behind Giga that was sold to Intel for USD 1.25 billion in 2000.
• Spotify (Sweden): An innovative and legal digital music service offering instant access to pretty much all music on the planet. The team is headed by serial entrepreneurs Martin Lorentzon (co-founder of TradeDoubler) and Daniel Ek (Skype, Stardoll).
• Videoplaza (Sweden): Provides premium publishers with an ad server for video, specifically catering for the needs of well known online brands with high-quality web tv content and a proprietary sales force.
• Xtract (Finland): A software company helping mobile operators and online advertisers create accurate and automated consumer profiles based on social interactions, behavioural and demographic data.

In addition to our new investments, we also made a pretty thorough exit-analysis where we have analyzed about 200 Nordic technology exits during the last 10 years. We’ll cover this study in more detail in a later post.