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Five take-aways from SuperVenture Berlin

Mike Reid

Mike Reid
Senior Partner

Five take-aways from SuperVenture Berlin

By Mike Reid

SuperVenture was full of insights a few weeks ago. It was a great opportunity to meet with peers from the European Venture ecosystem and discuss themes that are emerging through 2019 and into next year.

Here are my top 5 take-aways:

1 | The SoftBank Effect

Large quoted investors (pension funds, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds etc) are realising that successful private tech companies are staying private much longer, and that they are missing out.

2 | PE loves tech (or does it, really?)

Mainstream generalist PE is adopting Tech as fresh growth strategy. This is mostly ‘lipstick’ as most PE firms want to buy cash cows that they can leverage up. And leveraging they are! Ratios are at all time highs. Specialist sector and operational tech PE firms will win out.

3 | Operational support reduces risk

VC’s need to learn more from PE, and invest in operational support for scale-up CEOs. Europe won’t have enough Unicorns to feed all the early stage VCs, so a higher proportion of VC backed companies needed to succeed to deliver the returns. Take a look at the scale-up methodology we’ve developed with our network over the past 12 months.

4 | AI will is going to be big, but…

It’s currently over-hyped. It’s the new Big Data (hopefully not the new CleanTech). Every plan seems to have AI in it. You really need to know your AI from your Machine Learning to avoid getting sucked in.

5 | Senior scale-up Tech Talent

Finding the best people will continue to be a major bottleneck. This will mean scale-ups will originate from many varied locations, not just the major European centres.


Mike Reid

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Mike Reid