Saturday, May 2, 2020

The Four Questions to Ask After a Black Swan Event




A local crisis which started on the Balkans in July 1914 spiralled into a fully fledged world war within a short period of a few weeks .

After a four year impasse on the western front the German Army spectacularly collapsed in in late summer of 1918. What was then called the Great War ended on armistice day November 11, 1918. 

An ETF to Consider if the U.S.-China Trade War Triggers a Black ...
Picture credit: etftrends.com

The German General Staff was dissolved by the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. Only five months later the General Staff's clandestine successor organization 'Truppenamt' under Hans von Seeckt launched 57 committees to distill the learnings from the Great War.

The output of the committees were short, concise studies which addressed four questions 

  1. What new situations arose that had not been considered before?

  2. How effective were pre-war views in dealing with these situations?

  3. What guidelines were developed for new weaponry during the war?

  4. Which new problems put forward by the war have not yet found a solution?
The T-4 training section of the Truppenamt was given responsibility for collecting and reviewing the work of the 57 committees. 109 officers and former officers were appointed to chair the committees and more than 400 officers were involved the effort . The training section then edited the committee reports for use in army manuals and regulations. 

The Great War was a watershed event which affected everyone's life. 

Which questions will you ask after the next Black Swan event?
 
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Source: James S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg

Monday, January 27, 2020

Satellites, Biology and Big Machines - My Investment Activities in 2019

I had 17 companies in my portfolio at the beginning of 2019. Consistent with my pace in previous years I made three new investments across a wide spectrum of B2B software spaces: 





  • Geosite is an enterprise SaaS platform for spatial data that leverages the proliferation in satellite imagery sources and distributed sensor systems.
    Founder and CEO Rachel Olney came up with the idea when she studied the impact of the availability of small satellites on the military. Geosite now is on a mission to make geospatial data available to a broad range of businesses.


  • Turbine models the inner mechanisms of cancer to discover novel protein targets and precision biomarkers.
    I was introduced to Szabi and the team via Jens-Philipp Klein from Atlantic Labs in June 2018 and was simply blown away by the team’s vision to radically change drug discovery. 

  • Remberg digitizes asset service processes for manufacturers, service providers and operators.
    Fellow angel investor Manuel Grossmann introduced me to co-founder and CEO David Hahn and the team back in April 2018. David, Hagen, Cecil and Julian quickly navigated through multiple pivots and are now acquiring customers at lightning speed.


Throughout the year I met with hundreds of startups and had in-depth discussions with about a dozen. Finding the right market and building a true MVP often takes longer than the founders are anticipating, and being able to distinctly describe the use case - buyer, user, value proposition and ROI - is as challenging as ever. The majority of interesting companies are bringing software to new industries and new buying centers, although I also met a few interesting founders who have invented a better mousetrap (Zoom, anyone?).

I worked with many of the more recent investments and helped in positioning, fundraising, hiring, mentoring, GTM, and intros to my network.

Fewer companies than expected from my portfolio raised additional funding: Assuming that there should be a funding event every 18 months, I could have expected up to eight raises in 2019. Yet only three of my existing portfolio companies raised and I was invited to participate in two of these. Decisionnext raised a Series A, and two other companies raised bridge extensions at significantly higher valuations. There were no markdowns in my portfolio. 

On the downside: Employeechannel (formerly known as Navera formerly known as Trustnode) called it quits eight years after founding and multiple funding rounds. 

My resolutions for 2020: Keep investing and find teams and companies that address previously unexplored spaces and have the potential to own a category. 

Image sources: wikipedia, NIH, hydraulicpress.com

Saturday, January 11, 2020

2019 Was A Breakout Year For B2B SaaS Startups in Germany



The BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index (EMCLOUD) tracks 48 SaaS companies. Some are industry stalwarts such as Adobe, others are recently IPO’d companies such as Slack and Zoom. The EMCLOUD index rose 47% in 2019 and far outperformed any other indices including the tech heavy NASDAQ. 


 

There was not a single public B2B SaaS company in Germany as of 2018 . (Wirecard is publicly traded but does not have the subscription business model typically associated with SaaS). This embarrassing situation finally changed when Teamviewer went public in September 2019 at a share price of €25.30 and ended the year at €31.88, an increase of 26%. Teamviewer was founded in 2005 and is a leader for remote access and desktop sharing are in the transition from an on premise to a SaaS model. Teamviewer’s expected 2019 revenues are approximately €400 million and the end of year market capitalization stands at €6 billion.

The next largest relevant exit in the B2B space was Data Artisans’ sale to Alibaba for $90 million.

If the list of publicly traded B2B SaaS companies is limited to one, what about the pipeline of privately held B2B SaaS companies? As of 2018 only two things would have stood out: Celonis became a SaaS unicorn, and IoT company Relayr exited for 300 million. After that - nothing. Nada. Nimic. Rien. Nichts.
 
Privately held Celonis continues to grow on a global scale and the latest round now values Celonis as a ‘duocorn’ worth more than €2 billion. The company has strengthened its executive ranks to complement the three person founder team in the quest to get IPO ready. There are no other private B2B SaaS unicorns, and there is no other SaaS company that is valued higher than €500 million at the time of writing. 

2019 saw a flood of funding pour into the most promising B2B startups, and the largest SaaS players cumulatively raised $900 million in just their last funding rounds (It is worth noting that some of these investments were spent on secondaries and the money going into the companies was less than the amounts listed below and communicated to the public). 




Five companies appear to be valued as high or higher than Relayr at their $300 million exit in 2018: 

  • Personio provides an HR suite for SMBs and vaulted ahead to a  $300+ million valuation after a large €60 million round in December 2019 after a prior round just in January.
  • Signavio is a global leader in business process management, also raised a large round, although much of it was a secondary sale by the existing shareholders and only a smaller amount went into funding the growth of the company. The founders still own a very significant share of the company.
  • Sennder also raised two large rounds in July and April of 2019.
  • Scoutbee has been on an absolute tear since its founding in 2015 and has closed a large round in December after a prior raise only six months earlier. What first looked like a Web 1.0 era supplier listing tool on steroids is quickly evolving into a strategic sourcing vendor.
  • Commercetools had been flying under the radar since its acquisition by REWE 2015, but Insight Partners saw an opportunity to acquire the company from REWE. It does not appear that any money went directly into funding further growth right now.

The list of highest valued B2B SaaS companies is rounded out by Proglove, PowerCloud, Contentful, Wundermobility, and KONUX which are currently valued between $300 million and $200 million (the SaaS list excludes Auto1 who buy and sell actual cars and Adjust whose revenue model is based on transactions as opposed to subscriptions). 

2019 was a ‘golden’ year for startups in Germany to raise growth capital. The five largest B2C players (Flixbus, GetYourGuide, Frontier Car Group, N26  and SumUp) collectively raised €1952 million where each investment was larger than the $290 million raised by Celonis.

Marquee investors will provide the ammunition for Series B and beyond if they believe that these companies can become global category leaders with a clear path to exit: Accel is an investor in both Celonis and Personio. Insight Partners invested in Staffbase in addition to Commercetools and Lean IX. 

And there is an abundance of seed and series A capital available from German venture capital firms to fuel the fire.


Image credit: investing.com


Rocks Ahead For Cloud Companies in 2020?

2019 was another stellar year for the overall stock market (DJII ending at 28,462 up 22% from 23,328), even better for technology stocks (NASDAQ ending 8,946 up 35% from 6,635), and best for emerging cloud software and services companies (BVP/Nasdaq emerging cloud EMCLOUD ending at 1205.4 up 47% from 823.4). 



So there are ample reasons for cloud software companies to be happy. But was the wealth evenly spread? 

The first half of 2019 saw more than half a dozen IPOs in B2B SaaS: Medallia, Cloudflare, Dynatrace, Slack, Fastly, Zoom and Pagerduty all performed well immediately after their IPO.  However, the stock price of most of these companies stock prices performed far worse than any index by year end. The unweighted average share prices declined 15% between IPO and the end of 2019, and five out of seven were trading below IPO. 


Company
Share price EoY compared to IPO
Percent
Market cap $ million, EoY
Cloudflare
  -5%
  $5.2
Dynatrace
   6%
  $7.4
Medallia
-16%
  $3.8
Slack
-42%
$12.4
Fastly
-16%
  $2.0
Zoom
 10%
$18.6
Pagerduty
-39%
  $1.9

WeWork’s implosion in October effectively closed the IPO window for everyone else for the remainder of the year. Bill.com was the only company to squeeze their IPO in before the very end of 2019. 

While the IPO market took a break large enterprise SaaS companies continued to consolidate via acquisitions. The software analytics space in particular went through a generational wave of acquisitions reminiscent of the first round of M&A in 2005/2006. This time the buyers were Salesforce (Tableau), Workday (Adaptive Insight) and Google Cloud (Looker) instead of SAP, IBM and Oracle. 

Hyperscalers Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AliCloud have still largely been absent from making huge acquisitions. The growth and size of the hyperscalers far exceeds that of most other software companies, and their firepower will eventually be deployed towards more acquisitions higher up the software stack. Google Cloud’s acquisition of Looker may be the first indicator.

Clearly, there is enough money in the venture capital ecosystem to fund every startup that is worthy.The abundance of capital has trickled down from the large growth fund such as Softbank Vision to seed funds where seed round sizes have tripled since 2012. But the Softbank/WeWork writeoff has demonstrated that large funds are struggling to achieve their target returns. The Softbank Vision Fund has reportedly dialed back on its investment strategy of supersized rounds, and several of their portfolio companies have gone into restructuring mode. 

Are all of these events indicators of more down rounds to come?



Image credit: renemagritte.org