European Founders at Work Pedro Gairifo Santos European Founders at Work Copyright © 2012 Pedro Gairifo Santos All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copy- right owner and the publisher. ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4302-3906-2 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4302-3907-9 Trademarked names may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. 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Contents Foreword ...........................................................................................................................vii About the Author.............................................................................................................ix Acknowledgments..............................................................................................................x Introduction..........................................................................................................................xi Chapter 1: Jos White, Notion Capital, Founding Partner................................................1 Chapter 2: Barton, Inghelbrecht, Mukherjee, and Wang, Shazam.....15 Chapter 3: Lars Hinrichs, XING................................................................................41 Chapter 4: Bernard Liautaud, Business Objects.....................................................49 Chapter 5: Iain Dodsworth, TweetDeck.................................................................................59 Chapter 6: Giacomo Peldi Guilizzoni, Balsamiq................................................71 Chapter 7: Olivier Poitrey, Dailymotion...................................................................91 Chapter 8: Richard Moross, Moo.com...................................................................101 Chapter 9: Felix Haas, amiando................................................................................111 Chapter 10: Peter Arvai, Prezi...................................................................................121 Chapter 11: Saul Klein, Video Island (LOVEFiLM)........................................................135 Chapter 12: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, The Next Web..........................151 Chapter 13: Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp..................................................................163 Chapter 14: Ilya Segalovich, Yandex........................................................................175 Chapter 15: Richard Jones, Last.fm..........................................................................187 Chapter 16: Alex Farcet, Startupbootcamp................................................................201 Chapter 17: Martin Varsavsky, Fon.......................................................................209 Chapter 18: Brent Hoberman, lastminute.com...................................................................219 v Chapter 19: Loic Le Meur, Seesmic and LeWeb.......................................................225 Chapter 20: Eric Wahlforss, SoundCloud................................................................241 Index .......................................................................................................................251 vi Foreword The fact that there is a book about European technology founders is a mile- stone and one we should take a moment to celebrate. Just like Founders at Work (Apress, 2006), Jessica Livingston’s US-focused predecessor, this book takes you inside the mind of some great European tech founders and helps you gain insight into the highs and lows of creating a business. If the next generation of European founders can make new mistakes rather than old ones, this book will be worth its weight in gold. When you read some of the stories in this book, it’s easy to feel we have made amazing progress over the last 15 years in Europe—especially since this book covers only the tip of the iceberg. There have been many great companies built and many great outcomes. But in the next 15 years, if we aspire to the creation of businesses capable of supporting hundreds of thou- sands of new jobs and $10 billion in new revenue and enterprise value, we need to do more than just recognize, support, and reward innovation. We need in Europe (including Israel) to learn how to develop the conditions to create serious scale. Right now, Silicon Valley is peerless at both supporting innovation and creat- ing serious scale. There’s been no master plan, but the 60-year interplay of government as an early catalyst; academia and established companies as early customers and sources of talent; and of course, investors willing to take risks and a long term view, have given entrepreneurs fertile ground to sow seeds and try to grow monsters with dragon’s teeth ready to conquer the world. You need every element of this ecosystem working perfectly to create monsters—and Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Twitter, VMware, and Zynga have all been recent beneficiaries there. In fact, the capacity for serious scale is almost part of the muscle memory of Silicon Valley’s residents. As a newly-minted founder, you have unparalleled access within a 10-mile radius to a living ecosystem of talent and investors who have been part of businesses in almost every technology sector. Some of these went from start-up to superstar—HP, Intel, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, and Google—the list goes on and on, each one at different speeds and with vii different approaches, creating tens of thousands of jobs, over $10 billion in annual sales, and over $100 billion of enterprise value. Of course, there are examples of extraordinary value creation driven by vi- sionary founders who were able to build great organizations in the last 30 years outside of Silicon Valley, including monsters like Amazon, Dell, and Microsoft. Even in Europe we can point to SAP. Start-ups can grow to mon- strous scale in spite of their environments, but the chances of success— which are slim to begin with—increase vastly with a supportive and a cohe- sive ecosystem. The good news for Europe is we are now producing great founders in abundance. There are teams determined to go out and create monsters. They have been inspired by the likes of ARM, Autonomy, AVG, Business Objects, Checkpoint, Playfish, MySQL, LogMeIn, Skype, TomTom, and Qlik- Tech. In fact, if you go to almost any European city, you can find independ- ent start-ups like Criteo, Fon, Gameforge, Klarna, Moleskine, Privalia, SoundCloud, Spotify, vente-privee, YOOX, and Wix, all capable of global category leadership, creating thousands of new jobs, $1billion in new sales, and billions in new enterprise value. In London alone, you can see compa- nies like ASOS, Badoo, Betfair, Graze, Just-Eat, King.com, Mimecast, Moshi Monsters, PhotoBox, and Wonga. This is serious progress. But the straight facts are that while we are unques- tionably masters of invention in Europe, we don’t yet have the ecosystem— or perhaps the attitude—to really support our current and future genera- tion of founders to create serious scale. We are on a long journey, and to succeed we need more than just great founders; they are only the baseline for success. We will also need patience, vision, and long-term thinking from every part of the ecosystem to get to a place where we can produce monsters to conquer the world. For me, the big question is if we are truly able to do this. —Saul Klein, Founder of LOVEFiLM and The Accelerator Group viii About the Author Pedro Gairifo Santos is a co-founder of Beta-i, a NGO (non-governmental organization) based in Lisbon, Portugal, that supports entrepreneurship through a series of initiatives, including a seed-stage accelerator program. He is also the curator of the i9 Conference and a Startup Weekend organizer and facilitator. Santos holds an MBA from Rotterdam School of Management and he worked in the IT sector for ten years. ix Acknowledgments First of all, thanks to my wife, Anastasia Volkhovskaya, for her love, support, patience, and help in making this book a reality. Also, big thanks to my parents, as I was brought up being taught that any- thing is possible if you work hard enough at it. And in reality, it is. Love you both; thanks for giving me all the opportunities in the world. Thanks to Ekaterina Sizova and Paul Jesemann. Without their support this project would not have been made. Thanks to all the founders that I interviewed for sharing their stories, knowledge, and time. I learned immensely from their experiences and liked to talk to them all. I was pleasantly surprised at how “down to earth” and friendly all of them were. Thanks to Saul Klein for writing the foreword for the book and to Peter Cohan for his quote and sharing his experience on publishing books. Thanks to Nuno Morgadinho, Ana Aires, and James Page for brainstorming with me about which founders were best to interview. Thanks to Jeff Olson and Jeffrey Pepper for believing in the value of this book and their willingness to publish it. Also big thanks to all the team at Apress that helped me turn this book into reality. Special thanks to Jessica Belanger for “holding my hand” all the way through the new world of publishing. Thanks to Ekaterina Zhilina for chasing down founders for me to interview. Even when they proved to be quite hard to track down, she found a way to do so. Thanks to everyone that helped with introductions: Clément Cazalot, Syl- vain Theveniaud, Carlos Silva, Pedro Rocha Vieira, Robin Klein, Ricardo Sousa, Michael Jackson, Melissa Darker, and Samuel Mensah. Thanks to everyone at Beta-i and Startup Weekend for their amazing energy and commitment to bring entrepreneurship to the world. This book would not exist without them. I’m also thankful for the lessons I learned while in contact with these two great NGOs. x