Absolutely mind boggling how UK Headquartered ElevenLabs raising $500M at an $11B valuation yesterday is not in the Financial Times today.
Genuinely curious as to how that hasn't been covered.
"10 years ago, tech was about 3-4% of Europe's GDP, today it's about 15-16%...its grown four times".
Balderton Capital (@balderton) General Partner @surangac on what's happening in the European Tech ecosystem:
"What excites me about the next five years is that I think that trend is going to continue."
"It's grown four times and become one of the bigger industries across the continent."
"If you're excited by this tech renaissance, this tech revolution- then join it. And if you're really excited about it, why not start your own company?"
This is without a doubt the biggest lever Europe could pull overnight to boost its ecosystem.
A huge part of a person or entities success is the ability to tell their story at scale, not just in tech, for anyone who’s achieved great things - the Americans are complete professionals at this.
We talk about the tech ecosystem comparisons a lot, but they have an absolutely world class media ecosystem supporting them.
Understanding just how powerful a strong media ecosystem can be, implementing it well, and letting it rip will play a massive part in Europes future success.
General Partner at Balderton Capital (@balderton) Suranga Chandratillake (@surangac) says Europe's startup ecosystem has a marketing problem, not a talent problem:
"In California, while there are problems and people working on those problems, they're really, really good at reminding people of the good that is happening as well."
"In Europe, we tend to focus a bit on what needs to be done, on the issues, on the gaps. We should never ignore those things, but you can also shout from the top of the buildings about things that are working well."
"It's really trying to do what frankly the Americans do quite well, which is talk about the positives as well as the negatives."
BREAKING: Dmitry Shevelenko (@dmitry140) Chief Business Officer at Perplexity (@perplexity_ai) will join the European Technology Network live tomorrow at 2:15PM BST.
I suspect there will be three types of post-IPO routes for early employees at Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI:
1. The "I've made generational wealth and I'm going to go enjoy it" route. No longer need to work, doing whatever they want whenever they want.
2. The "I've made generational wealth, have a great track record and I'm now legible for serious capital to build my own start-up" route. Will go on to raise large rounds, and build their own company.
3. The "I've seen behind the curtain and I'm concerned about safety and ethical deployment" route. Will either stay on to make sure they're close to safely guide progress internally, to whatever degree they can. Or band together with other researchers/early team members to form safety/ethics councils that are taken seriously.
Anthropic has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Pending completion of SEC review, this gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering.
Read more: https://t.co/onGZAhRLvD
Leading Founder Experience at Open AI (@OpenAI), Laura Modiano (@LauraModiano) says the startup playbook has changed, and OpenAI is moving at the speed of founders:
"Every single step of building a company is now changed and companies need to change with the founders. So we just wanted to create the space for us to really listen to founders but also move at speed with them and support founders from day one."
"We wanted to stitch every single way that we can support founders together so that they can benefit from the whole platform that OpenAI has to offer, whether it is products, marketing, feedback, technical success, programs, different resources and opportunities."
"Because of the compressed timing and because of how fundamentally central to the existence of startups today AI is, we cannot be reacting. We have to proactively be able to support and provide resources the moment someone goes from a developer to founder."
The US passed the GENIUS Act. The EU has MiCA. The UK now has a second mover advantage.
On @etnshow, @ddisparte explains why the UK can take the best of both sides of the Channel and the Atlantic to build rules that support activity, investment, and market growth.
F1 World Champion Nico Rosberg (@NicoRosberg) shares he's been cold emailing Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke (@tobi) for three years and that his competitive edge to success is having no fear of failing:
"I'm cold emailing all the time and I get rejected 90% of the time...Rosberg Ventures is one of those chances because actually it was like 90% sure it's going to fail."
"I've been trying to reach Tobi Lütke, the CEO founder of Shopify. He's a race car driver so that of course is my best angle and I've been trying for 3 years."
"Guessing emails, his EA, common friends, everything...could not get him to even acknowledge or write me once."
"And I was on the phone with him yesterday".