- Sunday CET
- Posts
- the socialist model
Hey there,
Welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET. Let’s get right at it.
Dragos
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Market talk
🇪🇺 This week’s stories:
powder: high profile VC setting up shop in London + more European early stage deeptech funds popping out.
fintech is getting hot(ter): yet again, judging from the investors appetite.
early stage deals: vertical AI, smart nuclear, alt FAANG, longevity biotech, quantum, virtual power plants etc
high-signal-zero-noise professional coverage of Euro VC: sign up.
🇪🇺 Here’s an idea:
The EU is looking to fund the costs of local tech startups that want to go public in Europe and it could act as a cornerstone investor in IPOs.
"We're talking about ensuring that European companies, technologies that are born in Europe, stay in Europe, and that we invest in Europe's champions, in Europe's unicorns, that we reinforce Europe's competitiveness through a stronger capital market," EIB president Nadia Calvino said.
this sounds to me like taking money from a EU pocket (early stage VC funding which is mostly subsidised by the EU already) and putting it into another EU pocket.
kind of at odds with how an efficient capital market should work - the real hope is they become a market anchor as a hedge for attracting other money managers in the public markets ecosystem.
but… in spite of the socialist subsidising principle, the good news is that the acute of lack of liquidity is on the agenda and they have to start from somewhere, right?
bonus link - it looks like at least some EU folks started to ask for advice from the right people.
bonus link 2 - regulators should make it easier for companies to go public.
bonus link 3 - competition!
The state of Texas in the US will launch a Stock Exchange pledging tougher listing standards than NYSE and Nasdaq as part of an attempt to establish Dallas as a financial challenger to east coast dominance.
Assuming approval, TXSE expects to make its first trades in December next year and list companies early in 2026.
🇬🇧 Meanwhile, on other sovereign matters, British assets are for sale on the private market.
Sheffield United, which has been for sale since May 2023, might be acquired by a group of American investors led by Steven Rosen, co-founder of Resilience Capital Partners.
more than a third of the 92 professional teams in England’s top four leagues now have some form of US ownership.
the British club is now owned by the former Saudi sports minister Prince Abdullah bin Mosaad bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud
otoh, Selfridges got a new owner as Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund bought 40% of British department store chain Selfridges.
the stake had been owned by Signa Group, the Austrian property group which bought Selfridges with the Thai conglomerate Central Group for £4 billion in 2021.
🇬🇧 Shein’s business in the UK reported $2 billion in revenue for 2023.
almost all of it is paid to its Singapore-based parent Roadget Business Pte Ltd. for purchases of the goods sold in the UK
Shein Distribution UK Limited is a fully-owned subsidiary of Roadget Business Pte Ltd, and the ultimate controlling party is Elite Depot Limited, a company registered in the Cayman Islands.
🇫🇷 Nikon disclosed a 5.1% stake in French eyewear maker EssilorLuxottica.
EssilorLuxottica already operates an eyewear joint venture with Nikon that was set up in 2000.
same company doing a JV with Facebook for smart glasses, which Facebook is also considering to buy a stake of up to 5%.
🇵🇹 Portugal fights the brain drain - it plans to become a low-tax haven for 18-35 year olds by offering a decade of tax breaks, with zero tax in their first year of work.
under the scheme, about 400k young people earning up to €28k a year would have a 100% tax exemption in the first year of work, dropping to 75% from the second to the fourth year, 50% between the fifth and the seventh and 25% from the eighth to the 10th year.
the average annual salary in Portugal is about €20k and income tax rates range from 13-48%.
🇫🇷 France’s PM Michel Barnier joins the Brits, Italians and many other Europeans in building a national budget based on raising taxes, since the local finances are a bit messy under war circumstances in Europe.
La Résistance is there, of course - wealthy dudes threaten to move out of France and others who might have been considering settling in the country to are re-considering.
🇸🇪 I know a fair number of Swedes who were shocked that one of Northvolt’s subsidiaries had filed papers for bankruptcy this week - alas, they’re regular guys, from outside the VC/startups bubble.
bonus, by October 14 (which is on Monday) Northvolt must pay some $25 million to the Swedish tax authorities - by law, if it cannot pay its taxes on time, the company must be declared bankrupt.
🇨🇭 A bunch of PE guys are trying to boycott Switzerland’s efforts to forge a new deal to govern relations with the European Union.
🇪🇺 Dealroom made yet another report bullish on Europe - don’t you just love optimism? 😃 - stating the obvious that the energy sector took some 40% of the VC spend in Europe.
part of it is, of course, a direct effect of the current Russia/China war against the civilised world.
but the report’s largest theme is that industrial (re-)technology, which investors refer to as deep tech, is probably the sector with the more potential for innovation in Europe. Makes sense, if only taking the history into account - the industrial revolution started in the UK and spread to continental Europe and the United States, from around 1760 to about 1820–1840.
so forget about AI or backing crews cloning American SAAS, it’s crowded and expensive anyways, industrial revolution 2.0 is where it’s at, right?
🇪🇺 TikTok has set aside $1 billion for future fines from regulators in Europe.
💪 Epic Games scored a big win against Google in US court - Google will now be forced to allow third-party app stores to be publicly visible within the Play Store and operate freely.
the Google breakup is closer than ever.
🤖 Tesla unveiled a fully autonomous Cybercab to be made available in 2027 and competing with the likes of Waymo, already active in the American market.
investors were underwhelmed.
An interesting distro deal - Apple TV+ will be made available as a $9.99 add-on to Amazon Prime Video.
🍪 Samsung apologized to investors over weak contributions to the AI chips race.
💲 Spillover effects - Microsoft's AI bet will lead to over $100 billion in data center leases.
🤯 Roblox is a bot-addled, pedophile hellscape for kids.
☀️ A new Silicon Valley startup wants to build a network of solar power stations in orbit.
✍️ Substack wants to do more than just newsletters.
Also notable
⚠️ We’re doing the dinner again next month!
November 12, London.
the gist - invite-only event with the objective of matching ambitious founders with open-minded investors, and having them build future business relationships.
intimate event, in an informal setting over a dinner table (think salon), on the premise that people do business by getting to know each other in a relaxed manner as opposed to going to ‘fast food’ pitching gigs.
I already have a long list of folks interested - please let me know if would like to be considered.
🇬🇧 Why doesn’t the UK have more startups? It’s not a money problem, it’s cultural.
🙈 The rise of the AI Neoclouds and their anatomy.
💲 The state of the private equity market - too much money chasing too few deals.
☘️ Ten things that matter right now in seed VC.
⚖️ Legal AI market map.
💲 The state of luxury: what's worthy of investment in 2024.
👋 Q&A with Vinod Khosla.
🇪🇺 You can now answer Atomico’s State of European Tech 2024 survey.
🤙 Satya Nadella has told his staff to schedule two calls a day with CEOs of other companies, startup founders and VCs as way of staying in the loop.
🥸 If you put away his conspiracy theories and politics, Elon Musk can still be an interesting guy.
Musk has involved himself in the US election in a manner unparalleled in modern history - it’s why he paid $44 billion for buying Twitter and made it a Trump megaphone, yet another business guy waiting for a payback if Trump gets elected.
it’s also why people started not to trust/like the guy, and there’s increasing evidence that the mistrust started to reflect on the business side - see Tesla’s stock going down after this week’s launch announcements.
🗣️ Head of UK’s MI5 warns that Russia and Iran are hiring low-level criminals to undertake sabotage missions and attacks on dissidents in Europe.
🎥 The Free Blockbuster movement - people transformed empty newspaper boxes into mini libraries with old flicks and TV series (in DVD and VHS form) that are free for the taking.
🎥 The best ads of 2024, so far.
That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!
Presented by Notion
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We’re offering 6 months of new Plus plans, including unlimited Notion AI so you can try it all for free!
Redemption Instructions
To redeem the Notion for Startups offer:
Submit an application using our custom link: https://ntn.so/sundaycet and select SundayCET on the partner list.
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Created every Sunday by @drnovac of Nordic 9 with weekly notes and observations from the European startup ecosystem.
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