Dragos Novac, at Sunday CET, wrote an interesting piece on the new wave of European VCs.
I’m raising money right now for a new project and I can see the difference in people I’m talking to comparing to 2012-2013, when I raised money for MavenHut. The people I talk to now in Europe are a lot more similar to the people I was used to meet in the US. Not bad at all!
Who are those new people trying out new things? I am seeing three types:
i) former entrepreneurs – more and more founders decided to start investing, either on the side or as their main job.
ii) young people in their late 20s-early 30s, who decided to take their destiny in their hands and run their own show rather than working for traditional investment shops run by old school people.
iii) veterans who also decided to raise their own fund and become startup VCs rather than retiring as employees for traditional shops.
All those guys have energy, are knowledgeable and risk takers. They understand the value creation process and are trying their best to be a positive part of it. Some of them are idealistic, which is a good ingredient in a business where the KPI is a number which is usually correlated with the ego size.
And those guys, combined with a lot of outside competition, are the future of this VC-backed ecosystem, which is still an insignificant bubble in the grand economic scheme of things from Europe.
Read the entire newsletter/post from Dragos here and subscribe to Sunday CET. It’s the best newsletter I’ve found on VC and startup investment in Europe.
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