pawel.ch - notes of a VC in Berlin/Europe

I have just come back from the demo day of Startupbootcamp in Berlin. My impression is that it was quite a success and that Alex and his team did a very good job putting the program and final event together. Also, the teams have done a great job presenting.

Three things in particular struck me when I was sitting there and watched the teams pitch:

• The event was hugely international. During the 1.5 hours of presentations probably not more than 10% of the people presenting were of German origin. The teams were from all over the place - Denmark, Australia, US, UK, France..
• The event surpassed my expectations in terms of attendance. Without counting I feel that some thousand people were in the room watching the teams present and I could see many well known guests and investors from all around Europe.
• The absolute key themes the startups were addressing were media (video, music, text) and social and there were only one or two exceptions to that. This was a little bit surprising - (almost) no software, no commerce.

I think this event demonstrated the strength of the Berlin ecosystem, its sheer size and internationality. I expect that the upcoming editions will be even more popular, that it will stay hugely international and attract an even larger group of high quality startups.

This week we will be visiting some of our portfolio companies in Poland. Christoph, Nicolas and myself will be in Krakow (home to infakt and brainly) and Warsaw (home to positionly and one more investment that we have not announced yet). Unfortunately, we will not be able to visit Wroclaw (where oferteo is based).

This brings me back to the point I addressed in my previous post - the fragmentation of the European ecosystem. Europe in general is geographically fragmented - but the tech ecosystems in some countries, like in this case Poland, are VERY fragmented. Warsaw and Krakow seem to be the key centres of tech entrepreneurship, but Wroclaw, Poznan, Szczecin, Gdansk - they all have their own startup scenes that are somewhat comparable as far as their levels of development go. If one needs to visit five Polish cities to get an impression of how the Polish scene works, I am sure that many potential visitors and investors get discouraged by that.

I think a similar situation was the case in Germany for a long time, but Berlin is leading the way on becoming a significant startup hub and I think the whole German (and European) ecosystem is benefiting from that. I am looking forward to one city becoming the clearly leading tech hub of Poland and am curious to see which one it will be. Any ideas?

I have just looked into my calendar - I will meet five Berlin startups that I have not personally met before in the course of today and tomorrow. Great - that is why I like my job so much. Their offices are not far away from ours - one is actually located just a few minutes walk away.

This reminded me of something that I was taught at university many years ago - the importance of clusters for innovation. It is much more efficient for all parties involved to be located at a place with a high concentration of relevant ecosystem participants. Short distances increase efficiency of contracting and less friction allows for higher output at a lower cost.

I believe that a lack of concentration of the tech community is one of the reasons behind the relative weakness of the European eco-system vs. the US or Israel. Yet things are improving, illustrated by the rise of Berlin or London as tech hubs. I do believe that more concentration in even bigger hubs would be a good thing for Europe.

As for Berlin, the ecosystem is doing well on many fronts - lots of startups, freelancers, events are happening here. It would be nice to have more VCs based here to make the ecosystem more complete. We at Point Nine and a (very) few others are working on it, but there certainly is space for many more.

I have recently set up a basic Sonos hi-fi system at my flat and I am amazed. 

In short, Sonos provides a range of portable wireless speakers that can be combined together to create a customisable sound experience. The whole system can be controlled via mobile or desktop apps or via a Sonos remote control.

Most importantly, the system is directly wired into the Internet and has direct access to a number of music and radio streaming services (like Spotify, Aupeo or TuneIn) and can stream music directly onto the speakers. One can also freely customize which speaker is playing what, so that you can have one stream running in the kitchen and something completely different in the living room. Or you can group all the speakers to play the same thing.

If you are used to streaming music directly from the computer or your phone onto a speaker set, the Sonos system will seem counterintuitive at first. But after a short while, it becomes clear that their philosophy is actually smarter and more comfortable and powerful than for example that of Airplay.

It is a lot of fun, also because you can control the system via many devices at the same time - so if family members or a couple cannot quite agree on what music to play, you can be sure that it will be changing quite often with everyone switching to his favourite stream from his own device. I get to experience that a lot :)

However, the main shortcoming of the system seems to be that one needs to rely on the plugins provided by Sonos for the services that can be used with it. They support Spotify, Aupeo, Deezer and a few others, but, for example, SoundCloud is missing (even though they share the same investor, Index). It would be great if Sonos opened up their platform so that all streaming services could be used with it. And maybe they will get there eventually - they have just raised over a $100 million, so a strong international rollout and further investment in the platform can be expected.

Sonos has been around for a while (started up in 2004), but I only tried it now - and I encourage you to try it as well. And if you know any easy hacks to get SoundCloud on Sonos, please let me know.

…and then, once you have it set up, with all the music and radio stations of the world available everywhere in your home, you will probably stick to your favourite local radio station and the same few artists for most of the time ;)

[UPDATE 6 Dec] It is now also possible to play music from your iPhone on to the Sonos system, just like Airplay. Nice!

Hello World - my name is Pawel Chudzinski.

I live in Berlin where we are trying to build a great VC firm. You can check out our website at: www.pointninecap.com. I really enjoy what I am doing. Historically, Europe has not been the greatest of places for the VC business, but we believe and witness every day (esp. in Berlin!) that times are changing fast and this is less and less true. So stay tuned.

I also enjoy living in Berlin a lot. It is a vast city that is evolving very fast. It has a lot of space and is not crowded. It is in the centre of Europe and close to Poland. It is very international and still relatively cheap. However, it is certainly not perfect (pretty high unemployment due to the lack of large companies in the area) and many Berliners leave the city for more developed (richer) cities in the west of Germany or in other parts of Europe. Fortunately, many entrepreneurs from all over Europe come to Berlin to start tech companies - which makes it a perfect location from which to run a VC firm.

I have been wanting to start a blog for a long time. Now I am doing it and hope that I will be posting on a somewhat regular basis. I am curious to see how this works out :)