Weekend fun: Buy, Sell, or Hold. Silicon Valley edition.
On a recent homecoming visit to Silicon Valley I played a little Buy, Sell, or Hold? with a bunch of smart people out there. Here are the results: (For those not familiar with the game: Buy, Sell, or Hold? is quite simple. If <X> were a stock, would you buy, sell, or hold ?) . […]
There’s a new « mot de buzz » in town
Maybe it’s because I was out of France for 8 of the past 11 weeks, but it feels like there’s a new buzzword in the air: Ubérisation It’s difficult to open a French website without the seeing the word in a headline; journalists cannot get enough of it. One would be forgiven for thinking that […]
GDC 2016: Où est LaFrenchTech ?
The debate on the value of holding country pavilions at large tech conferences has merit. Whatever your views on the topic may be, France was conspicuously absent from this week’s Games Developers Conference in San Francisco. Germany, Italy, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, even Wallonia (Wallonia!) all hosted large structures at the conference, and […]
Crowd-pleasers from Distree
February has been one busy month, and it seems to be continuing with a slew of events. From Mobile World Congress to Distree, tech events have started off the year with a bang! During last week’s Distree, we had the chance to animate a couple of panels (international brand building & crowdfunding), where one of […]
The France Japan Year of Innovation is more than mere words
Government-sponsored initiatives involving startups and innovation often meet skepticism. I understand because I often tend to be one of the skeptics. It’s a familiar drill. A group of politicians announce with great fanfare some theme of cross-border collaboration, accompanied by numerous platitudes extolling the virtues of entrepreneurship, job creation, etc. The official framework here dates […]
No disrespect to VR, but I think HTML5 games will become trendy again
Almost exactly three years ago I attempted to expose my thinking on why I was enthusiastic about HTML5, at least from an investor’s perspective. Three years is of course an eternity in tech, and HTML5 has certainly progressed substantially in some ways I expected, while in other ways demonstrated my zeal in overestimating the immediacy […]
Words I never expected to hear from a founder
The Founder/CEO of a tech startup I’ve been following for a while caught me off guard the other day. This is not a company in which I’ve invested, mainly because its activity falls outside our fund’s investment sweet spot. Yet it’s a compelling venture for VC backing given its robust and defensible technology that offers […]
FrenchTech: One step forward, three steps back
For entrepreneurs and investors in the French tech ecosystem (and even potentially for outsiders looking in), it has been a discouraging couple of weeks for us. While I still believe that 2016 will be the year of the European entrepreneur, I sincerely hope that politicians do not thwart France’s momentum in innovation when we’re just […]
10 ridiculous humble brags recently spotted on Twitter
Many of these could pass for satire but I’m pretty certain their authors intended them in full seriousness. Great idea, very similar to what I advocated in my TED talk last year Flattered to be quoted alongside Peter Thiel in this TechCrunch article Could barely keep up with Chris McCormack in my first Ironman Still […]
5 smart European VC predictions for 2016
Last year’s Predictions on the State of VC in Europe 2015 proved so popular that I decided to do it again. Here are some insightful predictions for 2016 from five of my more prophetic peers. Dmitry Chikhachev, Runa Capital, Russia I would predict 2 trends for VC in Europe in 2016: 1) a growing number […]