All posts in RudeVC
Beyond Robots, France and Japan Launch Year of Innovation
It was an honor to participate in France’s governmental delegation to Japan to launch the Year of Innovation between the two countries. Seriously, I’m not being sarcastic. It’s true that I like to mock government initiatives in innovation, and my first reaction to the ministerial invitation to serve in the official kick-off of FrenchTechTokyo was […]
Another chance to Go East, Young Startup
For the third consecutive year, I’ve been granted some coveted spots to bring a delegation of five privileged French startups to the prestigious Dash Camp retreat in Japan. Dash Camp represents one of Asia’s exclusive tech conferences (they have a lot of exclusives there) whose objective is to foster cross-pollination between innovative entrepreneurs and leaders […]
The worst innovation of our day ?
I have this ongoing contest with a childhood friend on identifying the most impactful contributions to society’s moral decay. Potential winning candidates reflect more than mere kooky inventions: they genuinely qualify as innovations because they witness widescale adoption, for better or (in this case) for worse. I had won the last battle when I cited […]
Content is King; Distribution is King Kong
I love the expression by which I titled this post, though I cannot take credit for it. That goes to Laurens Rutten, CEO of our portfolio company BoosterMedia, a leading network for cross-platform mobile games. The importance of digital distribution has been on my mind a lot lately, and bubbled up again last week as […]
France has its tech Unicorn. Next it needs its Unicorpse.
France allegedly crowned its first unicorn last week when BlaBlaCar raised a new funding round led by Insight Venture Partners of $160 million at a post-money valuation of $1.2 billion. Actually, there is some debate on whether BlaBlaCar represents France’s very first unicorn (some argue that Vente-Privée should hold that title, but that’s beside the […]
If I could turn back time
With summer drawing to a close, it seems appropriate to revisit our little thought experiment about time travel. The responses from readers proved both entertaining and inspiring, even a bit emotionally touching in some cases. Before I report on the reader feedback, however, I’ll explain my rationale in suggesting this exercise. As I’ve proselytized before, […]
How a Scrabble champion reflects our new era of disruption
The Championnat Mondial de Scrabble Francophone (the French-language world Scrabble championship) crowned its winner last week: Nigel Richards. If that name doesn’t sound French to you, that’s because it isn’t. Nigel Richards hails from New Zealand. In fact, he doesn’t even know how to speak French! New Zealander wins French Scrabble Championship sounds like a […]
Nikkei acquires FT, and debunks several myths
As rather recursively reported in the FT last Thursday, Japan’s largest media company, Nikkei, will acquire the Financial Times Group from Pearson for a handsome £844 million. The eleventh hour offer for the London-based global news organization stunned rival bidders, and debunked several myths along the way in my opinion: Myth #1: Japanese acquirers are […]
LINE Stickers still are a thing
Although there are not many of us in Western Europe who use LINE as their primary messaging app (outside of Spain, where LINE penetration is remarkable), the multi-purpose platform that is LINE continues to entertain and stimulate creative new use cases around the world, like being coupled with Instagram to drive e-commerce in Thailand. I […]
Is corporate VC a KPI for a bubble ?
It feels like there are an awful lot of corporations setting up venture capital departments these days. I say ‘feels’, because my evidence was purely intuitive and anecdotal… until now. Compiling the data for global corporate venture deals all the way back to 1995 proved challenging. In fact, there were so many conflicting sources that […]