So many books have been written about how to win in business. The simplest way, in my experience, is to use core values fully in an organisation. It’s also one of the hardest things to get right.
Perhaps the single biggest tech investment area the last 5 years has been fin-tech. In Europe and the US, disruptors of everything from lending to foreign exchange have raised unprecedented capital to challenge banks and their kin:
Negative news recently from Soundcloud, which cut nearly half its staff only a year after ‘mulling over’ a $1B M&A offer, is now the exception rather than the rule in European tech.
A report from London & Partners yesterday outlined how the UK tech sector remains extremely strong despite Brexit.
One of the hottest areas for VC investment is AI/ML; artificial intelligence algorithms, related machine learning systems, neural networks, and back-end processing to produce insightful and self-learning applications.
London has been the undisputed European technology centre. Until now. Our view is Berlin will rapidly begin to take over, and in 10-15 years we will see the Berlin cluster as Europe’s technology hot-bed.
Confusion reigns about the impact a hung parliament will have on business confidence and, of course, whether the nation’s plans for Brexit will change. Naturally, this concern is magnified for sectors driving UK economic growth, with the tech and financial sectors foremost among them.
Since 2011, $60B of VC investment has gone into fin-tech globally. That’s 7,000 funding rounds, a staggering collective commitment by the venture industry to the future disruption of banking, trading and payments.
Amid the hype around Europe’s surging tech market, with talk of Silicon Valley losing its lustre to new hubs like London or Berlin, comes a sobering long term trend that suggests the complete opposite is in fact the case.
In recent weeks on both sides of the Atlantic ‘gig economy’ companies have consolidated at an accelerating pace. IAC has led the wave, acquiring Angie’s List after two years of courtship for $500m, after buying a smaller UK business only a few weeks before.
