The Steph Curry Fallacy

work in progress

• Entrepreneurs going places. Cloudvisor expanding to the US. ArcaPay launches Latvian market, and Kilo Health opens an office in Riga, too. Sweden is the first Scandinavian market for Vinted. Kastytis' startup studio launches a new recruitment platform - in Thailand. Adomas continues to hire Ukrainians for mostly US firms, and discovers Twitter for B2B sales. Rasa joins Carbon13 in Cambridge for a new climate venture. Giedrimas ends NATO gig, will join Anduril or something else?
• Edtech. Association is growing strong, here Sarunas reviews the first year. Some new ventures popping up - Skillademia by Jacob Laukaitis, Scoolsy, edON (hiring), and others.
• Apples and Oranges - and fashion. We should not compare the two, but let's do this. Poshmark (US-based fashion marketplace, mix of new and second-hand) was recently acquired for $1.2B cash deal by South Korean Naver. Poshmark 2021 GMV was $1.8B (27% yoy), net revenue $326 m (25% yoy), and the company had roughly 80m users. In the meantime, Vinted already dominates European markets (more than 40% market share), with EUR 2.75B GMV,  EUR 245m in revenue (much faster growth - 63% yoy), and at least 45m users (a year-old data point). Valuation will be further boosted by the US market potential, ongoing acquisitions (welcome, Vilnius visitors!), and of course sustainability/reuse biz model.
• Mobility hackathon Oct 28th with EUR 20k prize. As we'd love LT to accelerate sustainable transport, here are a few imported ideas, that might work when twisted for the local market. 1] Whee is cargo e-bike subscription in Norway 2] Company bike schemes makes e-bikes affordable - like Jooll in DK 3] Neighbourhood car-sharing 4] Companies paying for employees to bike - saves on fewer sick leaves 5]. Fancy one of the ideas, or have yours - feel free to email and we might be able to find you a partner.

rounds and capital

• Not again! Empty or we missed anything? Get inspired by how Vladas Lasas started backing deep tech startups years ago, combining vision and patience.

roleplay

How hard is it to find openings at early-stage Lithuanian startups?

founder guide

• 5 things I wish I knew before starting in early-stage VC
• The SAFE Nightmare
• Physical proximity is more important for meeting new people (with new knowledge) than for collaboration
• Nice ready why you can't get bridge from your existing investors - "What do VCs, book publishers and movie producers have in common — cut losses, double down on winners". A related challenge we are running into: growth capital splits between "traditional" (banks and PE provide, traditional industries, etc) and "venture" (ambition =  IPO), but little in between. Meaning nobody is there to call for financing if you are growing towards 10m revenue SaaS or another niche, innovative business. Taking venture money will likely break this thing. Hope that's a topic covered at various angel training schools. Who will emerge as Andrew Wilkinson of Lithuania, with Tiny Capital?

insights

• PE and VC returns in Finland (notice the boom years)
• Hollywood managed to derisk revenue - so it keeps falling steadily and we all noticed in quality
• Perhaps the real Tesla leverage? Three letters, ops.
• AI domain is booming and we are keen to hear from Oxipit. In the meantime, a perfect illustration of Jasper's "overnight success". This is why early-stage investing is art no science.

Podcast channels, that should have continued

• Building Bridges by Nicolas Colin
• Landed - a playbook for international expansion, by Brett Bivens
• Infinite Block by Micromobility founders
• When to Jump by Mike Lewis

ecosystem

• Good older piece on tech ecosystems. Are we all hurting ourselves trying to replicate Silicon Valley? Did Steph Curry hurt basketball with 3-pointers?

Understand what I’m saying when I say this. He’s hurting the game. And what I mean by that is that I go into these high school gyms, I watch these kids, and the first thing they do is they run to the 3-point line. You are not Steph Curry. Work on the other aspects of the game

Indeed, while everyone has 0.00000001% to have the talent of Steph, the odds of ecosystem massively increases when the density of people working for ambitious goals grows exponentially. Estonia is a perfect example - you may not have another Apple, but end up with 10 unicorns locally!

The only way for a venture community to leverage the power of Metcalfe’s law and increase the density of people working to build startups is to increase the chances that startups in their region succeed. That is what happened in Silicon Valley, it is what happened in successful venture communities like Seattle, it is the blueprint. In building product, a good feedback loop is crucial in preventing churn. The same thing goes — on a more long term scale — when building a venture community.