Welcome to our 103rd newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Diane de la Raudière, Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
Fundraisings from last week with Figures and Newsbridge
News from last week with Nicolas Brien and Porsche’s upcoming IPO
Our content of the week with a podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman w/ Entrepreneur First’s cofounders, Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford
The latest episode of “Dans la tête d’un CEO” w/ Jonathan Szwarc, CEO & cofounder of JOIN & #Yakar!
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
Oh, and before we forget:
In case you missed the info, our 9-weeks French bootcamp will be back in a few weeks. 🇫🇷
Registrations are open until September 19th, and are accessible just here! 🚀
The team looks forward to getting bigger! 👨👩👧👦 😉
👨🏭 Salary benchmark solution Figures raises €6,8M from Point Nine
At some point, every entrepreneur will ask himself the following question: how much should I pay my employees? By aggregating salary grids from all its clients and this for more than 100 roles, Figures deploys a solution for companies to analyse compensation data and establish a compensation strategy in line with market practices. 🤝
Founded in 2020 by a former HR director who worked for Criteo and Comet, Figures counts among its clients many startups including several unicorns such as ContentSquare, BackMarket and Qonto. The startup claims to have 700+ customers to date. And following the acquisition of Payspective, its British counterpart, Figures is continuing its deployment in Europe with a target of 1,000 customers by the end of the year. 🚀
Figures, the startup that defends compensation fairness is raising 6.8M€
🌉 Newsbridge raises a Series A to turbocharge its internationalization
Through its Series A with Supernova Invest and the participation of its historical investor Elaia, Newsbridge has raised €7 million to continue its U.S. expansion and pursue its investments in R&D. 📈
Newsbridge is an AI-based video collaboration platform that allows users to automatically index, create & share content. Founded by two brothers, Philippe and Frédéric Petitpont, Newsbridge's clients include companies such as Brut and the Olympique de Marseille, and it has doubled its growth in the last three years. 😳
This platform has two main goals:
Controlling the endless accumulation of online content in the face of an incessant flow of new videos (i.e. every two years, the amount of content produced worldwide is multiplied by two) thanks to indexing and archiving,
Making content accessible from anywhere, with a single click also with the help of Multimodal Indexing AI. 🤖
[Series A] Newsbridge raises 7M€ with Supernova Invest and Elaia
🇪🇺 Nicolas Brien no longer Chairman at Euratechnologies
After having arrived at the helm only about a year and a half ago following his previous stint as CEO of France Digitale, Nicolas Brien announced on his LinkedIn account that he will no longer be the Chairman of Euratechnologies, one of Europe’s oldest incubators headquartered in the north of France.
This follows news covered by Les Échos & Maddyness (in 🇫🇷) talking about turbulent times at the Lille-based incubator, having recently announced a cybersecurity campus and a fundraise in the works. 📈
Current COO, Koussée Vaneecke will take up the role of Chairwoman in the interim and pilot the fundraise as announced previously. 🤝
Euratechnologies : le joyau de l’entrepreneuriat du nord en pleine tempête
👀 Porsche’s long-awaited IPO is coming
Last week, Porsche CFO Lutz Meschke announced their plans to be ready for the IPO in the upcoming weeks. Despite the challenging market conditions, the board agreed on having an IPO taking place as soon as possible in the face of strong interest from investors. 😁
The Porsche IPO would be one of the largest in Europe in recent years and the carmaker could be valued at 60 to 80B€. By contrast, the entire Volkswagen Group (which owns Porsche since 2012) currently has a market capitalization of 86B€. 😳
With the expected proceeds from the IPO, VW intends to turn its ambitious EV aspirations into reality. Indeed, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess claimed earlier this year that he was expecting EV sales to make more than a quarter of VW’s revenue by 2026... and to overtake Tesla as the global leader in EV sales by 2025. 🚀
This summer, Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford, cofounders and co-CEOs of Entrepreneur First published a book entitled How to be a Founder: How Entrepreneurs Can Identify, Fund, and Launch Their Best Ideas. And we decided to dedicate our content of the week to a podcast episode they recently recorded with Reid Hoffman (cofounder of LinkedIn and now partner at Greylock). But before we dive into the main takeaways we noted during our listening, let’s start with a short recap of what Entrepreneur First is exactly! 🔎
“EF” was founded in 2011 and originated from Alice and Matt’s observation that, in most parts of the world, finding a cofounder is dreadfully hard. They thus decided to kickstart a 6-months program in which would participate exceptional individuals with an acute interest in identifying and launching business ideas. These individuals would put their careers on pause, and spend 6 months refining their ideas and possibly meeting their cofounders. 💪
Fast forward, EF has now helped thousands of founders creating 500+ companies worth billions. The program runs in 6 cities and the team receives around 20k applications each year for cohorts made of 50 to 70 people. 😳
Thus, it does not come as a surprise that Alice and Matt have some interesting things to say about entrepreneurs. And one fascinating part of their discussion with Hoffman concerns what usually keep people holding themselves back from trying entrepreneurship following their observation. Among the 3 main obstacles they see, we noted:
A lack of role models. In fact, a very large chunk of people globally don’t see other people around them building companies. So indeed: how could they suddenly decide entrepreneurship might fit with their aspirations? 😕
Thinking that you should postpone the start of your entrepreneurial journey to the moment you’ll have the right network. Having this kind of reasoning undervalues the fact that we can all start building a network right now according to Matt and Alice. 📈
A fear of failing. Alice and Matt discuss how they noticed a strong difference between founders who plan to succeed and those who plan to avoid failures. They note that if you fall in the later category as a founder, then a large part of your mental capacities is sketching out possible failure sources and working towards avoiding them. On the contrary, Alice notes:
“The individuals that succeed often have what we call very high personal exceptionalism. They can’t even fathom why they would fail because their brain is constantly planning and investing in what success looks like.”
The episode contains a lot of other thoughtful lessons and advices. So, we can only recommend you give it a try! 👇
How to be a Founder. Turning Entrepreneurial Ideas into Reality.
In this new episode, Yacine welcomed Jonathan Szwarc, CEO & cofounder of JOIN, a startup that offers a turnkey solution for creating, publishing, and monetising stories on all communication channels! 📱
Among the topics that both of them cover in this episode: the first business that Jonathan launched when he was 15, how he met with Nicolas (his cofounder) and how they ended up raising 4.5M€ with XAnge and Seedcamp. Yacine and Jonathan also talk about the notion of giving back and how Jonathan does so through his association #Yakar, etc. 🔥
“Before giving back, the most important thing is to reflect on the issue that matters the most to us, and especially think about the issue for which we’ll have maximum impact.”
So, if you’re a French speaker (and listener!), go check it out!
Internships
VC Analyst - French Founders (Paris)
VC Analyst - Verve Ventures (Zürich)
Jobs
Associate - Elaia (Paris)
👉 And if you’d like to discover more offers… you can check our job board just here!
Also, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at joinbabyvc@gmail.com. We’d be super happy to have you sharing job/internship offers, events or feedback with us! 🤝
You can also read about us on our website and follow what we do on LinkedIn.
Take care, and see you next week,
The whole baby vc crew 💛