European Scale-Ups Report 2016
There are lots of interesting trends in this report on emerging trends in European scale-ups in the tech sector. The rise of Paris as a tech hub for example. As with many reports, companies are increasingly defined as a thing – a unicorn, a scale-up – based on a measure of funding raised or valuation attained.
Just as you probably don’t judge a chef based on the amount of money they spend on raw materials, we shouldn’t judge a company based on the amount of money they have raised.
A meal is memorable for the ambience, the tastes, the smells, the company, sometimes the price you pay to eat it. It is rarely impressive or memorable simply because the chef spent a fortune on ingredients. Likewise with companies, there are so many more useful measures of the value/impact of a business.
Number of employees, revenue growth, profit growth are all valuable measures of the potential impact of a business than money raised and don’t fall into the trap of assuming that all scale requires external finance. There are plenty of companies that have become large and impactful without taking external funds.
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