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.

When Donald Trump, president elect, met leaders of the tech industry yesterday, these are the people with seats round the table.

Who is the most obvious omission…?

As job titles get ever more ‘exotic’, (the ones below are from an actual, real, company), we realised that one unexpected benefit for companies is it makes their staff harder to recruit on LinkedIn.

If a recruiter is looking for an, ‘HR Director’, for example, they are unlikely to find a candidate from this company where the HR Director could be a Rapport Support Officer, an HR and Culture Enthusiast, a Hiring Engineer or even a People Operations Alchemist.

Crowdfunding has been looking for a runaway success or two in order to give investors the confidence that investing in unregulated early stage companies can make even unsophisticated investors money. Nothing smacks of success like an IPO so I was excited to see the news of FreeAgent’s AIM IPO take top billing in today’s Seedrs newsletter.

I’m not sure this is such a great advert for crowdfunding though…

This is a reliably useful resource. David Skok from Matrix Partners has run an annual survey of SaaS companies for many years.

This year’s contains data from 336 SaaS companies and includes information on:

Grey Group ranks among the largest global communications companies. Under the banner of “Grey Famously Effective Since 1917”, the agency serves a blue-chip client roster of many of the world’s best known companies: Procter & Gamble, GlaxoSmithKline, Diageo, Pfizer, Canon, 3M and Boehringer Ingelheim. In Asia, Grey Group covers 28 cities in 16 countries and works with some of the biggest brands in the region: Hong Kong Tourism Board, HSBC, Volvo, Lenovo, Mengniu, Proya and Qatar Airways.

It developed an App to help solve the migrant crisis and to win itself an award at Cannes. It got a bronze. The app was a fraud.  Sometimes it seems there is nothing an advertising agency will do to win some press and glory for itself, certainly the forcibly displaced 65.3 million people at the end of 2015 (Grey numbers), must be pleased for them.

The Best of the Europas 2016

The Ultimate EU Referendum Playlist

I was somewhere today, Chatham House Rule and only one speaker. I won’t say where but, the speaker, a very well known Games Developer who has been producing games for a while and has a very popular game on the Oculus Rift, was asked whether the future of games was VR.

He replied, that he didn’t think so just yet for a few reasons: