pawel.ch - notes of a VC in Berlin/Europe

Remember the widely commented post and piece of research by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures on unicorns (i.e. tech startups worth more than $1bn)? It was a very solid piece of work that sparked a debate on what it takes to get there for the companies and what it takes to get into such companies for VCs. Also, it made clear how rare these animals are - only 39 were started in the US in the last ten years.

We were watching this debate from afar here in Europe. Intuitively, we felt that the number of such companies in Europe is much lower, probably not worth doing the same research work for Europe that Aileen did for the US.

Interestingly, the tech investment bank GP Bullhound did just that. And guess what, Europe is not that bad in producing unicorns after all. To be precise, 30 of them were born in Europe in the time period that Aileen took for her research piece.

Admittedly, Europe did not produce any ‘mega unicorns’ (worth 10bn+) in this time, but the result is pretty good, certainly better than many would have expected (and it does not include the Kopenhagen-born Zendesk, which just IPOed).

Check out the presentation below, it is interesting. And let’s go build some more European unicorns!