Despite the current downturn, venture capital firms continue to raise money and invest in startups at a healthy pace. In his interview with Viktoria, Maximilian Bleyleben - Managing Director at Kennet Partners explains why from his perspective as a technology investor the investment market is alive and well: “The important thing is that most of the big tech trends are far stronger and will last much longer than any recession. We have made five investments in the last four months: In BuyVIP – one of Europe’s leading private shopping clubs – as well as in Spreadshirt, a German business where you can personalize t-shirts online. We also invested in the Danish video advertising firm GoViral and in two US companies.”
As a growth equity investor, Kennet Partners focusses on finding businesses that are either bootstrapped or raised only small amounts of capital and already built themselves to five or ten million euros in revenues: “We look for wherever there’s growth. We’re pretty agnostic which sectors that comes from – certain niches within e-commerce or SaaS. If there’s a transaction to be done we do it, if not we develop relationships for the future. Sometimes it takes one or two years before the timing is right for a company to raise money” explains Max.
Max thinks it is crucial for entrepreneurs to finetune little features about their business as they bootstrap it with an eventual investment in mind – things like the working capital cycle or getting paid before suppliers have to be paid. One of the reasons Kennet Partners likes to invest in Europe is that there is tremendous diversity of talent in Europe “with lots of engineering talent that needs to be unlocked” Max says. “If you bring American commercial practices, sales skills and internet online lead generation skills to these European technical innovations you can build really strong companies and in this day and age where the company base doesn’t really matter anymore there is no reason why Europe cannot build the same winning companies as the US.”
Click here for an overview of all interviews from Red Herring 100 Europe.
