European Startup Thoughts

I'm in Paris and Luxembourg for board meetings with eXo and Codenvy.  Also, Adobe just bought Neolane for $600M.  They are based in Paris and were funded by Auriga and Xange - the same VC's who are backing eXo and also have some ownership in Codenvy. (In fact the eXo board meeting had to end early so Phillippe and Nicolas could go finalize the closing of that deal). Several thoughts on this while I have a bit of time:

Cloud is Big and Global.  Well, that is obvious these days.  But I find it interesting that Neolane will become "Adobe Marketing Cloud" and be headquartered in Paris. The distributed mode of operating a company is becoming more accepted. We've also seen at eXo, Codenvy and CloudBees that Europe is a strong early adopter of Cloud technology. Having a presence in Europe is becoming a strategic advantage and a good place for selling Cloud solutions.

US Tax Avoidance.  It has been well publicized that US firms have a lot of cash overseas that they can not bring back into the US to avoid paying taxes.  Adobe had $2.4B+ overseas as of 2012.  Acquiring a company that will put some of that cash to use is a wise move on Adobe's part.  I bet we see more of this search for International firms to acquire.

US Tax Avoidance Parts 2&3.  eXo was born in France as a company.  It has benefited from a number of government programs that encourage small companies with grants and loans.  Codenvy was a spin-off of eXo and was created as a Luxembourg company.  These company structures take the old strategy of all companies being from Delaware to a new level of globalization seeking to minimize taxes for the company and their investors.

Globalization.  We were walking down the streets of Luxembourg talking about they looked like they could be anywhere.  The global name brands were in full display - BCBG, H&M, Gap, McDonalds...

Startup companies should consider some of these elements as they grow.  Consider overseas VC firms, consider moving more aggressively outside the US.  Even consider locating your next startup in someplace beyond Silicon Valley.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ringside Winding Down

A year ago, a group of us met in a pizza parlor to discuss how we could bring the social web to every website and business. In January, we launched Ringside Networks with seed funding from Matrix Partners, one of the best VC firms in the country. By the end of March we released into open source an initial beta of our Social Application Server – a very ambitious project. We got some very positive reviews on our approach, our implementation and the need in the marketplace for every website to become social. We were ready for our Series A round of funding, and in late May we received a number of term sheet offers from the very best VC firms. As we were about to finalize our funding, one of the biggest non-evil Internet companies asked if we would have interest in being acquired instead. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact. The story sounds almost too good to be true. And it w
Read more

Facebook Open Sources Platform

I just got a call from Ami Vora of Facebook, who has corrected me on following the advice of this other article - http://ostatic.com/163756-blog/cpalss-whats-thatss#rss . Apparently the CPAL only applies to open sourcing the files that are changed. So if a class is extended, or the database access logic is put into an API call, then that gets open sourced under the CPAL as well. Facebook’s use of the CPAL open source license is a step in the right direction. We love the fact that the community is required to donate changes back to the open source project. This is the reason we use the LGPL at Ringside. The downside of the CPAL is the requirement to give attribution. This means a little Facebook badge comes up on all websites that use the Facebook software. This makes sense from a Facebook perspective because it helps them to build their brand in return for donating their software. On the other hand, if every open source project required this, then there would be nothing on web p
Read more

CRM Version 6 – This time for Races

Image
I’ve been lucky to use CRM in various ways over the past 35 years. The RunSignUp implementation is the 6 th major implementation of CRM I’ve been involved with over the years. From the beginning, RunSignUp has implemented many of the key concepts of CRM so that races can maximize customer satisfaction and retention and lower costs of customer support – all with the goal of engaging their various communities to maximize the impact of their race. Right now, we are consolidating our various features of Participant Management, Marketing Automation, and central consolidated database to bring a comprehensive set of CRM benefits to races. It might be interesting to see my personal journey and compare how CRM has matured over the years. 1.      1987 - Digital Equipment Sales Tracking. I did a side project to help the District Sales Manager and her 50+ sales people do a better job of tracking their prospects and sales. This was back in the days of Act!, which was built on PC’s,
Read more