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Jeppe Zink

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23
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2015-11-11
most recent
2015-11-11
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1
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  1. “Well, first and foremost, Lending Club has a lot to learn a lot to teach in Europe because Lending Club is separate so it can participate at a back end, whereas in Europe in peer-to-peer is mainly non-capital markets players, the family offices, individuals, retail, etc. You don't scale billion-dollar businesses that way. You have to have capital markets. So what Crossland has done is set it up exactly like a lending club. It's set up with a European banking license so you can go across anywhere and you don't currently have that in the first wave of companies.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Most reason was a company called Crossland, and indeed that is one I would describe as this second wave of fintech companies, the consumer lending company and its management that's been sitting as part of some of the first wave companies and saying, hey, we can do this better. And they've set themselves up in a way they think is superior to the current wave and I'll delete them.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, I'm less of a fan when it comes to business literature. I'm less of a fan of people searching for formalic ways of delivering startup success. So personally, I enjoy reading things like growth engines. I can't remember who it was by Ellis. I think it was called, who's really just a collection of interviews with founders. And what you read is that the randomness of every single startup is different stories. And the red thread is really tenacity and learning through failure.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I'm more of a dabbler, so I use Newsify to sort of scan through a larger amount. So I don't really have a single one I log on to. Although in Europe, I suppose I'm enjoying currently Fred Destin's Strictly VC.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It's so different from startup to startup. But for me, it's all about momentum. If I don't sense that's momentum, and momentum can be in product development, if I don't sense things that are happening, then I always push because I think momentum is when you have momentum, you can do amazing things. If you don't have a momentum, everything gets tougher.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Change it. Don't wait and see if it improves. You constantly got to learn through failure, A-B testing. And so when it comes to ambition, I think it's always about leveling up. It's about saying, how fast can you learn to be the best and deliver the best product?”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yes, that's a hard one. It's not all about rational thought and money. Ambition is really a mindset. It's about that feeling that you're on a mission to challenge the establishment and about that recklessness and purity of thought and saying we just want to win. And inside Nordstrom, we try to emulate the startup so we make sure we're never static. We always have people arriving and leaving. We make sure hunger is always present and getting new input. And then we make sure, of course, everything is about performance. If you don't set yourself up that way, you end up alienating yourself from what you actually do in terms of the world we see in the startups. I often hear about the notion that venture capital is supposed to be patient capital and I always smile because I think the opposite is all about being impatient. If something is not working.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think it's back to the not being transaction focused. If you don't know which sector excites you and you spend time in the sector before you're making any investments, you're unlikely to ever find the great ones. And also if you find the great ones, reality is there's also a bunch of other people have found them. So it comes down to your relationship with a particular entrepreneur and to what extent they have a view on you and want to work with you. So it's all about knowing people, knowing sectors and spending time and eventually that leads to investments.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, I mean, Norstone has three offices in the Nordic. So luckily for me, I have great colleagues up there. I probably, I'm up there every other week, but we have people on the ground there.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Successes up there that act as heroes to the rest and you have management second layer teams that have been watching that success firsthand and saying, hey, I can do that. So now it's literally a question of success breeding success and you have that hub mentality that we see in the valley.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “No, I think you're right. I mean, we're not wanting to dish London and UK, which is doing great. But if you look at it, we see very few of the current crop of great winners coming from here, whereas clearly Stockholm, the Nordics are punching way above their weight. And the reason, I mean, there's a bunch of them. It's partly structural. You know, if you look all the way back, Sweden was the first country in Europe to drop their trade barriers, and that created a highly competitive market and great companies flourished outside of tech. And then if you look at the 90s, it was the first place where you put broadband out to the population. And it was obviously also where you had Nokia and Ericsson coming out with first smartphones. So reality is you had the first mature online users and mobile users. And that obviously serves as a great place to launch innovative concepts. However, now that no longer matters. Now what matters is the fact that we have all these great.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yes, in many ways I find it scary, but that supply and demand speaking. I think we spoke about the cycle. I think we will see that changing as the cycle changes. Right now I'm just pleased there's lots of development capital available to speed up innovation.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, I think security is just starting. I mean, one thing is to have your Facebook account hacked, but an entirely different thing is to have your bank account hacked. So I think security is definitely an area that's just on the rise and is just starting. The other side of it, I think, is the business segment. As always, when it's consumer behavior, you're changing. It starts under consumer side, then it's the small business segment, and then it's the large business segment. So I think we will see that.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I think we very much currently in the first wave of seeing fintech companies literally succeeding by providing an online experience. I think if you look at the next five, 10 years, I think we're going to have a second wave of companies that say compared to this first wave, isn't there a better way of doing it? And I think you will find much more sophisticated setup structurally within the startups that's literally going to disrupt the disruptors.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, no, of course they do. There are barriers to entry and it is harder to get in as a startup in FinTech and many others because of regulation, et cetera. On the other hand, if you look at all the recent successes, you know, look in London from SOPA to Funding Circle, et cetera. It is possible to step in and take these incumbents head on and winning.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, fintech is massively important theme for us. And we've done quite a few recently. Clara, ICEL, market invoice, et cetera. I think the underlying driver is obviously that If you look at customers, both business and consumer customers, the way they want their banking services, in particular they want it online, is very different to what There's a lot more revenue that can be driven. And if you then see the discrepancy between the cost you have for acquiring the customer and running the customer, it means that you can drive quite big margins. That's exciting.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I saw a great presentation actually by Frank Catrone just last week and I think he felt we were all the way at the very peak right now. I think that's too blanket a statement. I see a lot of valuation bubbles in certain subsectors or in late stage visa investments and that's really because you have a lot of tourists coming in like hedge funds and other non-consistent players putting money into the VC game. And I think as you see the downcycle they will step out again. So we certainly in a frothy time, but it's not across everywhere.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And a veto we invested in 2010 into the deep bear market. So the point being that you can find the great winners in any part of the cycle and great winners always manage through the cycles. It's usually the less strong companies that often don't recover out of the beer market.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I think, listen, I think the real point for any VC is to appreciate that every single fund cycle lasts at least 10 years. So typically you will have at least one up and downturn in a single fund cycle. So your job really as a VC is to make sure to anticipate it and manage value through upturns and downturns. And I think people often forget that the best vintage years are driven as much by how good the excess markets are when you're ready to sell out of the companies as anything else. So in that sense, personally, I suppose I prefer to invest without extreme ups or downs. And if I look at our current biggest winners, Spotify and Ebito, we invested in the A round and Spotify just before the party finished in September of 2008 when the bull market was still very strong.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “A study that said that over 90% of the VC firms that were in existence in Europe in 2000 have died or cannot raise new funds today. So hopefully that's very difficult.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That's been the main change. And on the VC side of things, I think it's important to remember that for Europe, there was hardly anything there before 2000. The first VC firms in existence, if you look at in the 90s, you had Apex Wolfe Pinkers, 3i, etc., and they were doing an integrated VC buyout model thinking that that was the right way to do it. And obviously that's possibly a reason why so many fail. Because if you look at the VC strategies, there were simply two transaction focused, given that the talent came from the buyout side, and that was too far removed from entrepreneurial reality. So I think if you look at the VCs now in Europe, finally, you have the talent within the VCs much more aligned with the entrepreneurial scene. So I think if you go back 10, 15 years ago, I think literally I saw a”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, I think during that period the overriding factor has really been the rise of the digital economy. I mean, when I started, you had less than 100 million people online and now you have whatever over 3 billion. You literally had nil smartphones and now you have over 2 billion. So I think the main difference in the tech market is that 10, 15 years ago, we were mainly focused on putting down their plumbing for the connectivity. So we spent a lot of time in telecoms and infrastructure. My own first investment was CoCom, which was a fast modem supplier. And we sold it to Cisco. And indeed, the gorillas we all revered and feared were HP, Cisco, Vodafone, et cetera. Now, it's shifted. We have the connectivity in place and it's all been about then applications, then services, and obviously we've seen amazing rises in recently from that. So that's been the main...”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, I probably had a slightly unusual weigh in. I was working as a junior analyst in corporate finance at Deutsche Bank, and we just had this hugely successful Frank Pontrone, who probably still is the most successful tech banker today runs CAS List. But at the time, he was a Deutsche Bank. He just left with 90% of the team. So we were a few new joiners scratching our heads how to win any business. And we went together with the first European editor of the Red Herring. I think there were seven of us. And we got together to convince the bank that the only way to get any business was by buying it effectively through doing a pre-IPO principal investments. Being the late 90s, that meant that it worked out pretty well. And very quickly, the principal investments were way more profitable business than the advisory business. So that's how I got started.”

    2015-11-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 087: From The Investors Of Spotify, TrustPilot and Klarna with Jeppe Zink, General Partner @ Northzone · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source