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Nicolas Wittenborn

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23
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2015-07-27
most recent
2015-07-27
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1
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  1. “Yes, perfect. Which sounds maybe a little bit niche, right? Or funny at the beginning, but when you think about it as an entrance to kind of a subscription for a healthy nutrition, which is, I think, a huge trend at the moment, this can really be big. And also, I'm just super, super impressed by the team. So it's two founders that built the product, the whole operations and stuff, and they actually achieved unit economics here that are just really, really promising. So these guys, I'm really excited about. It's a seat stage company, right? So still very early in the company lifetime, but I'm very thrilled to be working with them.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Okay, so I probably have to plug our newsletter here a little bit. We have this monthly newsletter that we with law of handcraft and where we announce new investments and have portfolio news and aggregation of all the content that we pushed out that month. So I think that's worth reading, I hope. And then there's two other ones that I really like. One is by Cl ⁇ ment Vougon, who's doing an amazing SAS newletter, SAS newsletter. And I will treat it out after the show so people can find it. And then one more, and I really love this one because I think it's one of the few ones that really focus on mobile and is really good is Benedict Evans' newsletter of Andreessen Horowitz, which I follow as well.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “This one, yes, so I think it's very important, especially when you think about starting your own company, to focus on something that you're really passionate about. And this is not just a corny thing. This is, I think, very rational because first of all, you will always have more fun working on something that you really like, right? But second of all, you will always, and you might not think this when you start out, but you will always hit hard times. And once you hit hard times, I think it's very, very hard to stay focused and stay hustling and stay persistent when you're working on something that you don't fully embrace, right? Or don't fully stand for. So I think this is something that I really learned and I tend to hand on to people as advice.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I have many, many favorite books. Okay, one that I really liked and have read actually twice is called What Makes Semi Run. And I'm actually blanking on the author, but if you Google that, you should find it. And it's a very interesting book, first of all, because it's about the times of Hollywood when it was just the film industry really booming. And second of all, it's about this character, Sammy, who's just crazily ambitious. And in the beginning, it's very impressive to follow his path, but then it gets to, I don't want to spoil it, but it gets to a point where you wonder how much ambition is great and what does it do to a person. So I think this is especially for entrepreneurs and people in the tech scene that tend to be very hungry and want to achieve a lot of things. I think this is kind of maybe a nice cavite to keep in mind.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Is that you think about how you can empower the customer to actually be awesome or just be a better version of himself? And this would at least, or the least effort possible, right? So how can you actually have an experience with your app or with your solution that makes him feel like, oh man, I'm really getting something done or I'm really getting stronger or I'm really finding a date with your app. And it's so easy to do this that I want to tell my friends, right? And that I have this experience of, man, this was great. And it's so great that I want to tell my friends about it. Because at the end of the day, I think that this kind of word of mouth or referral growth for mobile apps is still a key driver for a lot of these successful ones, especially the ones that don't monetize in the beginning, right? Which is on mobile still how a lot of these apps start. So I think this is something worth putting a lot of”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, so this is, of course, a very, very tough question how to make a product grow. And I guess if I had a perfect answer on this, I would be an entrepreneur myself. But on a high level, I like to think about, and this is something that is very honestly very tough to fix once the product is out. Of course, there's different distribution channels and maybe hacks that you could try. But I think very important that from the get-go, you think about, especially with Apps and I guess you mean mobile apps here as well.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Stick at all, but I try to call it a key usage indicator, right? So moving away a little bit from the kind of financial terms and thinking about for what is the atomic user journey for your product, right? What is kind of the core function that a user is using your product for? And I think in the beginning, especially when there's just so much uncertainty, I think it's very, very good to figure this out on a high level and then tracking this over time because it doesn't necessarily restrict you to the MRR measure or anything else, but it gives you a bit of flexibility of what's really important for you and then trying to improve that metric.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yes, so some I mentioned right now it's for us because we are at such an early stage hard to set kind of absolute barriers or criteria because it depends so much on how far the company is right so we don't like to give out the number of total MRR or something like this I think what's more important for us is kind of the relative movement so there has to be some growth and we like to see some kind of heavy engagement and this can of course be translated in MR growth because people are just expanding their accounts and so on but it could also just be you really see that this this tool is part of the customer's work there right so they're logging in once a day maybe a few times per day and they're just like it becomes like a system of record for them and and another thing here is that so we talk a lot about KPIs in this context right and I actually I try to define this this term which unfortunately didn't”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yes, actually we do. So I think we are quite product focused overall as a firm. So if you go look at our portfolio, there's I think a number of companies that really stick out just because they've really nailed product. And I think this is important because I don't think that a great product on its own is enough to build an amazing company, but I think it's an ideal foundation, right? So one of the examples here would be typeform, which is a survey tool that works really, really well on desktop and also on mobile, whatever device you're using. And it's just beautiful, right? If you sit people on something like this versus a Google survey or maybe, and I'm burning the competition a bit here, survey monkey form or something like that, it's just a huge difference, right? In terms of user experience and in terms of, and this translates also in conversion, right? And better performance for the actual customer. And here this was”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So, this is kind of, I guess, the state that we want to get into. In most cases, this means that we invest when there's some six to 12 months of first data of actually usage of the product or maybe customers paying for this. Of course, sometimes we have invested even after that and we even have cases where we invested in companies pre or just at launch. But in most of these cases, we've worked with the entrepreneurs before and we just know that there's very little execution risk, right?”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So we do typically only invest when there's a first product. That doesn't mean that the product has to be perfect, right? So it can be a beta or maybe even a demo version. And this is actually, this is a fun fact, nobody knows this because it's a kind of, I guess, a bit far out. But the name 0.9 actually comes from the product version, 0.9. So we want to invest when it's not product version 1.0 yet, right? But it's almost there on the way.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Important to have great product people and great technical people, right? Because at the end of the day, it's about really differentiating with the solution that you're creating and then distributing that. And I think here it is a lot more important to have a great technical team, whereas maybe an e-commerce play where it's a lot more about execution, right? You set up the tech stack once and of course you're still iterating and getting better at that, but the core competency is somewhere else.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, again, I think we have seen all of that working, right? So we've worked with single founders that are just crazy, strong and managed to build a great company almost on the bottom. Not by themselves, but they managed to recruit great people and help them build this company. So this can happen. We, of course, have worked with first-time entrepreneurs many times. And I guess ideally what we look for is kind of a complementary team where you have a technical founder, you have a business guy, maybe a design leader or just a visionary that can tell a story and set the strategy and fundraise. At the end of the day, this is not a hard criteria, though, right? So I guess it just really depends on what kind of play you're going for. So at point nine, for instance, we're very focused on SaaS and marketplaces, right? And specifically for software as a service where you're essentially an online or cloud software company, it's super important.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Numeric signals that tell you that this is something that people are really love to use and spending a lot of time with and come back and are really engaged with. Because at the end of the day, if you can see that one of these things in terms of product or maybe the team or usage numbers, it's just such a strong signal that something is happening here and that the team has found a new product or new solution that people really want. I think then monetization is one of the things that you can take a bet at because a lot of times you will be able to figure this out later on. Not always, of course, and there's always a risk that this is kind of misleading, but I think that we as a fund at least, if you can show that this is something people really love and there's just huge traction in terms of usage or growth, then we think that monetization can often follow that.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “But kind of in the similar space, right? So looking at, for example, with Snapchat, just advertising volume on desktop and seeing how this could translate to mobile and how much of that they could capture. And I think the other maybe even more important part here, because it's more measurable, I guess, in the early stages, is just looking at other”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So that's a very good question to answer, I think. And my thinking on this has developed quite a bit in my time in VC. So we talked about TEM just now, so the total adjustment market. And when you go in, this is kind of the standard that you're looking for. But over time, I came to realize that this TEM in a way already is defined as a market that's already existing, right? Because you're trying to figure out which part of an existing market you can address with this company or the solution. And I think this is very, very hard, especially in these models that you mentioned, that haven't been there before, that opening up a new market maybe altogether. So I think the key here, at least as my current thinking, is a combination of two things. And that's one, it's having proxies of maybe not the exact same model or kind of business that you're going after now.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, so I guess a Kavit here is that although I also like to think of checklists and like kind of what we need to look at, it's kind of hard to get something that's standardized and works for every case in VC, I think, because the case is just so dependent on a case-by-case cases. So every company you look at can have a different angle and you also rarely have time and the information available to make a complete decision on all of these factors. Still, I think it's a good approach to definitely look at the market size and a lot of these other things. And in terms of how big the town has to be,”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Yeah, I mean, they did get back eventually, but this was like four weeks later when I already had an offer from a consulting company that I was about to accept. But then my friends were like, hey, come on, this is what you wanted to do. Why don't you take the interview, right? And so I went there and I met them. I had a series of telephone interviews. And it sounded amazing, right? So I was just like, fuck it, I'm just going to do it. And I said no to the consulting offer. I went into two team Europe. And what's funny is actually, I think I applied for a BizDev interview. By the time they got back, they were actually talking about helping one of the partners starting a little seed fund, which sounded even better to me, right? With the business background. And so I decided to do this. And this is how I started with Team Europe. And then eventually the partner that I was managing, that feed fund actually joined forces with Christophe Jans, who's an entrepreneur and SaaS investor himself. And they started point on capital. So I was very lucky to be there in the very beginning.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I actually didn't really know that this entrepreneurial thing was an option to really make a living in. And one day I just happened to read about these guys called Team Europe, which were one of the original company builders and kind of pioneers of the Berlin tax scene. And I just saw that they were doing exactly what I did with the iPhones online, but just in a way bigger scale and company after company. And I was like, man, if this is something that you can do for a living, I want to do that, right? That sounds like fun. So I ended up, and this is how I eventually got to 0.9, I ended up emailing them and applying for an intern position. And then nothing happened. So they just never got back to me.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “By that time I was kind of transitioning outcoming out of school and looking at what I wanted to do next. So I was always a bit torn between going down a more technical route. So my big brother, for instance, he studied computer science and obviously I was always a little influenced by that. On the other hand, I really liked this whole business part and starting thing. So I was always torn a bit between business and technology. At the end of the day, I did decide to study business administration. So I went to school there. And back then in Germany around 2009, 10, there was actually not a big, this entrepreneurial spirit was not as big as in the focus of the media and so on as it is now, at least over here. And so they were really just pushing us in the classical path of becoming a consultant, you know, and going into investment banking and auditing and so on.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Unlock that and started using it. And I was really excited just playing around with it. And I guess this was kind of my entry into this whole new world of mobile and having this computer on the go. And a lot of my friends obviously were really impressed and excited by my phone. And so people started approaching me and asking whether I could help them get an iPhone, unlock it and so on. Of course, I did this for a couple of my friends and then I realized that the interest is actually so big that I could start making some money on the side while I was still going to school. I started doing this in a bigger scale, I guess, which is kind of a gray zone, but it actually taught me that it's relatively easy to make these things happen. I mean, this has all changed by now, right? But there's always new opportunities coming up. And I think this is something where it clicked for me, right? That there was actually able to do a lot of interesting things online.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And so the first part is actually when I was still going to school, I really was into tech, you know, playing around with computers and trying to teach myself a bit of coding and so on. And when the iPhone first came out, I was really amazed by what it could do and it was presented by Steve Jobs 2007. So when the first iPhones came out in Europe, I really badly wanted to have one of my own hands and play around with it. And I didn't have the money for it, right? So I actually, it was super expensive, especially in Germany when it first came out. And you had to, you were locked in these long-term contracts. So what I ended up doing was looking on eBay and I started importing iPhones from the UK where they were actually a bit cheaper and because we just had started to have the European Union, there was no tolls on it and so on, right? So I just were looking for good deals and bought myself one.”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Sure thing. Thanks for having me again. Very, very happy to be here. I guess you talked to a couple of people in the industry now and you know that there's very unusual ways to get in here just because there's no proper career path, right? So I guess a lot of people have unusual stories. And for me personally, I'm probably particularly lucky in how I ended up in VC. I guess there's roughly there's two parts to the story. One of them is how did I actually get excited about tech or learn that you could actually make money and things happen on the internet and then the other is how did I end up at point nine, right?”

    2015-07-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 057: The Investor Checklist with Nicolas Wittenborn, VC @ Point Nine Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source