#who is Varza

[mariacallous]

French president Emmanuel Macron has spent years dreaming aloud of a homegrown artificial intelligence giant. The AI disruption is coming, he told WIRED in 2018, and “I want to be part of it.” After that interview, he campaigned hard to turn France into a startup nation, home to the kind of companies that could rival American and Chinese behemoths. Then in April 2023 an answer to Macron’s ambition appeared in the form of bushy-eyebrowed entrepreneur Arthur Mensch and the launch of his company Mistral AI.

Mistral’s ChatGPT equivalent, Le Chat, was met with feverishly high expectations when it launched in February 2024, and it did not take long for comparisons to be made between Mensch and his San Francisco rival Sam Altman. Both CEOs are in their thirties. Both companies received backing from Microsoft. Like Altman, Mensch was able to command vast amounts of capital: Mistral’s $6 billion valuation fell far short of OpenAI’s $80 billion price tag, but still—this was validation. To Macron, Mistral was a sign of French genius, and the president started talking about the country as an AI champion in waiting.

This optimism was contagious. French generative AI companies have raked in $2.3 billion in funding over the past decade—more than all their European competitors, according to a June report by VC firm Accel. Amid the Paris startup scene, there was a sense that the country’s AI industry was unstoppable.

Yet when Macron called a shock snap election earlier this month, the AI industry quickly began to fear that the progress of the past seven years could be lost thanks to campaign pledges that could have a knock-on effect on their talent pipeline, and turbocharge taxes.

On Sunday, French voters will cast their ballots in the first-round voting, which polls suggest pits an anti-immigration far right against a coalition including an anti-capitalist hard left, as Macron’s centrist alliance struggles to regain ground in third place.

“With the two options that are leading in the polls, we could take a real step back, which is quite scary and quite disheartening,” says Roxanne Varza, director of the Parisian startup campus Station F, launched by the billionaire and Macron ally Xavier Niel. “We are trying to pretend it's not happening, but we're all talking about it, and the discussion is always, unfortunately, which is the lesser of two evils?”

Now French AI and its prominent homegrown companies and nonprofits such as Mistral, Kyutai, Hugging Face, and H are facing an uncertain future. The status quo that was such a boost to the industry is being rejected by wide swathes of voters who, according to the polls, are instead drawn to parties promising to reintroduce wealth taxes (both far right and left), tax “super-profits” (the left), and restrict immigration (the right). In response, a gloominess has fallen across the industry, and the country which once spoke of ambitions to become AI’s European capital is now busy discussing how to survive a real setback.

Varza considers Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally a real threat to the immigration that the industry needs to compete internationally. Among the 1,000 startups based at the vast Station F tech campus, there are 65 nationalities, many of whom came to Paris on Macron’s French Tech Visa program, which allows non-European startup founders, investors, and employees to move to France with their families. The government even has its own office within the Station F campus to smooth the application process for founders.

“Then on the other extreme, [the left-wing New Popular Front] have been so vocal about all the taxation measures they want to bring back that it looks like we're just going back to pre-Macron period,” Varza says. She points to France’s 2012 “les pigeons” (or “suckers”) movement, a campaign by angry internet entrepreneurs that opposed Socialist president François Hollande’s plan to dramatically raise taxes for founders.

Maya Noël, CEO of France Digitale, an industry group for startups, is worried not only about France’s ability to attract overseas talent, but also about how appealing the next government will be to foreign investors. In February, Google said it would open a new AI hub in Paris, where 300 researchers and engineers would be based. Three months later, Microsoft also announced a record $4 billion investment in its French AI infrastructure. Meta has had an AI research lab in Paris since 2015. Today France is attractive to foreign investors, she says. “And we need them.” Neither Google nor Meta replied to WIRED’s request for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.

The vote will not unseat Macron himself—the presidential election is not scheduled until 2027—but the election outcome could dramatically reshape the lower house of the French Parliament, the National Assembly, and install a prime minister from either the far-right or left-wing coalition. This would plunge the government into uncertainty, raising the risk of gridlock. In the past 60 years, there have been only three occasions when a president has been forced to govern with a prime minister from the opposition party, an arrangement known in France as “cohabitation.”

No AI startup has benefited more from the Macron era than Mistral, which counts Cédric O, former digital minister within Macron’s government, among its cofounders. Mistral has not commented publicly on the choice France faces at the polls. The closest the company has come to sharing its views is Cédric O’s decision to repost an X post by entrepreneur Gilles Babinet last week that said: “I hate the far-right but the left’s economic program is surreal.” When WIRED asked Mistral about the retweet, the company said O was not a spokesperson, and declined to comment.

Babinet, a member of the government’s artificial intelligence committee, says he has already heard colleagues considering leaving France. “A few of the coders I know from Senegal, from Morocco, are already planning their next move,” he says, claiming people have also approached him for help renewing their visas early in case this becomes more difficult under a far-right government.

While other industries have been quietly rushing to support the far-right as a preferable alternative to the left-wing alliance, according to reports, Babinet plays down the threat from the New Popular Front. “It's clear they come with very old-fashioned economical rules, and therefore they don't understand at all the new economy,” he says. But after speaking to New Popular Front members, he says the hard-left are a minority in the alliance. “Most of these people are Social Democrats, and therefore they know from experience that when François Hollande came into power, he tried to increase the taxes on the technology, and it failed miserably.”

Already there is a sense of damage control, as the industry tries to reassure outsiders everything will be fine. Babinet points to other moments of political chaos that industries survived. “At the end of the day, Brexit was not so much of a nightmare for the tech scene in the UK,” he says. The UK is still the preferred place to launch a generative AI startup, according to the Accel report.

Stanislas Polu, an OpenAI alumnus who launched French AI startup Dust last year, agrees the industry has enough momentum to survive any headwinds coming its way. “Some of the outcomes might be a bit gloomy,” he says, adding he expects personal finances to be hit. “It’s always a little bit more complicated to navigate a higher volatility environment. I guess we’re hoping that the more moderate people will govern that country. I think that’s all we can hope for.”

[highwarlockkareena]

PASS THE HAPPY ALONG! When you get this, reply with five things that make you happy and pass along to ten nice people. ♥

you & your edits - always so insightful and making me think

magnus bane - i love him and miss him

the best twin & fellow appreciator of turians @amorverus  

my murder buddy @abloodneed for everything

the gc - they know who they are 👀

💜💜💜

[isfeed]

Station F turns its main startup program into an acceleration program

Station F turns its main startup program into an acceleration program

Station F, the iconic startup campus in Paris, is revamping its Founders Program completely to turn it into an acceleration program. Founders who decide to join the accelerator will get many different benefits. They’ll also have to hand out a 1% equity stake to Station F. “We are changing the flagship program of Station F. Everything is changing but the name,” Station F director Roxanne Varza…

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/harvestr-gathers-user-feedback-in-one-place/

Harvestr gathers user feedback in one place

Meet Harvestr, a software-as-a-service startup that wants to help product managers centralize customer feedback from various places. Product managers can then prioritize outstanding issues and feature requests. Finally, the platform helps you get back to your customers once changes have been implemented.

The company just raised a $650,000 funding round led by Bpifrance with various business angels also participating, such as 360Learning co-founders Nicolas Hernandez and Guillaume Alary as well as Station F director Roxanne Varza through the Atomico Angel Programme.

Harvestr integrates directly with Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, Freshdesk, Slack and Zapier. For instance, if a user opens a ticket on Zendesk and another user interacts with your support team through an Intercom chat widget, everything ends up in Harvestr.

Once you have everything in the system, Harvestr helps you prioritize tasks that seem more urgent or that are going to have a bigger impact.

When you start working on a feature or when you’re about to ship it, you can contact your users who originally reached out to talk to you about it.

Eventually, Harvestr should help you build a strong community of power users around your product. And there are many advantages in pursuing this strategy.

First, you reward your users by keeping them in the loop. It should lead to higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. Your most engaged customers could also become your best ambassadors to spread the word around.

Harvestr costs $49 per month for 5 seats and $99 per month for 20 seats. People working for 360Learning, HomeExchange, Dailymotion and other companies are currently using it.

[themakersmovement]

Only 5 days left for super early bird savings at Disrupt Berlin 2019 Our super early bird countdown continues startup fans. If you don’t have your pass to Disrupt Berlin 2019 yet, it’s time to mach schnell — make it quick! Buy your pass now before the deadline strikes on 6 September at 11:59 p.m. (CEST), and you’ll save up to €600. Just five days left, friends. What are you waiting for? You can save even more money with our group discounts. Buy in bulk, bring your whole team and leave no startup entrepreneur behind. You’ll save 20% when you buy five or more Innovator passes at once. Buy two or more Founder or Investor passes at once and enjoy a 10% savings. We love Disrupt Berlin’s international diversity. More than 3,000 attendees from more than 50 countries gather to learn about and showcase the latest tech innovations and to connect, collaborate and move their business forward. Disrupt is the crossroad of now and future tech. You’ll hear from an impressive array of tech leaders, makers, founders and investors on a range of hot topics. One example is Nigel Toon, the co-founder and CEO of Graphcore — a company that’s designing its own dedicated AI chipset. The company has raised more than $300 million from top investors, such as Sequoia Capital, BMW, Microsoft and Samsung. Pretty impressive, but even crazier — the tiny startup competes directly with giant chip companies, such as Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm. It’s a race to see who can create the most efficient AI chip. Director Roxanne Varza will be on hand to give us an update on Station F, the world’s biggest campus for startups. Housed in an historic monument (a beautiful building constructed in 1929), Station F is also a high-tech building and a cornerstone of the French tech ecosystem. Companies like Facebook, Naver (Line), Ubisoft, Microsoft and a host of others run incubators out of Station F, and its also home to more than 1,000 startups. You can’t talk European success stories without talking UiPath. Currently valued at $7 billion, the company’s wild success comes from creating enterprise software that focuses on repetitive tasks and helps customers automate as many actions as possible. We can’t wait to talk with founder and CEO Daniel Dines — who started the company 15 years ago — about his automation journey. There’s so much more to do at Disrupt Berlin 2019 and you can do it all for a whole lot less if you buy your pass before the super early bird price vanishes in just five days at 11:59 p.m. (CEST) on 6 September. Mach schnell! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form. https://buff.ly/2lnX1FO

[jacobhinkley]

Chain Accelerator Opens Its Doors to Blockchain, Crypto Startups in France

\Chain Accelerator has launched in France. It is the first startup acceleratordedicated to the blockchain that can call Europe its home. Among the organization’s chief operators are Hyperloop Transportation Technologies chairman Bibop G. Gresta, former SWIFT CEO Leonard Schrank, and Ledger president Pascal Gauthier.

The company will assist startups with initial coin offerings (ICOs), business development plans, marketing and public relations.

In a statement, co-founder Nicolas Cantu explained, “At a time when the President and the Government want to make Paris the capital of the ICOs, Chain Accelerator is positioning itself as a key player. By setting up a global and operational network in Paris, it brings together the best talent, extends the circle of contributors, and prepares for disruptions to help blockchain projects develop protocols in all sectors.”

France has been relatively mixed when it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency culture. Bruno Le Maire, the Minister of the Economy and Finance, has been particularly wary of cryptocurrencies in the past, and has called on regulators to implement strict rules when it comes to governing and controlling their activities.

In May, however, Le Maire expressed a drastic change of heart in a blog post for a French startup, writing:

“A revolution is under way, of which Bitcoin was only the precursor. The blockchain will offer unprecedented opportunities for our startups. I was a neophyte a year ago, but now I’m passionate. Let us show a lot of pedagogy with our fellow citizens to make France the first place of blockchain and crypto-active innovation in Europe.”

The integration of Chain Accelerator in France could help Paris become a major hub for blockchain development. Currently, the executive board of Chain Accelerator consists of over 30 individuals who will serve as mentors to Europe’s growing list of crypto-based startups, thus increasing the company’s potential to succeed and expand.

In addition, as blockchain technology and cryptocurrency garner more acceptance throughout the continent, more startups may arise, seeking the company’s aid.

National Assembly for Paris member Pierre Person states, “In France, as everywhere in the world, blockchain projects face many uncertainties and complexities, whether financial, legal, or technical. Yet this technology will revolutionize our daily lives. As such, it is essential today to have both a legislative framework enabling its full development and structures enabling the emergence of such projects. Our country must become a leader in the blockchain. I am convinced that Chain Accelerator — the first blockchain incubator — will contribute greatly to this.”

Despite its hard work, France will face competition with countries like the U.K. and Switzerland, which have positioned themselves as some of Europe’s primary fintech and cryptocurrency centers. According to U.K. Secretary of State for International Trade Dr. Liam Fox, the country’s fintech space has already attracted over $2.4 billion in investments in 2018 alone, while Switzerland was recently home to four of the world’s largest ICOs.

Chain Accelerator will be headquartered in Paris’s Station F, a large startup campus that opened in the summer of 2017. Station F director Roxanne Varza commented, “The blockchain universe, inherently decentralized, stands out for its global and international nature. Innovation comes from everywhere, talents are rare, the need for support is exacerbated. We are pleased to welcome Chain Accelerator.”

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

Chain Accelerator Opens Its Doors to Blockchain, Crypto Startups in France published first on https://medium.com/@smartoptions

[albanianvoices]

Mblidhniu ju varza, mblidhniu ju gra, M'ata sy t'bukur q'dini me qa, Eni t'vajtojmë Shqypninë e mjerë, Qi mbet’ e shkretë pa em'n, pa nder; Ka mbet e vejë si grue pa burrë, Ka mbet si nanë, qi s'pat djalë kurrë!

Pashko Vasa, O moj Shqypni

“Gather round, maidens, gather round, women Who with your fair eyes know what weeping is, Come, let us lament poor Albania, Who is without honour and reputation, She has become a widow, a woman with no husband, She is like a mother who has never had a son!”

[ailelie]

I have to cut this snippet entirely because I've realized that I've got the dynamic wrong. Nora has time-traveled. In the future, she and Ambrose were no longer friends. Now she's back in the past. Ambrose still considers her his best friend, but Nora can't reconcile the Ambrose who turned his back on her and the one who hasn't done that yet (and may never do it if she manages to change the future). Anyway, sharing so that the words aren't lost entirely.

Nora enjoyed dancing with Ambrose. Unlike most men, he did not place his full hand against her. Instead he pressed the inside line of his index finger and thumb to her hip, his palm facing downward. The style was that of Varza, one of the two countries along Astelan’s southern border, but Ambrose never seemed to mind.

“Happy birthday,” Ambrose murmured once the music began. As with her father, Nora rested her hand on his upper arm unable to reach higher without straining.

Nora tilted her head back to meet his gaze. “Thank you.”

“Did your family set a minimum number of dances again this year?” he asked, a smile tucked into the corner of his cheek.

“No. I suppose they believe I’ve grown up since last year.”

“And have you?”

Nora smiled and darted her gaze away. “Perhaps.”

Ambrose chuckled. “What do you have planned this year?”

“Just music,” she said, looking back up at him. “I didn’t even arrange it.”

“But you took full advantage,” he said, spinning her. He tugged her back a bit too quickly and Nora stumbled toward him, her palm hitting his chest. Her cheeks burned. Thankfully the other dancers had joined so fewer should have noticed. “Careful,” Ambrose said.

She tore her gaze from the contrast of her pale skin against the deep blue of his suit. “You did that on purpose,” she said, her eyes narrowing. She moved her hand back to his arm.

[technicalsolutions88]

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. The iPhone’s new parental controls can limit who kids can call, text and FaceTime and when

With the release of iOS 13.3, parents will for the first time be able to set limits over who kids can talk to and text with during certain hours of the day. These limits will apply across phone calls, Messages and FaceTime.

In practice, this means parents could stop their child from texting friends late at night or during the school day. It also allows parents to manage the child’s iCloud contacts remotely.

2. Pear, whose seed-stage bets are followed closely, just raised $160 million for its third fund

That’s more than twice the $75 million that the firm raised for its second fund in 2016 and triple the $50 million it raised for its debut fund back in 2013.

3. Uber guarantees space for skis and snowboards with Uber Ski feature

Starting on December 17 in select cities, an Uber Ski icon will pop up on the app, allowing passengers to order a ride with confirmed extra space or a ski/snowboarding rack. Nundu Janakiram, Uber’s head of rider experience, said to expect more features like this.

4. Accel and Index back Tines, as the cybersecurity startup adds another $11M to its Series A

Founded in February 2018 by ex-eBay, PayPal and DocuSign security engineer Eoin Hinchy, Tines automates many of the repetitive manual tasks faced by security analysts so they can focus on other high-priority work.

5. How Station F is boosting the French tech ecosystem

Three years after unveiling Station F at Disrupt, its director, Roxanne Varza, came back to our stage to provide an update on the world’s biggest startup campus, where there are now 1,000 companies at work.

6. Hyperproof wants to make it easier to comply with GDPR and other regulations

As companies try to figure out how to comply with regulations like GDPR, ISO or Sarbanes Oxley, Hyperproof is launching a new product to workflows that will allow them to gain compliance in a more organized way.

7. Introducing ‘Dear Sophie,’ an advice column for US-bound immigrant employees

Dear Sophie is a collaborative forum hosted by Extra Crunch and curated by Sophie Alcorn, who is certified as a specialist attorney in immigration and nationality law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization.

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2EaxsOV ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

[sheminecrafts]

Daily Crunch: Apple adds new iPhone parental controls

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. The iPhone’s new parental controls can limit who kids can call, text and FaceTime and when

With the release of iOS 13.3, parents will for the first time be able to set limits over who kids can talk to and text with during certain hours of the day. These limits will apply across phone calls, Messages and FaceTime.

In practice, this means parents could stop their child from texting friends late at night or during the school day. It also allows parents to manage the child’s iCloud contacts remotely.

2. Pear, whose seed-stage bets are followed closely, just raised $160 million for its third fund

That’s more than twice the $75 million that the firm raised for its second fund in 2016 and triple the $50 million it raised for its debut fund back in 2013.

3. Uber guarantees space for skis and snowboards with Uber Ski feature

Starting on December 17 in select cities, an Uber Ski icon will pop up on the app, allowing passengers to order a ride with confirmed extra space or a ski/snowboarding rack. Nundu Janakiram, Uber’s head of rider experience, said to expect more features like this.

4. Accel and Index back Tines, as the cybersecurity startup adds another $11M to its Series A

Founded in February 2018 by ex-eBay, PayPal and DocuSign security engineer Eoin Hinchy, Tines automates many of the repetitive manual tasks faced by security analysts so they can focus on other high-priority work.

5. How Station F is boosting the French tech ecosystem

Three years after unveiling Station F at Disrupt, its director, Roxanne Varza, came back to our stage to provide an update on the world’s biggest startup campus, where there are now 1,000 companies at work.

6. Hyperproof wants to make it easier to comply with GDPR and other regulations

As companies try to figure out how to comply with regulations like GDPR, ISO or Sarbanes Oxley, Hyperproof is launching a new product to workflows that will allow them to gain compliance in a more organized way.

7. Introducing ‘Dear Sophie,’ an advice column for US-bound immigrant employees

Dear Sophie is a collaborative forum hosted by Extra Crunch and curated by Sophie Alcorn, who is certified as a specialist attorney in immigration and nationality law by the State Bar of California Board of Legal Specialization.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2EaxsOV via IFTTT

[endenogatai]

Resilience is an ambitious bet to improve cancer treatment

Meet Resilience, a new startup that wants to help cancer treatment institutes as well as cancer patients at every step of the treatment journey. It’s an ambitious project founded by two well-known French entrepreneurs. They want to leverage their tech skills for this new healthcare startup.

Behind the scenes, there are two co-CEOs — Céline Lazorthes and Jonathan Benhamou. Nicolas Helleringer and Matthieu Pozza are the two remaining co-founders acting as CTO and CPO respectively. Lazorthes previously co-founded Leetchi, the leading money pot company in France. She also started MangoPay, a marketplace payment solution, as a spinout company. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa acquired both companies.

Benhamou co-founded PeopleDoc, a cloud-based HR service. In 2018, his company was acquired by Ultimate Software. Following the acquisition, he served as an executive in the publicly quoted company. Shortly after, private equity firm Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners acquired Ultimate Software.

Last year, they both spent a lot of time working together on a nonprofit called ProtegeTonSoignant. Along with 140 people, they raised €7.4 million ($8.8 million) in donations to buy personal protective equipment and deliver it to hospitals in need. It was a fundraising and logistics challenge.

After spending a lot of time talking with healthcare professionals, they decided to “dedicate at least the next ten years to those who save lives,” Lazorthes said.

It seems like an ambitious bet, and they’re aware of that. “We don’t know anything about healthcare just like we didn’t know anything about HR and finance. We’re entering a market that is highly regulated,” Benhamou told me.

That’s why they chose to focus on one area in particular — cancer care. While research institutes have made some tremendous progress over the past few years, it has become increasingly more complicated to treat cancer. For instance, Benhamou says he expects to see 300 new treatments over the next three years. Treatment is slowly evolving from broad spectrum treatments to targeted treatments.

Cancer treatment facilities face three issues. First, “a human brain can’t assimilate all this data,” Benhamou said. Second, as life expectancy increases, there are more cancer cases every year. A tumor board is going to spend a minute and a half or two minutes on a specific case to make a therapeutic decision.

Third, as a result of the first two problems, patients are left on their own. For instance, they suffer from side effects because there’s no dosage adjustment in their treatment.

Image Credits: Resilience

Starting from there, Resilience wants to become a full-stack software solution for cancer treatment for both the medical team and patients. When it comes to practitioners, Resilience will be a software-as-a-service solution that can augment therapeutic decisions. The company will categorize scientific literature, use machine learning to find some similarities with past cases and surface clinical trials based on various criteria.

When it comes to patients, there will be a web and mobile app to access content and information about their cancer. In particular, Resilience could help you understand side effects and treat them.

“Our goal is to prove that the app can improve the quality of life of the patients,” Lazorthes said. Resilience also wants to leverage its app to ask questions and collect data to improve treatments.

The startup is already putting together a data science team. It will use natural language processing to parse scientific literature. It will also work with a medical team to double-check everything.

When it comes to finding similarities between patients, the company is signing partnerships with various hospitals to get data from past cases.

Resilience has raised a $6 million funding round (€5 million) led by Singular, the VC firm founded by former Alven partners Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. Tech business angels Nathalie Balla (La Redoute), Xavier Niel (Free), Jean-Charles Samuelian (Alan), Roxanne Varza (Station F) and more are also participating.

There are also some healthcare investors in today’s funding round, such as Charles Ferté (AstraZeneca), Philippe Dabi (Bioclinic) and Thomas Clozel (Owkin).

Resilience is a mission-driven company — the company is partnering with a scientific board and a patient board. Gustave Roussy, one of the leading cancer research institutes in the world, is also acting as a co-founder in Resilience.

That’s a lot of stakeholders, but it’s the right thing to do when you’re building a healthcare company. Resilience now has the right system of checks and balance to iterate on its product and roll out a product that has a chance of actually improving cancer treatment.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://ift.tt/3cHKVia via IFTTT

[un-enfant-immature]

Harvestr gathers user feedback in one place

Meet Harvestr, a software-as-a-service startup that wants to help product managers centralize customer feedback from various places. Product managers can then prioritize outstanding issues and feature requests. Finally, the platform helps you get back to your customers once changes have been implemented.

The company just raised a $650,000 funding round led by Bpifrance with various business angels also participating, such as 360Learning co-founders Nicolas Hernandez and Guillaume Alary as well as Station F director Roxanne Varza through the Atomico Angel Programme.

Harvestr integrates directly with Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, Freshdesk, Slack and Zapier. For instance, if a user opens a ticket on Zendesk and another user interacts with your support team through an Intercom chat widget, everything ends up in Harvestr.

Once you have everything in the system, Harvestr helps you prioritize tasks that seem more urgent or that are going to have a bigger impact.

When you start working on a feature or when you’re about to ship it, you can contact your users who originally reached out to talk to you about it.

Eventually, Harvestr should help you build a strong community of power users around your product. And there are many advantages in pursuing this strategy.

First, you reward your users by keeping them in the loop. It should lead to higher customer satisfaction and lower churn. Your most engaged customers could also become your best ambassadors to spread the word around.

Harvestr costs $49 per month for 5 seats and $99 per month for 20 seats. People working for 360Learning, HomeExchange, Dailymotion and other companies are currently using it.

[theinvinciblenoob]

Atomico, the London-based venture capital firm co-founded by Skype founder Niklas Zennström, has launched a new program to find, mentor and back the next generation of angel investors across various hubs in the European tech startup ecosystem.

Dubbed the Atomico Angel Programme, and unveiled on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, the new initiative is headed up by newly promoted Atomico Partner Sophia Bendz, with support from Associate Will Dufton. Prior to joining Atomico she was an exec and early employee at Spotify, and has been a very active angel investor based in the Nordics over the last few years.

In a call last Friday, Bendz explained that the idea behind the program is to help “activate” a new generation of angel investors who Atomico believes are well-placed to discover “the most innovative and ambitious” founders just starting out, and to attract new people to angel investing sooner that might otherwise happen. More broadly, Atomico is always looking for new ways to help grow the ecosystem in Europe. A rising tide lifts all boats, after all.

“We are passionate about helping all of the ecosystems to flourish and this is one way of boosting them, and we’re also passionate about helping to activate the next generation of angels,” said Bendz. “And for me it has been such a rewarding journey doing angel investments, and there are more people out there with knowledge and capabilities, so this is a way for us to sort of help seed them in a way”.

The Atomico Angel Programme will run on a 12-month rolling basis, with 12 angels backed in the first cohort (full list published below). Each angel is given $100,000 to write multiple early-stage cheques. They remain entirely autonomous and who they choose to invest in is up to them, as long as it does not violate Atomico’s ethical investment principles and commitments to its LPs (i.e nothing “unethical” including drugs, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and porn startups etc).

And of course angels get a share of the upside if or when the founders they back succeed, in the same way that Atomico does. To promote collaboration by angels in the program, Atomico is also allocating “pooled carry,” meaning that one company’s success benefits all the Atomico angels in the same cohort.

“It’s more relationships than transactions that matters for us, so this is a long-term play where we care about relationships with founders and talented and interesting people in our ecosystem,” said Bendz. “It’s a way for us to come closer to the grassroots community and we are always passionate about, you know, connecting and making sure people meet, so we can help being that connector and put the graduate community even closer to the old established institutions and the people that they want to meet”.

Sophia Bendz of Atomico announces a new angel investing program that's all about giving back #TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/nS0ojbVtr2

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) November 29, 2018

Interestingly, Atomico itself doesn’t do seed investments but backs companies one or two stages later at Series A and beyond, so the Angel Programme is very different from the angel scout networks typically operated by large VC firms in Silicon Valley that want to build a bridge to seed stage deal-flow.

It is also notable that, unlike some U.S. VCs, Atomico is making the initiative public from the get-go, offering a greater level of transparency. After all, there’s something rather odd about angel investors investing in young companies but unable to disclose where the money is actually coming from. That said, Atomico isn’t disclosing the exact split between Atomico, the angels in the program, and the pooled carry.

Another thing worth pointing out and the part that is arguably disruptive, albeit on quite a small-scale, is that the program has a chance to create angel investors that might never have the personal wealth to start investing, and therefore to diversify the angel ecosystem with fresh ideas and new, otherwise untapped investor talent. That’s because the program is targeting people who are not expected to have had a huge exit or even any exit at all. Right off the bat, the gender balance of the first cohort is better than any group of angels I’ve come across.

“What I’m excited about with this program is we are doing things a bit differently, we’re transparent about it and reaching a slightly different group of angels than the ones that are approached by the big firms in the Valley,” said Bendz. “These are more people that are operators, founders, co-founders. c-suite people, and some are great connectors with their feet down in the depths of the ecosystem, so we want to help them to do angel investments, maybe even sooner than what normally happens: People with great deal-flow that maybe haven’t had their own liquidity event”.

That’s not to say that there isn’t direct upside for Atomico. The firm makes no secret that it wants to find well-placed future angels in hard to reach “pockets” right across the often fragmented European ecosystem.

The first cohort is quite shrewdly filled with a number of known uber-connectors, such as former U.K. government advisor Rohan Silva and Station F’s Roxanne Varza. And whilst there is absolutely no guarantee that Atomico will go on to back any of the companies its newly activated angels choose to invest in, VC relationships often work best when they start early. Bendz also told me Atomico worked hard to find angels outside of its existing network.

To that end, the full list is as follows:

Doreen Huber, Founder, LemonCat

Suvi Haimi, Co-Founder, Sulapac

Stefano Bernardi, Co-Founder, Token Economy

Rohan Silva, Co-Founder, Second Home

Clare Johnston, Founder, The Up Group

Emily Brooke, Founder, Beryl

Gregory Gazagne, Executive Vice President, Criteo

Roxanne Varza, Director, Station F

Josefin Landgård, Co-Founder, Kry

Tuva Palm, Founder, Executive Tech Advisor

Ritu Jain, Co-Founder, LifeX

Johan Brand, Founding Partner, We Are Human

via TechCrunch

[fmservers]

Emmanuel Macron meets with the French tech community

Emmanuel Macron came to France’s ginormous startup campus Station F to talk to the French tech community. The event is organized by La French Tech, the government initiative to promote and foster the startup community in France.

Station F director Roxanne Varza first took the stage to introduce the event. She announced that there will be more startups in the Fighters Program. Station F has created this program so that entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds get a chance to relocate to Station F.

La French Tech new director Kat Borlongan then talked for a few minutes about the public initiative. “My firm belief is that La French Tech should operate just like all the startups in this room today,” she said.

According to her, it means that La French Tech should think about its users first, have a data-driven approach, and test and iterate.

Emmanuel Macron gave a very short speech and then held a Q&A sessions with tech entrepreneurs. This is a surprising format for Macron.

He mostly reassured entrepreneurs that things are changing and France is on the right path. He announced that the French Tech Visa would be simplified by March 2019.

Some entrepreneurs said there were paying too many taxes to hire talent in France. Macron refuted that. “I like to compare a researcher in Harvard with a researcher in France,” he said. “[In France], school is free and excellent, healthcare is free, there's a retirement system. On the other side, there's nothing.”

He also promised stronger antitrust rules at the European level. Tech giants sometimes dominate in Europe living no room for competition.

Macron finished by saying that tech companies also need to promote France’s system. They need to pay fair taxes, they need to think about tech’s effect on society. “I know one thing, the system will implode if you’re not responsible enough,” he said.

Things have changed in just over a year. When Macron first came to Station F for its grand opening, it was shortly after the elections. He was a popular President.

Now, most people dislike him, just like his predecessors François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy when they were in office. According to a source, he even thought about canceling today’s event given that he’s about to appoint some new faces in his government.

But Macron built his reputation on the so-called startup nation. He first became a public figure thanks to a grassroots approach built on top of the startup community. That’s why the startup community is still overwhelmingly in favor of Macron’s policies. And yet, there’s now a clear divide between the startup nation and the middle class at large, who think the President is out of touch and doesn’t care about them.

Via Romain Dillet https://techcrunch.com

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/meet-europes-top-vcs-at-disrupt-berlin/

Meet Europe’s top VCs at Disrupt Berlin

Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, from Sequoia to Benchmark to Accel, are investing more and more dollars overseas, as more globally-minded unicorns crop up across Europe.

As Forbes recently noted, U.S. VCS are “bonkers for European startups,” with “more money … flowing into European tech than ever.” Seems like a great time to sit down with U.S. and European investors to get a better sense of what’s happening here. Conveniently, we’re gathering top venture capitalists at our annual European conference, TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, next week.

For starters, we’ll have Forward Partners managing partner Nic Brisbourne, Target Global partner Malin Holmberg and DocSend founder Russ Heddleston together to provide exclusive fundraising advice to entrepreneurs. They’ll sit down with me for 45 minutes to shed light on the biggest challenges founders face while raising VC, how to perfectly crap your pitch and how to know if an investor is interested in your upstart.

Sequoia’s Andrew Reed, who’s worked on the firm’s investments in Bird, Figma, Front, Loom, Rappi, UiPath and more, will join us, too. From Index Ventures, a noted U.S. and U.K. investor, we’ll welcome principal Hannah Seal. From Atomico, a European venture capital firm, partner Sophia Bendz, partner Siraj Khaliq, partner Hiro Tamura and partner Niall Wass will all be in attendance. And from SoftBank, we’ll hear from SoftBank Vision Fund investment director Carolina Brochado and SoftBank Investment Advisors partner David Thevenon.

Roxanne Varza will give an update on Station F, the world’s biggest startup campus based in Paris. Varza first unveiled Station F at TechCrunch Disrupt back in December 2016; naturally, we’re excited to see what she has to stay this time.

As for others making the trip to Berlin from the U.S., we’ve got Joyance Partners investment partner Holly Jacobus and Accomplice partner Ash Egan on deck. The rest of the line-up includes some of Europe’s top VCs, including Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu, Blossom Capital partner Louise Dahlborn Samet, Balderon Capital partner Suranga Chandratillake and principal Colin Hanna, Luminous Ventures founding partner Isabel Fox, Amadeus Capital Partners partner Volker Hirsch, Point Nine Capital partner Christoph Janz, dynamics.vs partner Tanja Kufner, Northzone partner Paul Murphy, Ada Ventures founding partner Matt Penneycard and Dawn Capital partner Evgenia Plotnikova.

Read the entire Disrupt Berlin agenda here. Tickets to the show are still available!

[imnotsebastiansten]

2

1. First thing you wash in the shower?  Not sure

2. Are you more of a coffee or alcohol drinker? Coffee probably

3. Would you kiss the last person you kissed again? hell no

4. Do you plan outfits? sometimes

5. How are you feeling RIGHT now? i'm pretty tired tbh

6. Whats the closest thing to you thats red? my blanket

7. What would you do if you opened your door and saw a dead body? take the mirror out of my face

8. Tell me about the last dream you remember having? i don't even remember that oof?

9. Three of your current feelings? i honestly can't put my feeling into words right now

10. What are you craving right now? summer vacation

11. Turn ons? great sense of humour

12. Turn offs? obnoxious

13. What comes to mind when I say cabbage? varza

14. When was the last time you cried? Why? a couple of days ago when i finished the third season of the magicians because that cliffhanger killed me and my feelings

15. If you could be a superhero, who would you want to be? thor obviously

16. Did the one person who hurt you most in your life apologize? i'm not sure who's the person who hurt me the most but most likely they did not

17. Do you bite into your ice cream or just lick it? who the fuck bites into ice cream

18. Favorite movie ever? thor ragnarok

19. Do you like yourself? not really

20. Have you ever met a celebrity? yes!!

21. Could you handle being in the military? no

22. What are you listening to right now? radiohead

23. How many countries have you visited? 4 i think

24. Are your parents strict? not really, my mom gives me quite a lot of freedom

25. Would you go sky diving? maybe one day

26. Would you go out to eat with a stranger? doubt it

27. Whats on your mind right now? how the fuck am i supposed to survive my first day of school tomorrow because i have 2 math hours in the beginning of the day

28. Is there anything you want to say to someone? yes but i never say much to people

29. Have you ever been in a castle? yes

30. Do you rent movies often? no

31. Whats your zodiac sign? capricorn

32. When was the last time you had sex? never

33. Name five facts about yourself 

I love alternative music, I want a black cat, my favorite band is bring me the horizon, I'm in 11th grade and my favorite tv show is the Magicians

34. Ever had a near death experience? If so, what happened? no

35. Do you believe in karma or predestiny? sort of

36. Brown or white eggs? white

37. Do you own something from Hot Topic? we don't have hot topic here

38. Ever been on a train? yes

39. Ever been in love? no

41. If you could trade places with any person living or dead, who would you trade places with? i'd trade places with a celebrity because i 'm really curious to see what's behind the scenes

43. Whom do you admire and why? i admire quite a lot of people and mostly because they can do things i wish i could too or things i am too afraid to try

47. What was your best experience on drugs or alcohol? with alcohol idk man i mean i had some nights when i drank some with friends and it was pretty damn cool i guess

48. What was your worst experience on drugs or alcohol? we planned to stay up all night because we were going to the beach to watch the sunrise so there was no point in going to sleep and i didn't even drink that much but i fell asleep for 15 minutes and my stomach hurt after that tiny amount of sleep and it sucked

50. As your walking down the street you find a suitcase full of money sitting next to a parked car, would you take it? hell yes

51. If you found that a close friend has AIDS, would you still hang out with them?yes

52. In front of you are 10 pistols, 5 of which are loaded. If you survive you’d receive 100 million dollars. Would you be willing to place 1 to your head and pull the trigger? why not

53. How old were you when you lost your virginity?

54. Do you believe in ghosts, werewolves or vampires? nah

55. If you could live forever, would you want to? yes

56. Which fictional movie character most resembles who you are? quentin coldwater

57. If you could go back in time, which time period would you visit? the 90s or some distant time like 1700 and try on a fancy dress from that period

58. If they were to televise a live execution, would you watch it? no

59. If you could be the president of the USA, would you be willing to do it? no

60. If you could choose the sex of your unborn child, would you want to? i don't know what i'd choose

61. Would you rather live longer or be wealthy? be wealthy i guess