20VC: The Contentful Memo: Point Nine's Christoph Janz on The Cold Email That Led to a Unicorn Investment, How To Approach Market Sizing and Timing & The Pros and Cons of Pre-Emptive Rounds, When To Do Them vs When Not To?

Christoph Janz is the Co-Founder and General Partner @ Point Nine, one of Europe's leading early-stage firms with a portfolio including the likes of Zendesk, Algolia, Revolut, Nex Health, Loom and of course, Contentful. Prior to co-founding Point Nine, Christoph was a prolific angel investor and also the Co-Founder @ Pageflakes, leading the company from inception to their acquisition by LiveUniverse in 2008. Christoph is also one of the most thoughtful writers in SaaS and you can find his writing here. In Today’s Episode with Christoph Janz You Will Learn: 1.) How did a cold email from the solo founder of Contentful convince Christoph to lead their first round? What was it about the email that made Christoph excited? How does Christoph advise founders today when it comes to crafting cold emails to VCs? 2.) The Market: How did Christoph analyze the market when making the investment? How much of a role does market sizing and analysis play in determining whether Christoph will make an investment? What matters more team or market? How did the market change in a way that Christoph was not expecting? How did it evolve in a way he was expecting? 3.) Business Model: How does Christoph advise SaaS founders today in crafting variable pricing mechanisms? How can you create a pricing mechanism that does not disincentivize usage but also optimizes for value extraction? Where does Christoph see many founders go wrong when it comes to pricing? 4.) Fundraising: How did the early fundraising rounds for Contentful come together? How does Christoph advise founders today on whether to take pre-emptive rounds? When can they be helpful? In what circumstances can they be very damaging? What is the best outcome that founders should be optimizing for today with fundraising?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  You are listening to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and it's time for a very special episode, our episode of the month called The Memo. This is the show where we dive into the investment decision of a unicorn company from the last 10 years with the partner that led that deal at the firm. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by a friend and fellow European counterpart in the form of Christoph Janz at Point9. And in this show, we'll be focusing on Christoph's investment in the unicorn that is Contentful. For some context, Point9 is one of Europe's leading early-stage firms with a portfolio including the likes of Zendesk, Algolia, Revolut, Loom, Nex Health, and of course, Contentful. Prior to co-founding Point9, Christoph was a prolific angel investor and also the co-founder at Pageflakes, leading the company from inception through to their acquisition by Live Universe in 2008.

• 0:42Harry Stebbings?

  Christoph is also one of the most thoughtful writers in SaaS, and you can find his blog on the site at the20minutavec.com. That really is a must. But before we dive into the show today, fast, granular, and most importantly, reliable data is so crucial to successful decision-making and venture capital today. And that's why PitchBook provides a comprehensive platform for all your venture and capital market needs, supported by world-class research, dedicated customer success teams, and award-winning technology. With PitchBook, you can track the activity of markets, firms, and individual investors to identify potential prospects, or even your next limited partner, offering the extensive exclusive data you need to make informed investment and business decisions, and the tools to carry them out.

• 1:23Harry Stebbings?

  And cooler than this, 20 VC listeners can try PitchBook with free limited access to learn why so many professionals make it their main source of VC data, see what you can accomplish with the most robust capital market database, visit pitchbook.com/20vc to get access today. And speaking of amazing services which really up-level your business, Mercury is building full-stack banking for startups. Apply in under 10 minutes from anywhere for FDIC-insured bank accounts, physical and virtual debit cards, domestic and international wires, and integrations with Gusto, Stripe, QuickBooks, Plaid, basically every other tool your startup uses. They also offer unusual features like API access, custom team management, and their newly-launched Mercury Treasury, a cash management product for high-growth startups.

• 2:06Harry Stebbings?

  They'll even help you build your startup with Mercury Raise, a program to Connect you to Silicon Valley's top investors. Head over to mercury.com forward slash sign up to apply. And finally, now you have the infrastructure. You have to acquire and retain customers. And that's where Linktree comes in. Linktree is the tool for connecting followers to your entire online world, not just one feed. A link tree not only points followers in the direction of your choosing to your other social profiles, e-commerce store or content you want to share, but it helps hold followers within your online ecosystem for longer. It allows users to share more, sell more, curate more and grow more. Today, with over 18 million users worldwide and incredible 1 billion monthly global views, Linktree is the audience monetization tool and the only link you'll ever need.

• 2:49Harry Stebbings?

  You have to check them out. I use them personally. Check out my Twitter. I love it. Head over to Linktree, that's L I N K T R dot E E to find out more. It really is a must. But that's quite enough for me. So now I'm very, very excited to hand over to Christoph Janz, general partner and co-founder at Point9.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:14Harry Stebbings?

  Christoph, this is such a joy to do. I've wanted to make this happen for a long time because I always think you're one of the most, I haven't told you, but I think you're one of the most deep and insightful thinkers when it comes to the actual investment decision-making process. So first, thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Well, thank you so much, Harry. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

• 3:31Harry Stebbings?

  Now, we're going to focus today on the Contentful story, but at the time it was called Storage Room when you wrote the memo way back. So I want to start with the story itself. How did you come to meet the team? Where were they? Where were you? Was it remote? And how did that conversation go?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So I expected that you would ask this question, Harry. So I actually dug out that original email that I got from Sasha Konietzke, the co-founder and CEO of Contentful, which at the time was called Storage Room. And he sent me that email in March 2012. It was a cold email with a subject, "Succeed Funding Storage Room." As you know, as we see, you get a lot of cold emails and maybe you try to look at most of them, but you probably don't manage. To really look into all of them. We try to look at as many of them as possible, but we don't always succeed.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  But this one was very special and I think it had all the elements of a great cold email.

• 4:32Harry Stebbings?

  What was it that grabbed you about that first email that made you go, yes, let's have a meeting?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, happy to tell you about it. And it's interesting, Sasha didn't have a sales background, right? It's not like he has learned how to do that. He's engineer by training, he's a young techie founder. He's just incredibly smart, so he just figured it on his own. And I think this email, I don't know if it's right to say it ticked the boxes or it pushed the right buttons with me. It had a couple of interesting elements if you try to analyze it, like one, Sasha made it really clear why he was reaching out to me. So it was clear that this was not a random email that was sent out to dozens of investors at the same time. And where you kind of see right away, well, this is completely random. This is not that interesting. He referenced my blog, that he liked some of the work that I've already been doing.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  And that he hasn't found so many investors in Europe at that time who knew something about SaaS. So he really made an explicit point about why he wanted to talk to me, which I don't know, maybe it's flattering. But it also made sense to me, right? Like there is a mutual fit. So that was interesting. Then he was able to articulate in really just a couple of words, what the product does, why it's different, why it's needed. Then he mentioned some of the early customers that he was already able to attract. And those were some big logos, so also a bit of social proof, which is maybe superficial. But if you spend only a minute on reading those emails, then it's one of the things that stands out.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Last but not least, I don't know if that was intentional or just intuitively, but it had a clear call to action. It was like, can we meet or can we have a call? And everything that I just described didn't make this email longer than two or three paragraphs. And there was a deck attached to it, which was well done. It caught my attention. I definitely wanted to learn more. So I replied to Sasha, we jumped on a Skype call. I continued to get more and more intrigued.

• 6:25Harry Stebbings?

  When you first met him, did you know straight away that you wanted to invest or was it a? Learning process over a couple of meetings over the relationship.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  So I was excited from the first interaction and I think with every interaction or everything that we learned, we got more and more interested, but it's in comparison to some of the investments that we've done in more recent times. It actually took a lot of time. One is that just the market has been so immature and so different. So I think even though it had these elements of love at first sight, I think it took still two or three months. Totally unbelievable today with the current pace in this environment where everything gets done in a week, right? But it took us, I think, two months to do our work and come to a decision and then probably another one or two months to actually do the investment. Things were just moving so slowly in Europe. We kind of were able to move so slowly. It's embarrassing, right?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Because there wasn't so much competition. So we were excited from the first meeting, but we dug in quite deeply to try to understand the product, the market, talk to experts, did more, did it than we can typically do today.

• 7:31Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, what a luxurious time that sounds like. I wasn't investing back then, but I think I'm actually quite grateful because I would miss that and yearn for those times greatly. But I do want to start, you mentioned the market a couple of times there. I like starting on market and going top down. When we think about the market, in the memo you reference the web content management market as having revenues of a billion in 2010. I mean, it's not a huge market when we hear that number actually for the whole market. How did you break down and analyze the market when you made the investment?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was quite hard to get solid data on this. Like we had numbers from a couple of different market research agencies or institutes and they varied greatly. It was clear that the market for content management as a whole was already quite big. It was harder to understand how the subset of web content management, how big that market was. And it was even harder, probably impossible, to get a number for the mobile web content management part, because that is what content will initially focused on. I had a look at the original deck in preparation for this meeting with you, Harry, and it's unbelievable if you look at this from the perspective of today that Sasha is the original market. Twelve million dollar as the addressable market.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  He did mention that expects that the market would grow by five to ten X within five years. It would be a tiny, tiny market by today's standards. I think we and probably everyone just totally underestimated how big these markets would get, how fast they would grow. Like, we had already bought into this software is eating the world theme, but we just had no idea how fast things would grow, how big they would become, and that we now have dozens of companies selling to developers, generating hundreds of millions in revenues.

• 9:18Harry Stebbings?

  When you think about market evolution, how did you expect it to change? You believed in software eating the world. How did you expect the market to move when you looked projected out for five years?

• 9:28Speaker 02

  So I think we made a bet on the growth of mobile. I think that was already a safe bet to make. Twenty twelve, so this was already like year five of the iPhone. So there was already considerable growth of mobile consumption. But I think it was unclear, so it was maybe a bigger leap of faith to assume that there will be a big market for developer tools, like everything that you need as a developer to create and market a mobile or a web app that works on multiple devices. I think we were bullish enough based on this high-level theme, but we couldn't really put our finger on this. And we definitely were surprised by how big Contentful has become. It was not an overnight success though.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  It's not like this company has taken off right away. Like, it took a couple of years of relatively slow growth and ups and downs and re-architecting the product takes a year longer than expected. So there were all the things I would expect from a startup rollercoaster, right? I would say also it happened in the case of Contentful.

• 10:29Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, this is, you know, twenty twelve. Developers did not have the same developer but like purchasing power that they do today. Were you not taking a big risk in terms of like developers' ability in terms of purchasing and their ability within organizations to try new tools and then spin them up?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess we were probably quite naive in that and got lucky that we.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  In the company and in some other companies of that generation like Algolia, for example, and that these companies have then been able to benefit so much from this incredible growth of software and the number of developers and developers having purchasing power. So I think it's we, I'm not sure if we really understood that well. We knew that there were a few companies already, early players, somewhat successful in selling software to developers. I think there was Pars and Heroku, if I'm not mistaken, but also like with the benefit of hindsight, not big successes. Heroku and Pars, if I'm not mistaken, exited between eighty million and two hundred fifty or so, which is the type of exit if when we have thought about that in twenty twelve,

• 11:33Speaker 02

  strangely given us confidence about the size of the opportunity because we thought this is big. We thought it would be great and today this is not what gets us excited, right?

• 11:42Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask on like the centrality of market for you when making investments? You know, how much emphasis and weight do you place on it? Because some people say great founders find markets. They may not be in the right one today, but great founders find their market. Others say, solve that if you're in a huge market with like macro tailwinds, even mediocre founders can win. How much weight do you place on market, market size?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  I don't think that mediocre founders can build a very large company to start off with that. I think there are just way too many opportunities to fail. It just takes so much resilience and energy and dedication to always get up again. I think to build a very, very large company, you probably have to be in that lucky or fortunate position as an investor to be in a company that combines a great team and a great market opportunity. I think if you have a great team in a really, really bad market, there is a good chance that they will still turn it into like some decent level of success or maybe they can pivot into a better market. So I think the team is the more important factor of the two,

• 12:47Speaker 02

  but we do look at both of these factors. It doesn't mean that we want or expect to have clarity on the market size by the time we invest. I think we've learned like many other investors that it's really, really hard. To predict a market size and storage room or contentful is a maybe a good example in so far as like we made the bed, it was right, but it became even better. So that's the kind of learning that I'm happy to make, but obviously we also had different types of lessons where things didn't work out. So what we're really focused on is finding founders that have a really strong insight that have identified a pain, that have developed a great solution to that for a specific audience. And then we wanna see some optionality or like some opportunity that they might get into a bigger and bigger market.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  But we don't expect to be able to really have a number for it when we consider investing.

• 13:37Harry Stebbings?

  Can I also, when you think about kind of markets here, we both have investments that have done better and done worse. My challenge is often for those that have done worse, my mind is tainted by that market and I go, oh, healthcare, never gonna touch that again. How do you retain mental plasticity and kind of a clear mind with every new opportunity, rather than have your mind tainted by past things that have done badly or well, you're blindsided. How do you keep that neutrality?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  It's a very, very good point and I guess mostly a psychological one, right? Where we have to keep telling ourselves we should not draw conclusions from a very small number of data points, which might be completely wrong, right? Because like we have pretty small number of data points, if you think about it. And then the feedback cycles are extremely long. It might take years or many years to find out if the original investment decision was right or wrong. And then even if a company, let's say, doesn't work out and you kind of realize that a couple of years later, you might not even know why it didn't work out, right? Like even with hindsight, sometimes it's hard to really attribute it to the market or the timing or the execution or a combination of this.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  So I think we just try to be humble and not assume that we know everything or too much. And some of the best investments that we've made at point nine or that I personally made as an angel investor were probably in spaces where I didn't know too much about it. So I didn't like Zendesk, for example, everybody in Europe who knew anything about enterprise software. Looked at Zendesk and passed because there were plenty of reasons why this would never work. I had zero knowledge about enterprise software. I was a consumer internet guy. So I looked at it from the perspective of a consumer internet person. I looked at the product, it looked great. I liked playing around with it. I thought I would use it. But this was not the way more sophisticated people thought about it.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  So maybe that is a good reminder that now that we know a bit more, this can also be misleading.

• 15:35Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to touch on the business model itself, in particular the pricing. I think pricing is an area where a lot of founders really struggle. And when we look at pricing today, my big question is always, how do you have a variable pricing mechanism? Which optimizes for revenue generation, but also doesn't disincentivize usage? How do you think about the balance there? And what have been some lessons for you?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, pricing is definitely one of my favorite topics because it has such a huge impact, right? Like, it can really change a company, right? If you get your pricing wrong, all right? Because the right price doesn't only mean that you charge more. It opens up totally new ways to acquire customers if you have much higher customer lifetime values. There are a lot of trade offs, right? Like, you mentioned one of them already. Like, on the one hand, you want to align pricing with the value that you deliver. But by doing that, you also charge for the value that you deliver. And value usually comes from usage, so you could disincentivize usage. And I think on this particular question, I think it's mostly a question around like timing

• 16:39Speaker 02

  related to onboarding and how you do implementation and customer support and customer success. You have to make sure that you show the customer the value first. And then when they see the value and then they might want to add more seats or maybe use the product more often, so they generate more FPI calls. And that will lead to higher costs. But if that happens at a time where they've already seen the value, they're probably fine with it. Because they'll still have a great ROI on that additional spend.

• 17:06Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about professional services? A lot of founders say to me, oh, you know, I've got professional services. It's 30% of my revenue stream now. How do you think about revenue services? And at what point do you think it becomes an uncomfortably large portion of revenue?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I would say In SMB SaaS, it usually doesn't play a big role, but it's very different on the enterprise side, where enterprise customers typically expect some percentage of professional services or setup costs or implementation fees. Founders who are not very experienced with enterprise sales might often not really want to ask for that because it maybe makes you uncomfortable or maybe you think it's friction to the deal or maybe you don't want to have that revenue that is lower margin, but essentially you have to do the work anyway. You have to do whatever it takes to make this customer happy and successful. So if you're doing it, well, why not charge for it if they are almost begging you to pay for it?

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Obviously, it means that when you present this data to investors in your next round, you like need to show it clearly, have probably two different line items and it's clear that those different types of revenue have different margins. Maybe one is recurring, the other is not recurring, so you will not get the same multiple on that. But it also doesn't hurt, right? It's cross margin, it's pay the bills and you can explain to investors why you're charging it.

• 18:26Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, do you have any gripes or annoyances with how founders present data today in terms of revenue numbers? I find sometimes there's a lot of confusion around some of the actual definitions of how they see different forms of revenue. Do you have any gripes where you're like, oh, for goodness sake, please stop saying X is Y or Y is X? Often, we both do marketplaces, people think GMV is revenue, it's not revenue. That really frustrates me. Are there any gripes for you where you're like, just understand this is how the presentation could be done?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. It happens all the time, like having a chart without X's description or presenting numbers, not really being clear about the definition. I think not every time when you hear about ARR or MRR, it actually is recurring. Maybe that is because SaaS has become so big, almost every company either is a SaaS company or wants to become a SaaS company that to look into that. But also, I would say that founders have become a lot more educated about this over the years. Like if you want to understand, there are so many great online resources, like every imaginable question around SaaS. If you look it up, Jason Lemkin has answered it on Cora.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  I think the general sophistication of this entire industry and the participants has increased quite a bit. So I would say it's maybe people still make mistakes, but not the same like very like beginner level mistakes of confusing cash M R or things like that.

• 19:52Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask Christoph, do you find with the transition of fundraising rounds where you know seed is now kind of pre-seed and everything's changed? Do you find that actually we're looking at much less mature companies and revenue is more often surprising than not, given how early both of us play?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  There is basically a shift of one phase. Contentful's first round, we call the seed round, was five hundred K. And we didn't even do it alone because we thought this was way too much for our tiny little fund. So we did less than half of it and helped Sasha fill up the round with others or help him get Borlason on board, which turned out to be a great partner for the company. And today, as you know, like five hundred K is less than the average pre-seed round, right? And seed rounds are often in the millions. So the label and the terminology really has shifted. Then also when you look at the series A stage, for a real series A usually still need some revenue.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  I guess in back in the days, we used to say that you typically should have around a million in E R R for a series A. I guess to a certain extent, that's still true, but at the same time, so many companies raise what you previously would have called a series A on the basis of a PowerPoint presentation. So I don't know if that's means you skip this pre-seed and the seed.

• 21:10Harry Stebbings?

  I think great founders skip the pre-seed. I didn't really ever see like tier one pedigree founders coming out with a pre-seed. I guess second is like the big concern that I have, I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts, you know, point point nine has such a phenomenal brand. I'm sure the majority of your companies get preemptive term sheets very, very quickly post you investing in them. How do you advise founders on whether to take or not take preemptive term sheets first?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm generally not a big fan of taking preemptive investments. There can be exceptions though.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  And maybe the real question is not so much should I take a preemptive offer when it's on the table or not. When you really have a good offer on the table from a firm or partner that you really like and it's a good valuation. Then it can make a lot of sense, right? I think the problem is that so many founders get dragged into these conversations at a time when they're not really ready for it yet. And then obviously investors are incentivized to convey that they are more interested or deeper in their decision-making process than they actually are. Because from the point of view of an investor, like you want to have the possibility or optionality to even explore that. And that makes it hard to read the signals for a founder who's not very experienced with it.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  So I think the issue is that when a founder hears from an investor, we want to preempt your round. Well, what does that mean, right? Does that mean one or two calls and maybe I share my metrics and then either I get a term sheet or not? Or does that mean four weeks of process? And I think in most cases founders are better off if they run a process. So they control the timeline, they talk to several investors in parallel, so they have more options. That's the advice that we typically give to the point nine family founders.

• 22:58Harry Stebbings?

  Do you worry that actually founders are getting stuffed with so much cash so early? I had a company of mine that's forty K MRR. First off, it was done at six hundred pre.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 23:07Harry Stebbings?

  My point is they suddenly got a hundred million in their bank and they're hiring twenty sales, perhaps twenty marketing. The most obscene customer success team when they have no playbook and they have no form of repeatability. Are you concerned that actually funding advancement has changed company execution in a negative way?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  I think having a lot of money can make a company better, but it can also make a company worse, right? And it depends on a couple of things. It doesn't make sense to hire lots of salespeople if you haven't figured out the sales motion yet, right? And this is like classical mistake, which a lot of people have talked about. So I think that is also quite well understood. It doesn't mean that people won't make that mistake again if they have just so much money. Money in the bank account. So I think one of the best things you can do as a founder in this environment is raise a lot of money at a very high valuation, but don't use it, or at least don't spend it faster than you would if the money had been much harder to raise.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  And I mean, I think it's great if a company can operate in a way that cash is not the constraint, right? I think that should be the goal of every investment, should be that the founders can operate the company without having to worry about cash being the constraint, which then means usually the actual constraint is just like manpower. How quickly can you hire great people and then onboard them, which is something which you can accelerate a bit with money, but with some limitations. Ultimately, it depends a lot on the personality of the founders, right? And if they are able to use the money to accelerate, or if, I mean, just too early for that, if they just keep a pretty low burn. And all of this is then great, right? Like what's obviously the bad scenario is it leads to premature scaling

• 24:50Speaker 02

  and building up of a huge burn rate. Ultimately, despite the fact that you've raised so much, end up one and a half or two years later, you haven't reached the milestones that you need to get to the next round and you have a high burn rate. So that's the scenario that is everybody should try to avoid.

• 25:04Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I do want to dive into a quick fire where I say a short statement and it's going to be all around contentful and you give me your thoughts in about sixty seconds. Does that work? Okay, Kristoff?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Sounds great.

• 25:13Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so if, when you did the investment, if all the stars aligned, how big did you think this would be?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  I think we didn't dream beyond an outcome of a couple of hundred millions in exit valuation. Our ambitions started to get bigger over time, but like we had a tiny fund, like we, I guess the term unicorn wasn't even coined yet, like we were not really expecting billion dollar outcomes. I think we also built our fund model based on like billion to half a billion in terms of the best case outcome.

• 25:43Harry Stebbings?

  My, how the world has changed. What was your pre-mortem for why this maybe wouldn't work? The biggest risk?

• 25:49Speaker 02

  I think two factors there. I think one is that we, we could have been outrun by competitors. And it's not like we weren't really aware of specific competitors, really. Doing the same thing, but nevertheless, this one man show, which then with the recruitment of the Paolo, the tech of honor became a two man show. It still felt like against all odds in a way, if you think that there is a Silicon Valley team going after the opportunity, raising more money, having more experience. So I think like potential future competition that would be able to execute faster, I would say was one reason why this might have failed. Unfortunately, it did not.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  And I think the other was that the amount of proof that we had that the market actually needs this was still pretty small. Like there was also the possibility that maybe a plugin to WordPress is all that it takes. Or that developers would rather want to build it themselves using some open source components, because they don't want to trust a startup with their most precious content and data. So yeah, I think those were two of probably out of even more reasons why this might have failed.

• 26:58Harry Stebbings?

  Who's the unsung hero from the team and what did they do behind the scenes?

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Maybe worth mentioning two people there. One is Chris Shagan, who joined the company as really the first commercial person. And I think he kind of in the early days built up marketing to certain extent, also sales. I think he played a very big role there and should get a lot of credit. And the other one that I would mention is my friend Roberto Bonanzinger, who at the time was with Bortton and leading the investment. And he, because he was investing out of a bigger fund with a bigger firm and maybe because he was more experienced, his ambition was already bigger than mine. I remember a really funny anecdote when we probably, I don't know, maybe a couple of months after our original investment,

• 27:46Speaker 02

  we did a kind of like a board offsite in Lisbon to discuss strategy and everything. Then he said in his really nice Italian accent, something like, "Christoph, Sasha, I just want to make one thing very clear. If we end up selling Storage Room for a hundred million, I will consider it a big failure."

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Thinking, well, a hundred million, I would probably be quite heavy with a hundred million. But for him, it was already clear that this is not what we should be aiming for. And it took me probably a bit longer to realise that this could become so much bigger.

• 28:23Harry Stebbings?

  I absolutely love that. Brilliant copying of Robertic that. Kristoff, as I said, I've wanted to see this one for a long time. Thank you so much for doing it with me and I really have enjoyed it.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Well, thank you so much, Harry.

• 28:34Harry Stebbings?

  Huge thanks to Kristoff again today. He's done so much to the European ecosystem. And if you want to read his writing, as I said, you can find his blog on the 20minutvc.com where we have all the links there. But before we leave you today. Fast, granular and most importantly, reliable data is so crucial to successful decision making and venture capital today. And that's why PitchBook provides a comprehensive platform for all your venture and capital market needs, supported by world-class research, dedicated customer success teams and award-winning technology. With PitchBook, you can track the activity of markets, firms and individual investors to identify potential prospects or even your next limited partner, offering the extensive exclusive data you need to make informed investment and business decisions and the tools to carry them out.

• 29:16Harry Stebbings?

  And cooler than this, 20 VC listeners can try PitchBook with free limited access to learn why so many professionals make it their main source of VC data. See what you can accomplish with the most robust capital market database. Visit pitchbook.com/20vc to get access today. And speaking of amazing services which really up-level your business, Mercury is building full-stack banking for startups. Apply in under 10 minutes from anywhere for FDIC insured bank accounts, physical and virtual debit cards, domestic and international wires and integrations with Gusto, Stripe, QuickBooks, Plaid, basically every other tool your startup uses. They also offer unusual features like API access, custom team management and their newly launched Mercury Treasury, a cash management product for high-growth startups.

• 29:59Harry Stebbings?

  They'll even help you build your startup with Mercury Raise, a program to connect you to Silicon Valley's top investors. Head over to mercury.com/signup to apply. And finally, now you have the infrastructure you have to acquire and retain customers. And that's where Linktree comes in. Linktree is the tool for connecting followers to your entire online world, not just one feed. Linktree not only points followers in the direction of your choosing to your other social profiles, ecommerce store or content you want to share, but it helps hold followers within your online ecosystem for longer. It allows users to share more, sell more, curate more and grow more. Today with over 18 million users worldwide and incredible 1 billion monthly global views, Linktree is the audience monetization tool and the only link you'll ever need. You have to check them out. I use them personally.

• 30:44Harry Stebbings?

  Check out my Twitter, I love it. Head over to Linktree, that's L I N K T R dot E E to find out more, it really is a must. As always, I so appreciate your support and I can't wait to bring you an incredible episode this coming Friday.