The AlwaysOn Venture Summit is a two-day gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and technology trends impacting the global growth investor, hosted in Half Moon Bay, CA. This year’s summit attracted five hundred of the most influential members of the tech investment community including “best of breed” CEO presentations, VCs, investment bankers, research analysts and so on.
On of the panels this year was on a very relevant topic to VC Cafe, titled: “Why Invest in Europe & Israel“.
The moderator Paul Deninger, Vice Chairman of Jefferies & Company asked tough questions to the group of investors below:
- Christopher Spray, Partner, Atlas Venture
- Bart Markus, General Partner, Wellington Partners
- Danny Cohen, Partner, Gemini Israel Fund
- Tod Bensen, Founder and former CEO, Cazenove Private Equity
- Yves Kraemer, Team Cote D’Azur
Danny Cohen from Gemini Israel Funds posted his main takeaways on the European VC industry:
Europe is also seeing an increase in the number of serial entrepreneurs (Although not as much as in Israel). The amount of $$ spent online in Europe is larger than the US, and is growing at a faster pace. It seems that that VCs can invest in companies that will focus on a single
European market (Germany or UK) and still become very substantial (I wish that was true in Israel as well).
So, why invest now in Europe and Israel? the panel of VCs from outside Silicon Valley seems to think that the other side of the pond is ripe for VC.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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