The Forsyth Group – Executive Search

Congratulations to the Asetek team and Northzone Ventures! It’s always great to see a client achieving success and this IPO is a brilliant result.

Bronderslev, 18 March 2013 – Asetek A/S (“Asetek” or the “Company”) is pleased to announce the successful completion of its initial public offering (the “Offering”) with its shares to be listed on the main list of the Oslo Stock Exchange under the trading symbol “ASETEK”. The Offering, which was priced at NOK 36.00 per Offer Share, includes a total of 5,333,333 Offer Shares, consisting of 4,000,000 New Shares offered by the Company and 1,333,333 Secondary Shares sold on a pro rata basis by existing shareholders (the “Selling Shareholders”). In addition, 800,000 Secondary Shares, representing 15% of the Offering (excluding the over-allotment), has been allotted pursuant to an over-allotment facility. The Offering was well oversubscribed at the Offer Price. The first day of trading of the Company’s shares on the Oslo Stock Exchange will be 20 March 2013.

http://bit.ly/XmOzin 

It’s that time of the year again for Seedcamp Companies!

The SC team and 25 Seedcampers are travelling the US visiting the most important technology hubs, meeting investors, and catching up with our friends.

For over 5 years, our US trip has been a key component of the Seedcamp program. The goal of the trip is to connect Seedcamp founders with the ecosystem in the States, fundraise from US investors, and learn from local successes. This year, we’re upping our game in two ways: Not only are we meeting more investors and mentors than ever, also did we just announce that we will now go on our tour twice per year.

Below is a summary of how the US tour will look for our teams, but If you are interested in our trip, the meetups, and events, make sure to follow our US trip Tumblr and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. We will post photos, check ins, and daily updates. Each week, we’ll post a recap of what happened, and make sure you are all up to date on what is happening.

Connections

This year, we are travelling to New York, Boston, San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, and we will visit Austin for SXSW. Access to these local ecosystems is key, especially as founders are looking for advice, network, capital, and validation for their startups. Through a combination of events, local meet ups, and office visits, we make sure to connect the entrepreneurs to the right people.

Seedcamp style events

In all those cities, we will hold local Seedcamp events. Much like our Mini Seedcamps in Europe, these events are based the teams presenting their companies, and interacting with mentors and investors in one to one sessions. Exactly like the events in Europe, these one day opportunities to network with a broad range of investors and successful entrepreneurs are a great base for founders to experience the local strengths and find partners with whom to work longer term. Last year, we had more than 200 of America’s top mentors and investors involved across the trip, this year, even more are signed up.

Local meet ups

Meeting local startups that are in similar phases of their development as the Seedcampers builds great connections and results in lots of friendships. As always, we make sure to engage with the local community – be it with our friends at General Assembly in New York, hack:reduce in Boston, various incubators and coworking spaces on the West Coast, or the wider tech community at SXSW.

Office visits

Nothing transports the value of a strong company culture more than visiting some of the most successful startups and tech companies in person. That’s why we visit role models such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Foursquare, Amazon, Microsoft, and Paypal, and connect with their startup and developer teams, have a chat with the founders and early employees, and enjoy the atmosphere of their campuses. This has brought about strong connections between Seedcamp companies and technology partners such as Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter, who are working directly with Seedcamp companies to support their products and services.

Fundraising

Besides the best European investors, we have always made it an explicit goal to attract US capital for our startups. The US trip is a great way to connect with and raise money from the best investors.
Exposure at Seedcamp events

About half of the mentors at Seedcamp events in the US are investors. The sessions are a great way for us to present to them some of Europe’s best early stage startups. Besides talking to potential investors for their startups, founders also get to learn from the investors experience with their portfolio companies, tap into the wider network, and build relationships early.

VC pitch sessions

Funds like Union Square Ventures, Redpoint, Lerer Ventures, Atlas, Next View, SoftTech,500startups, and more have invested in Seedcamp companies who they met on the US trip. That’s why we make sure to meet the investment teams of the best funds on our tour.

We are proud to have an open door to some of the best investors in the places we visit. This way, we’re are able to not only spend time with them during mentoring sessions, but also to visit them at their offices to deepen the conversations. This year, amongst the already mentioned investors in Seedcamp companies, we’re meeting Partners of iA Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, O’Reilly Alpha Tech, Greylock, and others to enable our companies to present to the best VC funds of the world.

Learning

Some of the greatest technology companies are being built in the US, and we want to enable our teams to learn from the best. We have local events, meet companies and platform providers, and involve our friends all across the US in what we do.

Masterclasses

In each city, we make sure to meet with locals and learn from their successes through masterclasses and group sessions. This year, we are excited to hold sessions like this in all of the places we visit. In New York, we talk fundraising and deal closing with successful investment bankers. In Boston, Atlas Venture and hack:reduce are organising an afternoon conference on the Boston ecosystem, which includes the founders of Zipcar, Hubspot, and insights from various VC firms. Our San Francisco events include more masterclasses on deign and product building –AirBnB and others are hosting us and the companies.

Platform sessions

Most startups are building on top of the large tech companies’ platforms, and we make sure to get them exposure to the folks behind the scenes. At places like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, 10gen, and Foursquare, we meet engineers and platform teams to get the word straight from the horse’s mouth: How can startups benefit and get the most out of these technologies.

Teams make their own trip

Besides meetups, and events, teams have done their homework and are meeting angel investors, lots of startups and community members in their industries, and get involved in events that are happening in the cities we visit. This is an immediately useful part and goes beyond what we could even plan: this year, 15 teams and more than 25 people are on the trip, and we aim to leave a mark in each of the places we go.

Check out the teams that are coming along and get in touch if you want to meet up!
Want to come along?

Our next US trip is happening in October this year. If you are interested in taking part – make sure you apply to Seedcamp in the mean time and join the family. Applications are currently open for Seedcamp Berlin.

You have secured funding for the business and now hiring a CEO, COO or CFO means it’s time to grow up fast for a tech startup. Rosemary Forsyth explains how to avoid a costly mistake!

“The founders have done a great job getting to the stage where an experienced investor will invest their time and firm’s money in the company. Now the founding team needs to be strengthened with one or more executives so that the company can scale to the next level.

The first step in this process must be for the team and person leading the hiring process to get a solid understanding of what skills and expertise they are looking to attract and why. It is critical that the team and investor are on the same page when it comes to hiring the first outside executives into the company. The simplest way to achieve this is to discuss the role that you are looking to fill and draft a detailed job description that all relevant parties agree is representative of who the company needs to hire to move forward.

The next step is to search the team’s and investor’s network for potential candidateswho may fit the bill. This is the cheapest and often the most effective way to find a suitable candidate, if the hiring manager has the time and the team has a large enough network. Some start-ups have successfully sourced candidates via social networks such as LinkedIn. It is
very important that the company do full due diligence referencing on all candidates, especially candidates sourced through social networks. The team should explore these options as soon as possible, especially where the hiring of an executive within a certain time frame is vital. If timing is an issue, or if the team and investor’s network are not sufficiently large or
do not cover the right sectors, the hiring manager can choose to work with an executive search firm to help source the ideal candidate.

The hiring manager should work with an executive search firm who has a track record of success scaling high growth early stage teams in their vertical and technology sector. The cultural DNA of a high growth start-up is radically different to that of a corporate environment and therefore high growth start-ups require executives who thrive in this less structured entrepreneurial environment.  Often the best candidates have achieved success in an early stage company before.The most effective candidate will fit in with the culture of the company and be able to “hit the ground running” by opening doors, closing deals and building value immediately.”

Thank you to Rosemary.

To find out more about available office property in the Silicon Roundabout area contact Kushner at www.kushnerproperty.com

•   Marissa Meyer has taken on the mother of all challenges aka www.yahoo.com. She is estimated to have $300m in the bank from her time at Google and her Yahoo CEO package is said to be worth another $70m – not bad. Looks like Marissa left Google after not being promoted to SVP  and I wonder if Marissa will be as big a loss as another female Googler who was also passed over for a senior position. Yahoo is going to be  an immense challenge and it will be exciting to watch – either way, Marissa’s already a winner in our eyes.

• The CEO of the month is the Lenovo boss Yang Yuanqing who distributed his $3m bonus to his 10,000 junior employees. The bonus the employees will receive, which is close to an entire month’s wages, will make a lot of assistants, receptionist and production-line workers very happy. Fingers crossed this altruism catches on!

• Indicted CEO of the month goes to former France Telecom boss Didier Lombard, who ran the company between 2005 and 2010.  Lombard has been indicted by a court in Paris over allegations that he led a corporate culture of bullying and harassment, which resulted in the suicide of at least 30 employees. During a two-year period 35 employees killed themselves and critics have pinpointed Lombard’s management culture and decisions as one of the reasons for this dire attrition. Lombard was the architect of the “NEXT” program, an efficiency drive and restructuring which cut more than 22,000 jobs over a short time and forced managers to change jobs every three years. Many of those who died left notes blaming pressure at work for their actions. Worst. Boss. Ever.

• Russia, home to the bravest start-up CEO’s, seems to be experiencing a backlash after imprisoning nearly three million entrepreneurs in the last 10 years. Boris Titov, who Vladimir Putin installed as ombudsman for business rights, says it is “hard to find another social group persecuted on such a large scale”. Of course Putin is concerned about the imprisoning of the entrepreneurial engine of the country. He may also be more than a little concerned by the $84bn in capital that exited the country last year, a record amount.  You definitely do not want to go to court over a business matter in Russia. Sergei Zlobin, who resigned as head of the Volgograd regional criminal board four months ago, says that in the thousands of cases he heard in the 15 years he was a judge, he only ever issued seven ‘not guilty’ verdicts – and five of them were later overturned. Issuing a not guilty verdict, he says, was not only a “waste of time”, it was risky. Not expecting a mass exodus of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to Skolkovo  just yet then…

Since our Seedcamp investment in October 2008 we’ve watched Vladimir and the team at uberVU go from strength to strength. Closing funding rounds with Eden Ventures, closing impressive partnership deals with Nielsen, winning impressive customers like PayPal and building out their team in the US market.

We worked with the founders to hire their CEO Mark Pascarella and since then the company has continued on their hockey stick trajectory. uberVU has launched the new version of Signals and moved to the Cambridge Innovation Center  in Kendall Square to take advantage of the talent, funding opportunities and entrepreneurial energy in the area and the company plans to quadruple employees this year.

We are looking forward to watching the company continue to power ahead and take a leadership position in the social media monitoring space.

Rosemary and Brett attended The Next Web conference in Amsterdam on April 26^th and 27th.

On the geek side Robert Scoble’s talk on the future of technology was fascinating as was CEO of Evernote Phil Libin’s Keynote.

The star of the event however was Klara, the very well behaved cow, who took the leading role in www.dungville.com a clever twist on the Million Dollar Home Page. Users were asked to click on three squares in the virtual field where you thought Klara would drop her cow pat.

Congratulations are due to Nuji one of our Seedcamp portfolio companies won the Best Web App award at the event.

Thanks to the Coen and Herman for the Henq Invest VIP party on Thursday, which was great fun.

Being only an hour away Amsterdam is definitely one of our favourite event destinations.

On Tuesday this week Jos White tweeted the very good news that Notion completed their first close of Notion Capital Fund 2, focusing on emerging Cloud Computing and SaaS companies.

Notion have already invested $50m from their first fund investing in 10 high-growth companies such as Brightpearl, eSellerPro, NewVoiceMedia, Star and Tradeshift. Tradeshift recently completed a new funding round valuing the business at $137m and we are proud to have been able to assist the company with their European expansion. We helped Tradeshift hire their first executives in the UK, Netherlands, France and Germany and expect great things from the team moving forwards.

With this $100m fund, which should close at $150m, Notion are now able to really scale up their investment efforts. Another bright spot on the European technology landscape!

http://bit.ly/I4i5qf

If you are a web- or mobile-orientated startup, focusing on an exciting space apply before 25th April

Back to Berlin – 15th May

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 06:10 AM PDT

Berlin has been a fixture on our Seedcamp calendar since 2008, not only because of the great entrepreneurs and the startup activity but also because we have always had great relationships with local investors and mentors. This, and of course, the recent surge in activity and attention for the German Capital’s startups, makes us more than excited to come back for our fourth Seedcamp in Berlin.

Last year’s Berlin event was a full-on success for us: not only did we invest in three companies as a result of the event – Mopapp, EfficientCloud and Crashpadder (who was recently acquired by Airbnb) – but other great results also followed. Our recent guest post by Christian Thaler highlighted how he met Bonusbox at Seedcamp Berlin last year and made an investment after being in touch with the founders for a while. Similarly, Passion Capital invested in wireWAX, who were one of last year’s participants. Since we set out to not only invest in great companies, but also to facilitate connections beyond our events, we couldn’t be happier with last years’ event.

This year, we are playing an even bigger fiddle. Fresh off the back of our huge U.S. trip in March, Tel Aviv this week, and April’s Seedcamp in Tallin, we will come back to Berlin in May, where we will be hosted by our new investors at BDMI for what looks to be our biggest and best event in Berlin yet.

Seedcamp Berlin will take place on May 15 in the beautiful “Unter den Linden 1″, one of the most iconic buildings in the capital. We already have some of the best German and European startup investors, entrepreneurs and mentors signed up, and can’t wait to see what the applications will bring.

If you are a web- or mobile-orientated startup, focusing on an exciting space apply before 25th April. We invest from a prototype to a live minimum-viability product through to launch with a few users or customers. As usual, we are excited to see companies from all over Europe applying. We are especially looking forward to see what Berlin’s and Germany’s startup communities are working on, and also expect to attract a record number of applications from the neighbouring countries.

Apply now – and keep yourself up to date about Seedcamp by following us on Twitter and Facebook. Of course, if you’re not working on a startup yourself, make sure you tell your friends about the upcoming Seedcamp Berlin!

The so-called “Estonian Mafia” are not the only Eastern Europeans who have global ambitions. The Eastern European companies we work with are thinking global from the outset and building teams to execute on an international scale from the get go.

We recently completed a CEO search for one of our Seedcamp portfolio companies, UberVU .  The company had expanded into the US and was looking to hire an experienced executive to take advantage of the massive market opportunity for social media monitoring in the US.

We have also recently completed a NED and CEO search for a Kiev based company in the online travel space. Our most recent customer is a flash sales business originally founded in UberVU’s home town of Bucharest. They are setting up their HQ in the UK to tap into the London based VCs and are planning a pan-European roll out.

We are certainly going to see more of this global/international expansion from Eastern Europe. These are  exciting times – the Industrial Revolution 2.0 is well under way all across Europe.

In February this year I posted on the Seedcamp Road trip to the USA. I jealously followed the Tumblr blog  and now Milo Yiannopoulos, the Editor in Chief of The Kernel, has written a great round up of the very successful trip.

Here are some of the numbers

The teams met with:

• 6 Accelerators
• 20 Companies
• 16 Investors

The teams experienced:

• 12 Learning sessions/lectures
• 4 Mentoring Days
• 18 Social events

The teams met:

• 77 VCs
• 65 Entrepreneurs
• 18 Corporate Executives
• 15 Marketing & PR Executives

And GREAT traction:

• 3 Term Sheets
• 13 Ongoing discussions

Hats off to the Seedcamp team!