2022 statistics of Pinto Ventures: we received 300 qualified leads; spoke with 65 teams; took forward conversations with 15 of them; took a closer look and did DD in 5 (less than 2%); and did only one new investment (to be disclosed soon). Why did we do all this work? Selecting startups to invest is just 1/5 of our time. The rest is spent supporting teams throughout the ups and downs of building new profitable growing tech businesses, which is a very different approach from other early stage investors. How do others work? A typical early stage fund needs to create results after 10+ years for their investors or LPs. Investments are done in the first 1 to 3 years across ca. 20 to 30 companies. Portfolio construction is about maximising the chances of having at least one winner in each fund. The rule of thumb is that the “winner” investment will need to yield at least 1.5 times the size of the fund. Assuming an investment in equity of 20% and dilution until exit to 10%, this implies tha
Investing in VonZu Tech - a memo to myself Globalisation and Retail Have you ever noticed that in the list of the richest people in every country there is always at least one Retail family? This is true in the US (e.g Walton family), Germany (e.g. Albrecht family), in smaller countries like Portugal (Soares dos Santos family) and is the same even in China (Ma family, Colin Huang). There is a reason for this: retail goods and food is one of the highest spend categories of households in any country. The last massive transformation that made the money of many of this families was an invention from the 1960s: the sea container. The evolution of retail via mega chains and stores with their professional category managers and international sourcing teams was made possible by this pice of logistics infrastructure. And this was very much what led to the massive expansion of global trade from 1960 to 2019. My hands-on experience with global trade was first gained as CEO of Spiriant GmbH in Ge