12.1 What We Got Right and Wrong Last Year A venture-backed European tech startup will exit for a $B+ to a traditional non-tech European giant Non-tech European corporates have millions (for example, BNP Paribas and already made billion-dollar tech Compte Nickel). This will change in 2018 acquisitions (Anglo-Dutch Unilever as European non-tech corporates put picked up Dollar Shave Club), but some of their combined $1.5 trillion acquisitions within Europe have cash holdings to work. typically been in the hundreds of We...sort-of got this maybe half-right Mark: 0.5/1 In the purest sense, this did not come enterprise value of around $6 billion. to pass. There was no single acquisition Siemens, the German industrial giant, of a European VC-backed company acquired Mendix, a Netherlands- for more than $1 billion to a traditional born, -funded and -raised enterprise non-tech European giant. But that’s software company, for $730 million. not to say that there was not plenty of In other smaller, but still meaningful relevant M&A activity that validated transactions, ING Group acquired this trend. In fact, the year started in Payvision for a fee that valued the January with Richemont’s acquisition of business at more than $500 million, full control of the European, formerly- while Munich Re acquired Berlin’s Relayr VC-backed, but now public company for $300 million. All this taken together, Yoox Net-a-Porter for an implied total we think this deserves a half mark. European founders will increase efforts to tap engineering talent pools outside of traditional hubs The battle for talent in Europe is ensuring talent flows are not a one- intensifying. Not only are there more way street into tech. In order to stay venture-backed startups that are better competitive in this context, European funded and hungrier for engineering founders will look for creative ways to talent than ever, but global tech giants best exploit the untapped engineering are also expanding aggressively in the talent pools in less obvious places. region with inflated salaries on offer for For example, we expect to see more the most talented. At the same time, satellite offices opening up across the European corporates are fighting back, region in upcoming hubs. Yeah, we nailed this one too Mark: 1/1 This trend has certainly taken hold in already opened satellite offices to Europe in 2018, driven by increasing tap new talent pools and 80% of levels of competition for talent in core those founders expressed increased European tech hubs and a growing interested in opening additional awareness of the depth of talent in offices. As one example, N26 has emerging hubs. According to the more opened its first major office outside of than 1,000 founders that responded Berlin, choosing Barcelona to build an to this year’s State of European Tech office that will quickly expand to 100 Survey, more than 50% of companies employees. with more than 100 employees have 147 In Partnership with & www.thestateofeuropeantech.com