📖 Venture Chronicles - March 2023
Discover more from Overlooked by Alexandre Dewez
📖 Venture Chronicles - March 2023
Overlooked #142
Hi, it’s Alexandre from Eurazeo. I’m investing in seed & series A European vertical solutions (vSol) which are industry specific solutions aiming to become industry OS and combining dynamics from SaaS, marketplaces and fintechs. Overlooked is a weekly newsletter about venture capital and vSol. Today, I’m sharing the most insightful tech news of February.
For 2023, I want to pick one piece of news per day and write a short comment about it. I want to talk about something that strikes me. Something that happened in the tech ecosystem. Here is the issue for March!
Please note that the date picked for each event is not always the exact event date but the one at which I decided to write about the event.
Wednesday, Mar. 1st: Bain released its 2023 private equity (PE) report. - Bain
In 2022, the private equity industry was impacted by the increase in interest rates which caused many banks to stop funding buyout transactions.
“What makes the current economic slowdown different from the one brought on by the global financial crisis is the lack of clarity about what’s happening.” There are many challenges in the macro environnement but none of them powerful enough to stop our economies on its own.
LPs will limit their new exposure to PE. On the one hand, they need to re-balance their portfolio after the general public market downturn. On the other hand, in recent years, PE funds raised successive funds at an accelerated pace without keeping a great pace at returning the cash to LPs.
Direct lending (29% CAGR), Venture (24%) and Growth have been the fastest growing asset classes by AUM in the last decade.
“Deals done through a downturn generate superior returns over time.”
In venture and growth, exit value was down by 64% in 2022 compared with 2021 with SPAC and IPOs more impacted than M&A and PE buyouts.
In 2021-2022, GPs were raising a new fund every 3.2 years and were raising funds c.50% larger than their previous vehicle.
PE funds are increasingly targeting individual investors. Individuals hold 50% of global AUMs but only 16% of AUM managed by alternative investment funds.
Thursday, Mar. 2nd: Founders Fund reduced by 50% the size of its next venture fund from $1.8bn to $900m. It had already raised $1.8bn but it decided to downsize to adapt to the new market reality in which deal volume and deal prices are decreasing. This move is putting pressure on other venture funds which are on the market raising their next vintage. - Axios
Wednesday, Mar. 3rd: Prukalpa Sankar wrote about the future of the modern-data-stack. - Prukalpa Sankar
Prukalpa highlights 4 trends on the modern-data-stack: (i) optimising data spend will become a major priority, (ii) data teams will be governed by ROI & metrics, (iii) the modern data-stack will start consolidating, (iv) modern data stack companies will build on-premise connectors starting with SAP and Oracle.
Snowflake and Databricks are optimising their platform to help their customers reduce their data warehouse bill.
“Dark data, or data that never actually gets used, is a serious problem for data teams. Up to 68% of data goes unused, even though companies are still paying to store it.”
“Companies have so much belief in the power and value of data that data teams haven’t always been required to prove that value. […] In 2023, companies will get more serious about measuring data ROI, and data team metrics will start becoming mainstream.”
Saturday, Mar. 4th: I listened to a Colossus’ podcast episode with Doug Leone who is a partner at Sequoia. - Colossus
When it backs founders or when it recruits investors, Sequoia looks for outliers, for people doing extraordinary things because something happened in their lives which made them extra-driven.
Venture has gone from “a high-margin cottage industry to a lower-margin mainstream business”.
“I actually think that AI is the next platform shift in the same way that mobile was the one before, Internet was the one before, infrastructure, the hardware-software layers that allow the Internet to be overlaid over that.”
To adapt to the new market reality, Sequoia did 3 things: (i) vertical integration to serve founders from pre-seed to public markets, (ii) geographical expansion in Asia and Europe, (iii) leveraging technology to make Sequoia more productive as a firm.
To evaluate the performance of an investor early-on in his journey, you can ask the following questions: “Can they source anything? Do they have the courage to have an opposing point of view when 6 people have another point of view? Are they good human beings? Are they likable to founders? Can they win situations?”
Sunday, Mar. 5th: I listened to a Colossus’ podcast episode with Dan Rose who worked at Amazon and Facebook before becoming a partner at Coatue. - Colossus Venture Capital Anthropology
On launching the Kindle at Amazon. Jeff Bezos forced Steve Kessel who was leading the media business at Amazon to leave his job to focus entirely on building the Kindle with the mission to kill his old business “by building a digital product that's so good that people don't buy physical books anymore.”
The best founders are great at transforming ideas that seem unrealistic into realities. “They have the right to ask for completely unrealistic things of their team and to be stubborn about those things and wait until they get to the answer that they like rather than accepting the compromise that the team insists is necessary in order to deliver the end result.”
“The best founders are able to attract the best people.” They are able to articulate why what they are building is so important to the world and to make this cause resonates with top talents.
To be successful as a visionary, you need (i) to attract the best talents and (ii) to have the credibility of being right over and over (vs. just being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn).
Dan values companies which have the following attributes: (i) network effects, (ii) great products, (iii) perseverance and execution.
Monday, Mar. 6th: I listened to This Week in Startups with Mark Suster who is partner at Upfront. - This Week in Startups
The funding boom between 2020 and 2022 has been the biggest we have ever had in the venture industry in terms of quick acceleration with massive amount of capital coming to the market at undisciplined prices.
Building a startup is always better in a more difficult capital market because (i) it’s easier to attract and retain to talents, (ii) you have less competition, (iii) you can have stronger unit economics (lower CAC, higher margins). “If you can raise capital when other people can’t, you have the opportunity to build a much better business.”
Upfront invests in seed as the first institutional capital with a median first cheque of $3.5m. It skips the series A and the series B but Upfront has an early growth fund for companies being valued between $100m and $500m which have found PMF and in which it invests $10-20m tickets. Upfront does not invest in series A/B because these are the worst stages in which to invest in terms of risk/reward ratio.
Tuesday, Mar. 7th: I listened to a podcast with Michaël Valentin on Tesla’s secret sauce as a manufacturer. - Trendspotting (🇫🇷)
Tech can help the manufacturing sector adapt to the new world reality (climate crisis, geopolitical challenges, etc.).
With Tesla, Elon Musk invented the next stage for the manufacturing sector after the Toyota’s model. Tesla is based on 5 main principles: (i) having an innovative long term vision pushed by the leadership of the company, (ii) moving from an engineering centric culture to a customer centric culture, (iii) being a data-centric organisation to iterate more quickly in your product cycles, (iv) moving towards a more sustainable manufacturing model, (v) changing the way they operate by bringing the startup spirit into manufacturing.
Wednesday, Mar. 8th: Acquired published an amazing deep-dive on French luxury conglomerate LVMH. - Acquired
LVMH has 75 houses including Louis Vuitton, Moet, Hennessy, Veuve Clicquot, Dom Perignon, Tiffany. It has also a distribution arm with Sephora and duty free shops as well as an hospitality business including Cheval Blanc resorts. Bernard Arnault turned $15m in initial capital in 1985 into $200bn as of today.
LVMH has relationships with top celebrities. It co-launched with Rihanna Fenty Beauty. Jay-Z and Beyonce became Tiffany’s new branding ambassadors. “They can be very certain now partnering with a LVMH group brand or group of brands within LVMH that it's not going to hurt their brand value and probably will enhance their brand value.”
Bernard Arnault “had the insight that with scale economies, there were going to be massive profit pools in the luxury industry.”
LVMH is a semi-integrated conglomerate in the sense that houses are run independently but that LVMH has synergies around media buying, real estate or talent retention.
Marketing is not involved in product creation. You have a creative person who generates ideas and transform them into realities. The marketing department is only involved when the product is ready to be distributed and should be perceived as desirable.
LVMH brought “professionalisation of business management within luxury”, the idea that creative people could be integrated into an organisation with massive scale objectives.
Thursday, Mar. 9th: Hunterwalk wrote about cold emails arguing that a good cold email is always better than a weak warm intro. - Hunterwalk
Reaching to somebody with a weak warm intro is like supplying a bad reference to somebody who wants to hire you.
“What would I prefer instead? Send me a great cold email. One which tells me why you’re reaching out, directs my attention to something, and suggests what you’d like as a next step. Provide proof, rather than claims (show me code, a blog post, a deck). And don’t start off by apologizing for sending me a cold email. I’ve funded companies off of cold emails. I’ve taken coffees off of cold emails. I’ve sent (hopefully) thoughtful replies to cold emails. There’s nothing wrong with a solid cold email.”
Friday, Mar. 10th: Zeeza Cole at Bain Capital and Taylor Brandt wrote about vSaaS. - Bain Capital Ventures
They believe there is a strong momentum for vSaaS founders for the following reasons: (i) more millennial buyers, (ii) cloud, mobile and API products have become mainstream, (iii) industry data is becoming available (e.g. Axle in the trucking industry or Agave in the construction industry) and (iv) digitalisation coming at a faster pace driven by covid & regulations.
There is a depth vs. breadth dilemma for vSaaS. “Many early Vertical SaaS winners expanded horizontally to extend their addressable markets – while this enabled them to become a comprehensive tool for their end users it increased the chances that some processes could be underserved.”
Saturday, Mar. 11th: Chartmogul published a report on retention for SaaS businesses. - Chartmogul
“Companies with best-in-class retention grow at least 1.5-3x faster than their peers. On average, SaaS businesses with a net retention rate of over 100% grow 43.6% per annum. In comparison, businesses with a net retention rate of less than 60% grow at just 13.1% per annum”
“More than half of SaaS businesses had lower retention rates in 2022 when compared to 2021. This is in sharp contrast to 2021 during which we saw almost 70% of businesses having a higher retention rate vs. 2020.”
Sunday, Mar. 12th: I discovered a post from Elad Gil on entrepreneurship arguing that launching a startup as a founder is an act of desperation.
Elad breaks down deperate reasons into several categories: (i) career desperation (jumping a few steps ahead in your career), (ii) financial desperation, (iii) product/mission desperation (I want this product to exist, I want to pursue this mission that nobody is pursuing), (iv) desperation to make a dent into the universe, (v) revenge founders (e.g. Parker Conrad at Rippling or Travis Kalanick at Cloud Kitchens).
“One of the reasons you rarely see a MAMAA (Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) VP or above start a company is the lack of desperation.”
“If you do not have either form of desperation, a startup may become a vanity project, or lack the Darwinian function to force it into a useful for some customer. The last few years have seen desperation flee the startup ecosystem due to easy money, low perceived risk, and lots of secondary opportunities. As the macro environment changes, desperation is back rearing its ugly head, and causing great people to desperately accomplish great things again.”
Monday, Mar. 13th: Thomas Robb at Breaking SaaS interviewed Mike Brown from Bowery Capital to talk about vSaaS. - Breaking SaaS
“Bowery is excited about investing in software companies targeting ‘offline’ industries that are going ‘online’. Think mom and pop industries where the potential of switching to mobile unlocks significant value (i.e., in-field service professionals going from phones to mobile apps). We often see this shift being sparked by outside factors like generational ownership changes or supply chain issues (e.g., SMBs experimenting with new marketplaces to source supplies during COVID).”
“Founder-market fit is so important given how deeply a successful vertical SaaS platform needs to integrate with its users’ businesses - we tend to gravitate towards founders who have direct experience in the sectors they are building for as they can understand which features to prioritize and how to build them optimally for their industry use cases.”
Tuesday, Mar. 14th: Tidemark published a case-study on Slice which is a US-based vertical solution for independent pizzerias. - Tidemark
In the US, there are 77k pizzerias (75% of them are independent) generating $47bn in revenues.
Slice helped independent pizza shops to counter-position pizza franchises like Domino’s with an all-in-one solution to manage their businesses (POS, payment processing, website builder, online ordering and marketing services) as well as a DoorDash/Uber-like consumer app to aggregate consumer demand. It had 9m active consumers in the past 12 months.
“Franchise models and larger companies have a natural advantage over independent operators in economies of scale.” Franchises “give you a business in a box and an operating system.” “The probability of success is elevated.”
“There is an opportunity to provide a franchise-like platform—with the economies of scale, the technology, the marketing, the shared services, and the sense of community—but champion the authenticity of the independent brand.” Slice talks about “a reverse franchise model”.
Slice started with online ordering, a website builder and presence management. It was key for independent pizzerias to build and nurture an online presence. It was also a transition away from phone based orders. In 2017, Slice expanded by launching a consumer app to let consumers order from their favourite pizzerias which was a key development to bring more orders, more frequency and higher AOVs to its customers. Slice does not operate a network of drivers as 90% of pizzerias have self-delivery and Slice used third party providers for the remaining pizzerias.
Slice also supports pizzerias in their procurement efforts by pulling its customer base to gain discounts from suppliers. “My vision is to lower the cost of the supplies in a way that is greater than the cost of the software or the cost of doing business with Slice.”
Wednesday, Mar. 15th: US-based accelerator YC decided to shut down its late stage activity and to lay-off 20% of its employees in order to refocus on its core early stage program. I think it’s a smart move for YC to refocus on its main activity as it was a smart one to reduce the number of companies participating into its batches. It will strengthen the YC brand and it will help YC increase the quality of its programs. - YC, Techcrunch
“In recent years, we have also done some late stage investing. But late stage investing turned out to be so different from early stage that we found it to be a distraction from our core mission. So we’re going to decrease the amount of late stage investing we do. Unfortunately, this means we will no longer need some of the roles on the late stage investing team.”
Thursday, Mar. 16th: Jason Lemkin wrote about a healthcare vertical SaaS called Doximity. - SaaStr, Techcrunch
It’s a LinkedIn for healthcare professionals. It’s worth $6.5bn trading at a 12x ARR multiple. It generates $450m in ARR growing at 18% YoY and with a 42% EBITDA margin. 80% of US healthcare professionals are on Doximity.
Doximity has 3 categories of products: (i) marketing solutions for pharma companies and healthcare organisations, (ii) hiring and (iii) telemedicine.
Friday, Mar. 17th: Rippling raised a $500m series E led by Greenoaks at a $11.25bn valuation which is the same valuation as its last round in May 2022. It raised an emergency funding round over the weekend when SVB collapsed in order to have the cash to advance salaries to employees working for its customers. It also shifted its banking partners to process salaries from SVB to JP Morgan with a first transition done in a couple of hours to immediately pay 50k people that could not be paid because of SVB’s failure. - Rippling
“This extraordinary financing would not have been possible but for the fact that Rippling’s business is strong and growing at triple-digit rates.”
“We went from a conversation with Neil at 9:30 a.m. to a signed term sheet 12 hours later. The round closed shortly thereafter on Monday morning, less than three days from start to finish.”
Saturday, Mar. 18th: I read Openview’s report on the state of usage based pricing. - Openview
Openview distinguishes 3 categories of pricing:
No usage based pricing (e.g. Asana): “revenue is almost exclusively generated on a subscription basis. Pricing is tied to user seats, company size, functionality, services, or other factors as opposed to product consumption behavior.”
Largely usage based pricing (e.g. Twilio): “revenue is mostly generated based on a customer’s product consumption or active usage. Customers usually have the choice between a pay-as-you-go option, committed volume plan, or a hybrid of the two.”
Usage based subscription (e.g. Zapier): “revenue is mostly generated on a subscription basis. Subscriptions include some combination of product consumption, functionality, and services. This is often an entry point into usage-based pricing.”
Sunday, Mar. 19th: The Generalist wrote about Kleiner Perkins’ (KP) revival as a venture fund. - Generalist
KP only refocused on early stage investing cutting other investment strategies (growth, biotech, clean-tech, China) and operating with a craft-approach with only 9 full time investors in the team.
KP recruited a team of young partners (Bucky Moore, Annie Case, Everett Randle, and Josh Coyne) working alongside with its two managing partners Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman which ensures the firm’s mid-term longevity.
“Kleiner’s new stewards have emphasized the importance of a hungry, united culture. Sources describe it as collaborative and even familial. Hamid and Fushman are approachable leaders but “compassionately direct” when they need to be.”
“For one thing, Kleiner seems to have set a very high win rate, even when computing against Tier 1 rivals like Sequoia or Benchmark. In 2018, the firm apparently had a 100% win rate over competitors; today, it sits at 90%.”
Monday, Mar. 20th: Duolingo launched a new subscription tier called Duolingo Max integrating GPT-4. AI enables two new learning formats: (i) explain my answer to better understand why you made a mistake and (ii) role-play to simulate real-world conversations. It costs $29.99 per month which is a superior tier to Duolingo Plus which costs $12.99 per month. My gut feeling is that this price point will be too expensive to have a mainstream adoption but it’s super interesting to see mainstream consumer apps integrating the latest achievements in AI. - Duolingo, Techcrunch
Tuesday, Mar. 21st: Stripe raised a $6.5bn series I at a $50bn valuation. It raised from new investors GIC, GS and Temasek as well as existing investors including a16z, Thrive, GC and Founders Fund. As a reminder, Stripe used to be valued at $95bn during the tech boom. Stripe is not raising to fund its operations but to offer liquidity to its early employees who need to pay taxes on their stock options. - Techcrunch, Stripe
“The funds raised will be used to provide liquidity to current and former employees and address employee withholding tax obligations related to equity awards, resulting in the retirement of Stripe shares that will offset the issuance of new shares to Series I investors. Stripe does not need this capital to run its business.”
Wednesday, Mar. 22nd: Facebook announced that it was laying-off 10k more employees (13% of its workforce). It had already laid-off 11k people in Nov. 2022. - NY Times, Facebook
“Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.”
“In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors.”
“Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster.” […] “A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people.”
“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely.” […] “I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person.”
Thursday, Mar. 23rd: Beam raised a $4m seed round led by Accel. It’s a vSol in the construction industry. It’s a fintech helping general contractors get paid and pay their subcontractor. It was launched by Adam Eagle who spent 5y+ at Stripe as a software engineer working on the Stripe Billing and invoicing product. - Techcrunch, Accel
It’s “an easy-to-use billing and compliance platform for mid-market general contractors and subcontractors that enables users to upload relevant documents, and track, send, and receive payments.”
“Every construction project involves the tight choreography of general contractors, subcontractors, structural engineers, architects, and other small businesses, bound by a blueprint and (very loosely) a timeline. Embedded in these relationships are contracts and payments that are complicated to track, and often underwritten by clunky and overpriced legacy software – or worse – pen, paper and physical checks.”
Friday, Mar. 24th: Tomasz Tunguz compared Q1-23 funding rounds data with previous years. The venture market has massively contracted. Series B is the most impacted stage (86% fewer number of rounds in 2023 compared to 2022). Tomasz highlights two main reasons: (i) no clearing prices for series B, (ii) companies that raised a series A in the last 18 months have a lot of cash and will not rush to raise capital. - Tomasz Tunguz
Saturday, Mar. 25th: Boris Golden at Partech wrote about the importance for both founders and investors to seek friction/tension during the fundraising process. - Boris Golden
“It's actually a must for both founders and investors to experience moments of friction/tension together in the course of their discussions, before committing to a long-term relationship.”
“If these moments of tension/stress don't happen organically during the discussions, founders and investors alike should probably seek a way to make them happen before making an irreversible decision (e.g. by focusing on topics where there are some disagreement & digging into them).”
“Those moments of "tension" between founders and investors can occur quite naturally during a fundraising process since, by design, there is typically some misalignment of interests on some key deal parameters (valuation, terms, syndication & allocation of capital to different investors, governance, etc).”
Sunday, Mar. 26th: The Financial Times wrote about France replacing the UK on the world stage. - FT
“Probably because Paris and London were both imperial capitals, they are western Europe’s only two global metropoles. That makes Paris the potential alternative to London. It’s now eating into London’s big lead in banking and tech.”
The UK is suffering from Brexit: (i) Europeans need a visa to start working in the UK, (ii) UK-based financial firms can no longer service European customers without an EU-based branch, (iii) the US can no longer rely on the UK to talk with the European Union.
Monday, Mar. 27th: Battery published its state of cloud software spending. - Battery
To reduce IT spending, companies will primarily (i) optimise SaaS licensing and (ii) consolidate the number of vendors they use.
Cloud infrastructure, data warehouse and enterprise security are the most important priorities in terms of IT spending.
Tuesday, Mar. 28th: Bill Gates wrote about AI arguing that generative AI is a technological breakthrough that is as big as the invention of the graphical user interface which powered Microsoft’s success. - Bill Gates
“The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.”
“Any new technology that’s so disruptive is bound to make people uneasy, and that’s certainly true with artificial intelligence. I understand why—it raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more.”
“I think back to the early days of the personal computing revolution, when the software industry was so small that most of us could fit onstage at a conference. Today it is a global industry. […] Soon the pre-AI period will seem as distant as the days when using a computer meant typing at a C:> prompt rather than tapping on a screen.”
“As computing power gets cheaper, GPT’s ability to express ideas will increasingly be like having a white-collar worker available to help you with various tasks. Microsoft describes this as having a co-pilot. Fully incorporated into products like Office, AI will enhance your work—for example by helping with writing emails and managing your inbox.”
“Advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent. Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.”
“I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn. It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged. It will measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback.”
“One big open question is whether we’ll need many of these specialized AIs for different uses—one for education, say, and another for office productivity—or whether it will be possible to develop an artificial general intelligence that can learn any task. There will be immense competition on both approaches.”
“I’m lucky to have been involved with the PC revolution and the Internet revolution. I’m just as excited about this moment. This new technology can help people everywhere improve their lives.”
Wednesday, Mar. 29th: Albert Wenger at USV wrote about AI. - Continuations
“Much of my writing […] is also based on the insight that much of what humans do is a type of computation and hence computers will eventually do it better than humans. Despite that there will still be many situations where we want a human instead exactly because they are a human.”
“So where do I think we are? At a place where for fields where language and/or two dimensional images let you build a good model, AI is rapidly performing at a level that exceeds that of many humans. That’s because the structure it uncovers from the language is the model.”
“I believe we are now at the threshold to artificial general intelligence. Artificial domain specific intelligence will be outperforming humans in a great many fields, especially ones that do not require manipulating the world with that other magic piece of equipment we have: hands with opposable thumbs.”
Thursday, Mar. 30th: Hindenburg Research published a short-seller paper on Block arguing that Cash App, a Block subsidiary, is massively overestimating its number of users and is monetising mainly on interchange fees that are at massive risk to be capped in the coming years. - Hindenburg Research
“Our 2-year investigation has concluded that Block has systematically taken advantage of the demographics it claims to be helping. The “magic” behind Block’s business has not been disruptive innovation, but rather the company’s willingness to facilitate fraud against consumers and the government, avoid regulation, dress up predatory loans and fees as revolutionary technology, and mislead investors with inflated metrics.”
“Our research indicates, however, that Block has wildly overstated its genuine user counts and has understated its customer acquisition costs. Former employees estimated that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud, or were additional accounts tied to a single individual.”
“Former employees described how Cash App suppressed internal concerns and ignored user pleas for help as criminal activity and fraud ran rampant on its platform. This appeared to be an effort to grow Cash App’s user base by strategically disregarding Anti Money Laundering (AML) rules.”
“Congress passed a law that legally caps “interchange fees” charged by large banks that have over $10 billion in assets. Despite having $31 billion in assets, Block avoids these regulations by routing payments through a small bank and gouging merchants with elevated fees.”
Friday, Mar. 31st: I listened to a Tech 45’s podcast episode with Clément Delpirou who is IAD’s president. IAD is a French unicorn in the real estate sector reinventing real estate brokerage with a multi-level marketing model. - Tech45
IAD is the 1st digital real-estate network in France and Europe by number of transactions. IAD was founded in 2008 in a French department close to Paris called Seine et Marne in which IAD has reached a market share of over 20%. In Jun. 21 when it closed its fiscal year, IAD had generated €450m in sales, had 13k real estate agents and a 5% market share. IAD takes a 4.1% take rate on transactions (vs. 5-6% on average) and has a €200k average transaction price. IAD not only operates in big cities but also in certain geographies that have been abandoned by its competitors.
IAD created a category in real estate called “mandataires sociaux” based on a network of independents operating without a physical location. This category had a 3% market share in 2010 and reaches 20% today (vs. 30% for non intermediated transactions).
IAD is based on 3 intuitions: (i) traditional real estate agencies with physical locations are no longer necessary for all transactions, (ii) entrepreneurs/independents are best suited to handle all human interactions involved in a real estate transaction (e.g. taking a call on the weekend, organising a visit beyond working hours), (iii) counter positioning existing models enables IAD to generate additional value that can be redistributed to its agents, end consumer and IAD.
Clément started his career in the tech sector working in a web agency building websites for top French companies during the dot.com bubble. He left to manage Infopro’s digital business (online B2B media, SaaS, platform for B2B lead generation) before joining Altice to manage the digital transition of two famous French newspaper brands called Libération et L’Express.
15% of IAD’s independents are former IAD customers. Only 15% of IAD’s independents come from the real estate sector. Others are making a career shift by joining IAD and they’re being trained by IAD in person, remotely and via mentoring from other IAD’s members. Anyone can join IAD’s network (no pre-qualification required and no interviews). 58% of IAD’s members are women.
Thanks to Julia for the feedback! 🦒 Thanks for reading! See you next week for another issue! 👋
📖 Venture Chronicles - March 2023
Absolute treasure trove of articles!! I always look forward to your monthly roundups. Thanks a lot for consistently putting these out, Alexandre! Cheers.