Ready for a post-pandemic world?
We’re getting there! In the meantime, here’s your inoculation against lockdown boredom: the Founders Intelligence newsletter, now with interviews! 🤯 For this missive, we caught up with our great friend Emily Watt (Head of Innovation at bp Trading & Shipping).
See you soon (I hope 🤞🤞),
Rob & the Founders Intelligence Team
🗞 What's grabbed our attention this month 🗞
Brought to you by Ezra Konvitz & Hendrik Jandel
For next month’s holiday blow out edition, Ezra and Hendrik are predicting what the world will look and feel like in 2021 (spoiler alert: it’s soggy). Got a brainwave / insight? Reach out to us here. But right now…
Feeling fulfilled? – German FMCG challenger SellerX raised a €100m seed round (mainly debt to power acquisitions) with a vision to become a ‘digital Procter & Gamble’. Their business model? Buy up consumer companies that use Fulfilled By Amazon and help them develop and scale their brands by applying scale analytics, processes and production relationships to lower costs and showcase their differentiation. Similar businesses already exist in the UK (Heroes, Perch) and in the US (Thrasio, Heyday).
So what? SellerX belongs to a new breed of start-ups that are in the business of consolidating the multifarious companies that became successful leveraging others’ platforms. Turns out, the future of online consumer goods isn’t just trad D2C - and while it’s not the most creative business model, these indy roll-ups are only going to make it harder for FMCG dinosaurs to get market share online. But the big winner here is - you guessed it - Amazon, who are taking rent on the digital high-street by owning the storefront where all this stuff is sold (and the virtual and physical real estate that hosts it via AWS and FBA).
Here’s hopin’ – Online events platform Hopin raised a $125m Series B round at a mind-boggling valuation of $2.1bn, just 8 months (say what?) after launching. Fuelled by global COVID lockdowns (and a $40m Series A in June that followed a $6.5m ‘seed’ led by Accel in Feb - with no formal pitch deck), the company rocketed to 215 remote-first employees, 3.5m registered users and 50,000 organisations, including folks like NATO and the UN. Who says European businesses can’t scale?
So what? High valuations are often based on a compelling, hungry founder creating wholesale behaviour change (check, check and check). Hopin and its backers bet on a change that was inevitably going to play out over the next 10 years - and then saw it happen in days. Pure luck? Well, they also designed an on-brand, completely remote company before it was cool, giving them the ability to scale aggressively with global talent. The way of the future - or will they move so fast they break themselves?
Trumping fake news – Twitter and Facebook are coming down hard on misinformation in the aftermath of election day, putting warning labels on false or misleading content, shutting down groups and permanently deleting accounts that promote violence. About time. Meanwhile, the New York Times hit a huge milestone, reaching 7 million digital subscribers and, for the first time ever, is making more money from online readers than from print. About time, too.
So what? After an era of unbundling and ‘democratising’ content (aka giving free reign to QAnon conspiracy theories on Facebook) more consumers are looking for high quality content and are willing to pay for it, presenting an opportunity for new platforms designed to proactively counteract the bad vibes: some (e.g. The Factual, Factmata) are using algorithms to gauge truthiness, others like Telepath, a platform in private beta founded by an ex-Quora crew who ‘are intolerant of intolerance’, insist on real IDs, reject ads, and use moderators to stop hate speech. But will any minds be changed?
Hunting European Unicorns – The European venture scene has had a strong year so far and is well on track to exceed the €37bn raised in 2019 – despite, you know, COVID-19 and all. But the virus did make its mark: Pharma & Biotech ventures have attracted much more funding than in previous years (aka where is that vaccine!?), early-stage activity is way down and so are exits.
So what? If you’ve previously scanned the market for interesting ventures in your industry you might want to refresh your views: European startups are coming of age. European industrial tech start-ups are playing a particularly strong game, so if you oversee a complicated supply chain or manufacturing operation you should really be out there looking to work with some of these players (we have a few tips on who’s found product-market fit and has the ability - and scale - to make your life easier).
📸Please meet…Emily Ehrgood Watt📸
We’re working with some very clever people driving innovation at leading corporates - and we’re catching up with them about the good, the bad and the ugly.
About Emily:
Emily is the Head of Innovation for bp’s Trading and Shipping division. Before joining bp this year, she was COO of Deutsche Bank’s Innovation Labs - her leap into innovation was a big career shift following 10 years in more traditional financial services at Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and two hedge funds.
She spent years questioning ‘is there a better way to do this?’, which finally led her to find that what she loves most is finding new and innovative ways of solving commercial challenges through the lens of cutting edge digital solutions.
What recent development in your industry are you most excited about?
This applies to all industries, but the most exciting development when I think about digital innovation is the growing realisation that everything comes back to data.
How can we acquire better data? How can we better integrate data? How can we identify anomalies to make our data is more reliable, accurate and powerful? How can we apply cutting edge analytics to glean better insights and drive augmented decisions?
All paths lead to bottom line impact when we get it right. Better data-driven decision making creates efficiencies by reducing risk and cutting out duplicative processes, and it leads to growth by amalgamating and analysing data in new ways that lead to customer insights and commercial opportunities.
In the oil & gas / energy industry specifically, I’m incredibly excited about the transition to renewable energy – this isn’t happening overnight and there are so many opportunities to drive innovation across both traditional hydrocarbon businesses as well as new low carbon and renewable businesses. I am lucky that I get to work with both sides of this important transition at bp.
What are the biggest challenges you and your team face?
1. The kind of innovation I am trying to drive is not just about improving current systems and processes; more broadly it’s about evolving to keep up in an increasingly digital world. That means we’ll always have to balance between time and resources focused on critical fixes to current systems and processes (i.e. keeping the lights on) vs partnering with or building new solutions.
2. Scepticism of some who prefer to stick to the ways they’ve always done things. That said, we have plenty of partners in the business who are excited about change, new ways of working, and digital adoption. We have more than enough work to tackle and we’ll convert the sceptics overtime by showing real examples of value creation from digital solutions we bring into the organisation.
3. Data – while it’s the most exciting opportunity as mentioned above, it’s also a big challenge. We need to have accurate, reconciled, accessible and reusable data as a starting point and that takes a lot of work. Simply acquiring new data doesn’t always solve the challenge - it’s much more complex than that.
What's an interesting startup you're excited about?
I am really excited about a startup called AlphaSense, an AI powered platform which leverages natural language processing and analyses sentiment from millions of documents and thousands of sources, allowing users to gain better business insights and make strategic data-driven decisions. The potential use cases are quite varied which makes it all the more exciting. I liken it to a super powered Google by finding information faster and more efficiently – pop in a couple key words and you’ve got tons of results with highlighted sections jumping off the page. What’s not to like?
Thank you, Emily!
Disclaimer: All views expressed in this interview are personal.
That’s all, folks. If you enjoyed reading this, why not share the joy with your nearest and dearest & your remote colleagues.
PS: We’re also contributing insights to Founders News, a new personalised tech newsletter with info on your network and lots of this content too hatched out of Founders Forum - subscribe here!