How’s your 2021 going?
While celebrating carnival, our Brazil team got in an interview with the brilliant Lisa Worcman, Partner at law firm Mattos Filho, on how they’re innovating and how they serve tech clients (see an insightful snippet below and the full interview here). In other news, we talk non-ironically about Clubhouse (not on Clubhouse), flying taxis and fashion that doesn’t exist.
Até Breve,
Rob & the Founders Intelligence Team
🗞 What's grabbed our attention this month 🗞
Brought to you by Ezra Konvitz & Daniella Loftus and Hendrik Jandel
NFT / WTF? – Cryptoartist Beeple recently sold a piece of NFT art (that’s short for ‘non-fungible token’ that links to a unique digital asset) for $6.6 million and is about to have his work sold at Christie’s. Meanwhile, band Kings of Leon announced they’ll be releasing their latest album within an NFT format and a drop of NFT sneakers (buy a virtual pair and they give you a real pair for free!) brought in $3.1 million in under 7 minutes. And somehow it makes perfect sense that bitcoin millionaires are collecting / investing in digital patronage and virtual showing-off.
So what? NFTs are hailed as providing creators a way to give their digital creations scarcity and for artists to get an ongoing chunk of change every time their work changes hands (which is nice even if those transactions are likely to ebb and flow with price of BTC). If this business model enables digital art to finally thrive, we could witness a new creative movement - and it just might speak the language of newly-minted millionaires who haven’t yet clicked with the traditional art world. The downside? Putting the nail in the coffin of cultural criticism in favour of pure market validation (aka ‘democratization’) and the ignominy of being a market-leading money laundering facility.
Come fly with me – Air taxi unicorn Lilium announced a partnership with Ferrovial to build 10+ electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) taxi airports (‘vertiports’, my dear) in Florida. Lilium’s wants to have hubs in cities around the world by 2025, adding to a network that includes regional airports. Meanwhile, Hyundai is partnering with start-up Urban-Air Port to build Britain’s first flying ‘car’ airport and Uber added $75m to its existing $50m investment into Joby Aviation to create a seamless service launching in 2023 (Joby bought Uber Elevate in December). Think that’s cool? Check out the just announced Airspeeder Mk3 - the first ready-to-race eVTOL, with F1-rivalling ambitions that could further accelerate (hoho) both the industry and its visibility.
So what? Corporate / start-up partnerships are a powerful way to tackle new landscapes where technology, regulation and infrastructure are core to success - the mobility space is leading the charge (LOL) with AVs and in the eVTOLs, but we also see this in energy, media and healthcare, to name a few. Creating win-wins that drive (we’re hilarious!) innovations means scanning for disruptive shifts before they happen, starting conversations early with key elements in the ecosystem and cutting across your own silos to develop and enable your USP for the brave new world.
SPACs for everyone – European venture firm Lakestar IPO’d their very own Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) in Frankfurt: if you’re a European SaaS, FinTech, Health Tech, Deep Tech or Logistics scaleup with a chunky valuation you might get a phone call in the coming months (we’re also accepting bets now). While only three other European SPACs launched last year, the US saw 248 in 2020 alone. Many European entrepreneurs, like HelloFresh founder Dominik Richter, prefer to launch their SPACs in the US, and European successes like Darktrace and Babylon might be acquired by US SPACs.
So what? SPACs are dramatically changing the game for late-stage ventures, providing great exit opportunities for growth investors and more liquidity for scaleups - and could potentially become an interesting scenario for less-strategic corporate ventures (as well as a handy way for corporates to participate in late-stage investments). Great news for the European ecosystem that notoriously lacks growth capital. But there’s a good chance European success stories will go public in the US, with Europe missing out on the upside. The solution? Regulatory changes (e.g. removing stock suspension rules in the UK) and more Lakestar-style vehicles listing in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London please.
A face for radio – First Elon, then Kanye, and now Putin? If one thing’s clear, the Clubhouse craze is here to stay as plans for monetisation take shape with a pilot group of 40 influencers. The app’s spontaneity, authenticity and two-way engagement is catching widespread attention (too much so for Chinese censors) - plus it’s ephemeral, you don’t have to look good, and no one cares about spelling. While social audio is coming in hot, the VC world is embracing the ‘creator economy’ with startups like Stir reaching $100m valuation to help video and audio creators alike to streamline their income.
So what? Getting the incentives right for great content creators will be key for Clubhouse to justify Andreesen Horowitz’s cheques and not going the way of Vine. Real-time conversations are hard to structure and moderate, but freedom and access are what makes these platforms compelling. Until NLP moderation gets its game together, corporates might be shy to bring their voice to the table - we say: “know thy customer and speak to them where they are, and about things they care about”. Forward-thinking marketing organisations should be considering how they can bring their brands to life through sponsored conversations that engage purpose-driven groups. Oh, and auto-tune is going places - don’t miss a beat!
Emperor’s new clothes? Digital-only fashion is moving from the metaverse - where in-game skins are estimated to rack up $40B annually - onto your skin(s). You can now buy clothes, at a fraction of the price, to wear in a single photo - really putting the idea of Price Per Wear into perspective. Last week Buffalo London launched a collaboration with virtual-only e-comm provider Dress-X, and fashion game Drest saw the launch of their first ever digital-only fashion brand Auroboros (from Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande foundation).
So what? The fashion industry is notorious for inefficient production, with an estimated $50B lost in deadstock annually. Meanwhile, the $4.5B influencer market has come to determine what’s hot and what’s not. By leveraging digital fashion, brands can reverse engineer efficient production (a la Cherrypicker) using likes to predict demand for real clothes with less material wastage. And if a buyer is prepared to vote with their dollars as well, a la Whale Shark (who dropped 22ETH ($27,000) on some virtual shoes through RTFKD) all the better.
Are you interested in learning more about virtual fashion? Check out Dani’s newsletter This outfit does not exist to know what (not) to wear on your next Instagram posts.
📸Please meet Lisa Worcman📸
We’re working with some very clever people driving innovation at leading corporates - and we’re talking with them about the good, the bad and the ugly. This month, our team in Brazil caught up with Lisa Worcman, Partner at Brazilian law firm Mattos Filho.
Lisa started off as a tax attorney in a leading law firm working for US media conglomerates before becoming an entrepreneur building a career as independent external counsel. A year and a half ago, she joined Mattos Filho as a Partner after discovering the office has ambitions to build a differentiated legal firm. Lisa is an active member of the firm’s Tech Committee, with a mandate to serve and grow clients in the technology sector. Here’s a snippet of our interview with her and you can see the full interview here.
How do you set up to deliver legal services for tech clients?
We are constantly thinking about how to address these emerging needs with new skills and perspectives, aiming to have generalists alongside specialists in the firm, not just legal experts. An area we are excited about is visual law, which stretches across new ways of communicating our work with methodologies like design thinking.
Tech clients also seek legal advice that is powered by digital tools. To that end, we have an internal innovation team that is constantly scanning regional and international technologies to integrate into our workflows, including lawyer staffing systems and intelligence-gathering platforms we can leverage in M&A due diligence processes, among others.
Could you share a bit more about your tech client portfolio, including International clients?
Given our relatively young age as a firm (28 years old), we see every interaction with our clients as an opportunity to grow with them and continue to build in new layers of collaboration. For instance, we have recently started to “invest hours” with entrepreneurs, supporting early-stage ventures’ commercial goals by giving them strategic legal advice.
We have been lucky to support multiple international tech players with their “land and expand” strategy in Brazil. However, our client portfolio is remarkably diverse, from start-ups to unicorns and big techs, and across (virtually) every industry.
Brazil is a complex country to do business in. For example, tax is a sensitive matter that requires expert guidance. Depending on the description of a business activity, remittance costs may go from 40% to 0%, so having the right legal structure can yield huge economic gains (or losses). Understanding what different technologies do for purposes of IP registration is also important to avoid incurring unnecessary tax costs.
Tell us a bit about Mattos Filho’s Tech Committee and the impact it has had on your positioning?
The Tech Committee was formed 3 years ago to look outwards and understand how to better serve tech clients in Brazil and Internationally. This is important because tech clients have different expectations in terms of efficiency and communication, and a completely different risk-profile. We need to be set up internally to deliver against these new expectations and to continuously learn from their incredibly dynamic growth paths.
In the past, lawyers were afraid that technology would compromise job security. Now the industry sees technology as an asset and enabler that can enhance delivery capacity and service quality.
It is increasingly harder to separate the lines between tech and non-tech businesses, as traditional industries are now having to make the leap. On behalf of the firm, we aim to be the bridge with this ecosystem, helping translate and disseminate developments in monthly meetings across the firm.
Thank you, Lisa!
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!