31–40 of 135 posts
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Doing all the work and taking all the stress only to have the EU remove a chance of growth and exit is a problem that I never want to have. I went through some failed startups, and at least that was our own fault, but still I never want to do that again. I don't know what I'd do in this situation.
Why is "exit" always the goal? Why not go on growing?
To be frank, I am more worried about the fact that they raised $385M from US investors at the seed stage. That speaks volume about how much it really is an EU company. Good luck to EU for retaking control of this ship.
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Part of that is that you're taking a fixed number of companies. So if Europe has more, but smaller companies, the value of the top-40 would be lower than if they had fewer but larger companies. To me the first sounds healthier, everything else being equal.
Also, lots of large European companies are privately held. For example: IKEA, Schwartz group (Kaufland, Lidl), Bosch, Aldi...
US has new upstarts like Tesla and Nvidia, which at their prime, add like 1 IKEA per fortnight to their market cap.
To be frank, I am more worried about the fact that they raised $385M from US investors at the seed stage. That speaks volume about how much it really is an EU company. Good luck to EU for retaking control of this ship.
385M USD is way too much for EU investors. They usually invest 10x-100x less. So the alternative without US investors would be to have no startup of this kind - great job, that will really help EU grow!
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Why is "exit" always the goal? Why not go on growing?
Why is "growing" always the goal? Why not go on sustaining?
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385M USD is way too much for EU investors. They usually invest 10x-100x less. So the alternative without US investors would be to have no startup of this kind - great job, that will really help EU grow!
What makes US investors so uniquely ambitious and generous? I'm starting to appreciate the US financial sector more and more.
The usual EU investor is simply going to buy some real estate instead of participating in VC funds - still great returns, very low risk. The more progressive ones will maybe try some real estate development projects. No need to think about this software thing. The angel investors I met with that had portfolios of 5-20M EUR wanted to invest 20-50K EUR into our startup, definitely not more.
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This move from MSFT is clearly perceived as aggressive from EU given how fragile EU sovereignty in AI is at this point. If EU wants to own its AI future, that’s not a great way of getting started.
I thought EU had money a lot more than €15M (Microsoft investment), actually a lot more than €1.8B (Mistral valuation). Why didn't EU make an offer? If EU wants to own its AI future, it has enough money to buy one. They decided not to.
Love it as a consumer because Mistral is probably not doing any more open weights if they get tangled with Microsoft. But man, as a business owner in EU, this would just make me not want to build an AI startup in EU
Time will be the ultimate judge but Mistral's Co-founder/CEO is still committing to be a leading provider of open weight models [1]: > Clarifying a couple of things since we’re reading creative interpretations of our latest announcements: - We’re still committed to leading open-weight models! We ask for a little patience, 1.5k H100s only got us that far. - We have a reselling agreement with Microsoft, that we’re very…
Love it as a consumer because Mistral is probably not doing any more open weights if they get tangled with Microsoft. But man, as a business owner in EU, this would just make me not want to build an AI startup in EU
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Why is "exit" always the goal? Why not go on growing?
Perhaps the founders want to remain there and grow, perhaps they want to focus on something else or retire. Perhaps the plan always was to sell after X years - I don't see anything wrong about that, still better to innovate&sell than just buy stock&sell IMHO. You can't attract investors if they can't sell in case the investment is successful. This is severely limiting and a terrible situation to be in - especially if…