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April 26, 2006
Lund Kenner's (Very) Early Stage Pitch
As regular readers know, from time to time the alarm:clock euro profiles early stage ventures. But we also want to cover those who work with and advise seed stage ventures, so today LundKenner is getting the treatment.
Lund Kenner was recently founded by Soren Kenner and Morten Lund, in Copenhagen. The two have put all the ventures they've supported in the past informally into one portfolio and formed a management team around themselves to take it all forward.
The biggest bragging rights the firm has is being an early investor in Skype. Lund invested before the VCs did.
LundKenner is a different animal than that what we're used to seeing coming out of the corporate finance world. And Kenner's description of what's on offer confirms it.
We asked Kenner for a quick overview of some of the more developed startups. Here is what he said:
Aresa is a biotech company that does gene-modified plants that detect landmines. Company just did IPO. We have a good stake. In China, we backed Maxthon [browser made in China] which has had 55 million downloads. Biggest damn browser in China by now. And Bullguard [personal firewall and desktop security software] 16 million downloads. Now also on preload and in retail stores. It's the number 5 brand in small office/home office market in Europe by now.
Can you describe what you offer to entrerpeneurs?
We bring to the table whatever is needed, be it money, people, access, network, distribution. This is the stuff that a venture would normally try and buy with money. We're better at sourcing third party services, so we get better pricing, better quality and usually better traction. Also we have some 40 people doing inhouse branding, web-development, design, and SEO. To my thinking we are doing what any venture-partner should be doing -- which is becoming a true partner with the venture instead of just a passive investor.
LundKenner takes an equity stake in exchange for these services, to pay for the so-called value add. What sort of value does LundKenner add?
What sort of value we add depends on the situation. It can be anything from tweaking the business model, designing the GUI, finding the right connections, doing the back-end integration, finding the CTO, the CEO, the sales force, developing the lead generation model, selling the JV-model to partners etc. No fixed approach. We try and stay loose. So far we seem to be having a very good run with that. Size of equity stake depends on what sort of value we can add.
It looks like LundKenner is out to shake things up a bit and we think that the firm is worth paying attention to for entrepreneurs looking for good advice, and for VCs looking for dealflow.
What the team has yet to prove is that such an advisory investment company can not only contribute to building viable tech businesses, but also achieve an exit that will give them a good return on the time and energy they put into their deals.
Another milestone that we'd look for is some more examples of LundKenner bringing in the big name VCs to portfolio firms at the right time. We know one thing for sure, that Index Ventures, DFJ ePlanet, Bessemer, and Mangrove Capital are well aware of LundKenner.
Read- Description of LundKenner current portfolio firms (LundKenner blog)
Posted on April 26, 2006 06:13 AM | Posted to entrepreneurship | Permalink
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