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August 30, 2006
Kelbook: The Inside Story Of Kelkoo
We've just finished reading a book about how Kelkoo's management and backers created the European online shopping comparison company that was acquired in early 2004 by Yahoo for €475M.
Entitled Ils Ont Reussi Leur Start-Up: Le success story de kelkoo! , also known as Kelbook, it was written by Julien Codorniou and Cyrille de Lasteyrie, a Microsoft executive in France responsible for the software giants' relationships with venture backed companies in Europe, and a journalist, respectively.
It is the story of the deal that pretty much started off this cycle of venture capital investing in Europe and worth reading (if you read French). It entertainingly imparts a lot of lessons, ones that are more able to be emulated than some of the tech venture success stories that emerged during the bubble, without being dry and educational.
Structured as a timeline, the authors document the formation, the launch, the switch in business models, the near misses, the conversations, the penny-pinching, the bravado, and the deals made by Kelkoo's management, headed by Pierre Chappaz, and a host of supporters, on their way to creating a quick growing, profitable Internet company that was worth half a billion dollars.
The story climaxes with a dual track exit strategy and a showdown between Chappaz and Yahoo's top brass. It is worth buying for that chapter alone.
Although the Kelkoo deal was not the largest exit valuation to take place in Europe in recent times, nor did it deliver its VC backers their biggest return ever -- they quintupled their money -- the book is useful also as a source of insight into on some of the personalities active in the Internet and technology venture scene in Europe today: people like Chappaz, who was Kelkoo's CEO, and is today the Co-CEO of Netvibes (the personalized homepage company backed by Index Ventures and Accel), and Wikio (a news and blog aggregator with a user rating engine).
Or Dominique Vidal, who actually was working for one of Kelkoo's two principal venture capital backers, Banexi Ventures, and was then hired away by Chappaz to work for him at Kelkoo. Vidal now heads up Yahoo Europe.
Besides these two and a host of others, there are the three Bull engineers behind Kelkoo's core shopping engine that are also part of the story, and have gone on to new things, namely Maurizio Lopez, who had been heading up Bull's R&D unit and is now travelling, Remy Amouroux, now a chief software architect at Yahoo, and Christophe Odin, who now heads up Kapirsk, a business angel investment vehicle.
We're seriously thinking of translating the book, so stay tuned.
Link (Julien Codorniou Blog)
Link (Cyrille de Lasteyrie blog)
Posted on August 30, 2006 09:43 AM | Posted to entrepreneurship | Permalink
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