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October 05, 2007
Impatience Is a Virtue
You hear about VCs being impatient with startup teams, but sometimes it's not a bad thing, at least according to entrepreneur Olav Stokke, CEO of NextGenTel, a broadband startup that was active mainly in Norway.
“... The venture capitalists were very helpful in that they were impatient and eager to following up on our performance very closely. This made us more aware of the quick progress we had to make in order to achieve our growth. To that extent, they contributed to the overall development of the company as the company pushed forward towards success …”
The source for the quote and some of the following insights into the VC contribution to the venture is a new report that EVCA, the industry association that most VCs in Europe and private equity firms belong to, sent us.
NextGenTel was founded in March 2000, and grew to 200 employees. It floated in 2004 in Norway and was acquired in 2006 by TeliaSonera, a telecommunications company in the Nordic and Baltic countries, for around $330M.
One of its VCs, Northzone, exited at the acquisition price which was at a 45% premium on the stock price at the time. (That last item was not in the report we picked it up here(pdf).)
In this case, the VCs were impatient but they also brought in a US VC and let the management team follow their hunch about the market for ADSL, and execute on their conviction that it was important to seal the home market before it considered going international.
The report is meant to get the tech VC community to be a bit more "vocal" about their achievement. It is entitled: The European Venture Capital Market: Scaling Beyond Current Boundaries.
There are a few more nuggets like that one, once you get through the lengthy survey methodology and rationale pages.
We couldn't see it up on their website , but expect it to go up soon. It was released yesterday.
Posted on October 5, 2007 04:32 PM | Posted to Being European | Permalink
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