Here’s what you need to know about what happened last week in the Dutch startup scene. And what’s coming!
News & Updates
Startups from The Netherlands have raised 84.4 million euro in the third quarter of 2016. For the third consecutive quarter the amount rose, however, the number of deals took a drop.
Starting in Cedars in Amsterdam last week, ChillySpaces transforms restaurants into flexible coworking spaces during the day. This way closed restaurants must be a productive and creative workspace for freelancers and entrepreneurs.
UK/Dutch startup Story Terrace announced it has raised £500,000 ($640,000) to continue its mission to tell the stories of those you love. "We are building technology to assist our writers in completing the books," says Dutch founder Rutger Bruining, to Techcrunch. "The bottleneck for us is the design process and we are investing some of the money we raised into automating the process. We want to turn photos and text into a print-ready book."
Around 50.000 companies in the Netherlands secure their revenue mainly via the internet, says Dutch research institute CBS. Web shops (and other online companies) are accounting for 3 percent of all companies in The Netherlands, but are good for 8 percent of the total revenue of 104 billion euro. The research, commissioned by Google, also shows that these online companies secured 345.000 jobs in 2015 – 4,5 percent of the employment total. The amount of web shops grew from 23.000 to 32.000 over the last three years.
Monday Reads
Phusion, a software company that makes Unix solutions for highly demanding server environments, made it to $1,000,000+ in annual recurring revenue (ARR) without taking any VC investments. This article tells the story of how they managed to achieve this goal. (Phusion)
Rob Go, cofounder of NextView Ventures, managed to visualize the period before reaching a strong product/market fit and creating traction into a graph. Imagine a graph with the X-axis being “product quality” and the Y axis being "traction". There is some level of traction that suggests that it’s highly likely that you have strong product/market fit. This is the shape of traction. (Nextview)
Alphabet showed the sweeping breadth of its ambition to own consumers’ personal data last week, presenting new smartphones, routers and cloud services. Computing continues to accelerate away from static desktops into a cloud of connected devices with the potential to generate far more data than ever before. The actual price we pay for this would in fact be zero privacy for everyone, everywhere. Doesn’t sound quite so OK, Google, now does it? (Techcrunch)