sutton020

It's that time of the year – you're looking back to the old year and you're reviewing your plans for the new one. The last year was very busy for me, both privately and professionally. I became a dad for the third time, and I teamed up with Team Europe to create Point Nine Capital . Two startups, so to speak. It's also a good time to take a look at my angel investments because from now on I'm going to make all new investments via Point Nine Capital. Last year I wrote a series of small portfolio review postings. This time I'd like to post some aggregated (vanity?) stats about my investment activity in 2011: I've made 14 new investments in 2011, which brings the total number to 28 The new investments are: Lieferheld and Delivery Hero , Server Density , Fundly , Westwing , Shiftplanning , FinanceaCar , Vend , ChicChickClub , Unbounce , Cibando and 3 investments which haven't been announced yet   Out of these, 10 were co-investments with Team Europe / P...

Our last investment in the old year is a novelty for us – our first investment in a startup from Italy. Founded by 23 year old entrepreneur Guk Kim, Cibando operates a popular iPhone app that makes it easy to find the best restaurants in Rome, Milan, Florence and other Italian cities. What makes this significant (beyond its obvious significance for Cibando and for us) is that this is one of only a very small number of VC investments in Italy. So significant, at least, that the news got covered by TechCrunch and also made it to the online frontpage of Corriere della Sera , one of Italy's oldest and most reputable daily newspapers! To say that Italy's early-stage funding ecosystem is underdeveloped is probably an understatement, at least that's what I've heard in the last few months. Not that it's that great in Germany, although with the rise of Berlin as Europe's new tech hub it's hopefully getting better. But in Italy it seems to be much worse – so bad th...