The five factors of longevity for founders

Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
July 30, 2024 • Read time: 3 minutes

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Remember Wiz? The 4-year-old Isreali cybersecurity startup turned down a $23bn acquisition offer from Alphabet, opting for an IPO instead. Concerns over antitrust issues (Google failed to acquire Hubspot for similar concerns recently) and the recent Crowdstrike incident influenced their decision. This move echoes Yahoo’s rejected $44bn offer from Microsoft in 2008 and Facebook rejecting Yahoo’s $1bn offer in 2006. Time will tell if this was a brilliant move like Facebook's or a missed opportunity like Yahoo's. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Revolut gets banking licence in the UK

Fintech star Revolut has received approval for UK banking operations. The received “Authorisation with Restrictions” will allow the company to build out its UK banking operations before an official launch. The approval is a major step forward in the firm’s 3-year old fight with regulators. Its application had been delayed by concerns of regulatory breaches and reputational damages due to its reportedly overly aggressive working culture (average employee tenure is 0.8 years). The company currently has 9 million customers in the UK alone and some 45 million globally and the approval will allow it to hold £50’000 in deposits per customer.

Legal Tech: Bubble or promise?

It was one of the last bastions to be disrupted by digitisation: the legal industry. Enter Gen-AI: now you may indeed enable one lawyer with AI to do the work of five lawyers without it. Startups and VCs have taken note. Harvey, a US company providing AI assistants for legal teams, now closed its $100m Series C at a $1.5bn valuation. This is being 2.5 years old and an estimated ARR of $10m - $20m. This is in stark contrast to Clio, a case management software provider which has been around for 16 years and doubled its ARR to $200m in the last two years alone. Just last year it announced an AI assistant product, though. Investors clearly love the AI-native players. Eventually, investor valuations are about the future. Will Legal tech deliver on its promise?

A world of memes

Food for thought

Is Europe out?

Number of European startups raising pre-seed funding:

2019: 12’300
2023: 2'500