Demo Your Startup Product At ATS London; The Memes & Themes Venture Nonsense; Sustainability, A Buyer Requisite
Come Demo Your Startup Product At ATS London
FPC is teaming up with ATS London this year to host its Innovation Alley segment on June 13 and 14 at Central Hall, Westminster.
The idea behind Innovation Alley is to allow ad tech and martech startups to showcase their products to 600+ decision-making attending ATS London.
The industry as a whole is in an innovation cycle, and ATS London wants to help promote startups that are building the latest innovation in MadTech.
Innovation Alley is open to all startups, not just the FirstPartyCapital portfolio. FPC is all about a rising ad tech tide and all that (cc MadTechMoney as an example of that).
The criteria for signing up to Innovation Alley is fairly simple:
Only companies at pre-seed or seed stage qualify.
Company must have raised less than £2 million (some flexibility is available on this).
Company must be less than 3 years old.
Companies must have a demonstrable product for the alley (MVP — Minimum Viable Product — are allowable).
To get more information on participating, fill out the form listed below:
https://zfrmz.com/lq31jbvk0GzDMLa1HfQl
The Problem With Chasing Themes & Memes In Venture
FPC, like most people in the industry, uses the LinkedIn feed as a news aggregator. Sometimes it’s good.
Most of the time it is an awful experience: a bloated mess of derivative industry groupthink, social soapboxing and irrelevant B2B advertising for random workflow SaaS companies.
The wonders of ChatGPT and the transformational power of generative AI is clogging up most news feeds (LinkedIn et al).
All this has been fuelled by a gold rush in VC, as everyone looks to stake a claim during this AI hype cycle.
Most big VC funds have had to contend with some ugly write-downs, as sanity returns to an economy that gorged itself on free money. New money has been difficult to come by as LPs look for safer confines - and better returns.
AI is the perfect bullshit narrative to get SWFs (sovereign wealth funds), pension funds and Deep Purple drummer family offices to put their cash to work.
What we have here is a classic meme and theme investment strategy. We had crypto. It was a spectacular failure. Now we have AI.
FPC takes a very different view of the sheeple strategies employed by our peers. It’s too easy to get carried away with the constant media bleating. As Chuck D says, don’t believe the hype.
FPC invests in what it knows best: brilliant MadTech startups that disrupt, solve big problems, and scale in a $5 trillion dollar market.
Sometimes it pays to be a vertical and sector specialist.
You see, readers, AI and ML have been around for many many years. Every company in our portfolio is using the aforementioned in some capacity to build products.
Our advice to investors: always be wary of the theme and meme crowd.
Sustainability, Now An Absolute Requisite For Buyers
FPC was never really sure what Brian O’Kelley was trying to do with Scope 3. This is the man, after all, that was instrumental in building modern ad tech (from ad exchange to programmatic).
A green auditing tool was a confusing departure for BOK… that is, right up until this week.
In the ultimate ad tech power play, Scope3 introduced a new product, Climate Shield - enabling buyers to block impressions from websites that have a high carbon footprint.
And how do you know you have a high carbon footprint and fix your emission issues? Yes, you guessed it, Scope 3. The TAM just exploded for Scope3. Think IAS and DV for sustainability, and you get a sense of how big it could be.
We do see others moving into this market segment. One of them being our own portfolio company, Good-Loop, which collates data on other key areas like DE&I. It is an important space for buyers - and, as a consequence, ad tech.
You can hear Good-Loop CEO, Amy Williams. talking about sustainability on the NDA podcast this week with Justin Pearse and Andy Oakes using the link below:
And on that note, readers, we will bid you a good weekend.