In this post, Giovanni from Specter, and I take a closer look at the M&A activity in the European manufacturing industry in the past five years. The motivation for writing this post came from the following two questions we wanted to answer: How many software acquisitions have manufacturers done in…

In early September this year, 500+ shipping professionals met online at the Digital Container Summit organized by our portfolio company Container xChange, a marketplace for shipping containers. Over the last few years, Container xChange has also fostered a community of shipping professionals. According to First Round’s State of Startup survey…

At P9, we believe that our community plays a crucial part in our aspiration to be the partner of choice for tech startup founders in the world. …

Since I started looking more closely at the manufacturing industry a couple of years ago, there has been a huge increase in the number of startups that try to solve problems in this industry. More precisely, I have added more than 350+ startups to my Industry 4.0 …

The unexpected nature of Covid-19 has unveiled that many companies are not well prepared for disruptions among their supply chain and are re-evaluating how to procure materials going forward. …

How to succeed at very hard things and what we can learn from athletes In the last few weeks, there have been countless tweets about the Last Dance — the Netflix documentary about Michael Jordan — in my (too biased) Twitter feed. Many people get quickly excited about people…

Why we need more collaboration between our fragmented tech-ecosystems. — Countless articles and studies have been written about the power of regional clusters and tech hubs, where many of them cite Silicon Valley as the leading and most successful example. I think attempts to “copy” the Valley have been met with limited success in the past because it is about…

A framework to communicate your early enterprise traction to investors. — At Point Nine, we see a lot of startups every year that just closed their first large customers and therefore want to understand in detail how valuable the early traction is, hence if their pilots, prospects or the like are ready to buy. My colleague Christoph summarized in this…

At Point Nine, we’ve been very enthusiastic about B2B marketplaces for quite some time now — to the point that we organized a conference exclusively focused on this topic and published a “map” that showcases all major European B2B marketplaces that we could find. …