This post first appeared on Lars' Medium ahead of his appearance at Arctic15
See Lars' Medium post here.
As a VC, my job is to meet and analyse interesting companies throughout Europe at speed. Dozens of them, in quick succession.
In this process, I’m trying to answer the question that every venture capitalist is constantly asking themselves: Can this company become a billion-dollar business? Does this company have the potential to generate the kind of returns that WhatsApp did for Sequoia, or that eBay did for Benchmark?
As I consider this question ahead of Arctic 15 (#Arctic15) in Finland, I’ve devised a system based on my experiences over the past 17 years. Over this period, I have worked at many tech companies including Uber and Dropbox, and served as an advisor to game-changers like WhatsApp and Pocket. I joined these companies when they were startups, and have witnessed each grow into businesses that have fundamentally altered industries.
Working at the heart of these businesses has enabled me to boil down the factors of success down to four themes: the team, the product, monetization and timing.
Within each of these themes, I have created a set of questions and observations that enable me to analyse companies in an unbiased and consistent fashion, which I also hope is helpful for entrepreneurs.