Aaaawwww well would you look at that? Our little baby is growing up so fast: exactly one year ago today, we launched tech.eu.
Together with my esteemed co-founders, friends from across Europe, the goal from the outset was to fill a gap that we - and many others - perceived to exist: the lack of a publication dedicated to delivering high-quality, in-depth content about the European tech industry.
We decided to scratch our own itch, and with the backing of a number of angel investors set up tech.eu to become a filter for all the noise and provide a consistently high-level window to the fascinating and rapidly-transforming tech ecosystem(s) in Europe.
Fortunately, we were right about not being the only ones with a desire for more. Our audience has consistently grown from the day we published our first articles, which is great even though traffic and page views have never been important metrics for us in our ongoing quest to put quality first.
The year has flown by, and I figured a tiny bit of reflection wouldn't hurt. We've learned a lot from both our many mistakes and the things we got right, but I daresay we stuck to our original mission and managed to crank out some amazing, unique content over the past twelve months.
Two things we also definitely got right: our newsletter, a veritable labour of love that gets opened and clicked by thousands of people every week, and our calendar of European tech events, an unmissable resource for the EU tech industry already. And there's a lot more stuff in the pipeline.
That means there's also a lot of work ahead of us. It's great to see what we managed to do in just one year with limited resources, but the next few years will really be about doubling down and turning tech.eu into the single best source of information about the European technology industry.
In parallel, we're hammering away at building a solid business on top of tech.eu, and our recently-joined COO and head of partnerships Leen Segers will focus on this relentlessly in the future.
Charmaine Li, a Berlin-based wordsmith who joined us from Venture Village back in February, has proven herself a fantastic writer and editor and we're very happy to have her along for the ride.
From left to right: Jon, Alex, Ivo, Charmaine, myself and Leen.
Missing in action: Adrian and Roxanne.
Charmaine has written some great profiles on European tech companies that should be on your radar (Changers, MUBI, ResearchGate, MySugr, Brainly, Moviepilot, BehavioSec, Kano and plenty more)
And she has quite a knack for drilling down into a given category and surfacing the best Europe has to offer: from art to health to smart energy to fashion e-commerce to photo apps to language-learning to transportation to travel to music and more.
As you can see, the focus for tech.eu isn't on news and being 'first to publish', even though we've broken quite a few stories in the past year (Fab's retreat from Europe, Twitter expanding its ad network, Rocket Internet's financials, Germany's doo rebuffing acquisition interest from Dropbox etc.).
Rather, we strive to deliver analysis, informative interviews with key people and in-depth profiles of needle-shifting European tech companies as well as data-drive reports. A selection:
- tech.eu M&A report for Q1 and Q2 2014 - A look at Europe’s top startup countries: the good, the bad and the ugly - UK startups are hiring – and paying – more as tech scene continues to mature - A comprehensive study on Europe’s most promising tech ‘scale-ups’ - What brings Y Combinator to Europe? We caught up with partner Kirsty Nathoo to find out (video) - A look inside Eyeo, the company behind ad-blocking software phenomenon Adblock Plus - EU app economy share shrinks to 19% in 2014, but continues to grow - What female VCs really think about the tech industry - How big is Zalando? - Startling Stockholm: a tech startup scene that’s rapidly coming of age - A spotlight on the EU startup accelerator ecosystem: quantitative and qualitative analysis - Etc.
And a number of great articles by contributors and our growing network of freelance writers:
- The difference between raising early-stage capital in the US vs. Europe - A peek inside Shazam, and why its endgame is important to all European startups - The rise and future of video-on-demand services in Europe - Bitcoin and Europe: a complicated but promising relationship - OpenStreetMap – What’s next for the ‘Wikipedia of mapping” as it turns 10? - Investments come with investors: 7 ways to exploit your VC - The 7 faces of London’s tech scene - Will Europe dare to be bullish on immigration for entrepreneurs? - Taming a search titan: A deep dive into the Google-EU antitrust pact - Etc.
Again, the bulk of the work lies ahead of us, but I'm happy about and proud of our team for what we've achieved so far, and excited about what comes next. I hope you are too and I want to emphasise that the entire team cares about any feedback you may have for us, now or tomorrow. Bring it on!
And thank you for reading!
