🚀 2024 Wrap-Up Bulletin: What we learned this year
Founders Factory Startup Bulletin #46
This is the Startup Bulletin—written for founders, by founders. Each month we bring you a round-up of startup and investment stories, key learnings from founders, and insights from the Founders Factory team.
Welcome to the 2,259 new subscribers who joined us in 2024! Help us grow our 19,787-strong community of founders, investors, and startup enthusiasts by sharing this post:
How will 2024 be remembered in tech?
Depending on what you’re reading, this is the year that AI began to fully realise its potential, or rather that it demonstrated the limits of its capabilities. That this was the year that web3 finally reached maturity, or that it merely flagged signs of another crypto bubble.
At Founders Factory, we’ve seen renewed faith that entrepreneurs can address the world’s biggest challenges; and more importantly, that investors are willing to fund this. Breakthrough science and technology will hold the keys to these transformational solutions—solutions that we may not understand or even exist yet.
Given all these, what do the fundamentals of building businesses look like in 2024? We reflect back on some of the best insights we’ve gathered from the best in the industry—future unicorn founders, top VCs, and of course our own operations team—to ask what we’ve learned about venture building in 2024.
Also in today’s Wrap Up Edition newsletter:
Founders Factory: A Year in Numbers
Best of the rest—2024 summaries & 2025 predictions
💡 What we learned about venture building in 2023
…about becoming a founder
Understand your ability to find shortcuts. There are many traits required to become a successful founder—high risk appetite, adaptability, magnetism—but one characteristic is a real indicator of success. “Great entrepreneurs find ways to make systems work in their favour. Faced with roadblocks and limited resources, they discover workarounds to the ‘rules’ or standard way of doing things, allowing them to unlock an unfair advantage wherever and as often as they can.” Read our full guide to essential founder traits for the other characteristics we look for.
…about raising investment
Keep it simple when speaking to investors. As cool as your product is, investors look for precedent (that it’s feasible, and it's been done before). That’s what DRIFT founder Ben Medland told us: “Everything we’re doing has been done in aggregate, we’re just the first to engineer it all together.”
Timing is everything. Fundraising should be well timed to meet the needs of your business, particularly if that means capitalising on a particular opportunity. TrustedHousesitters’ CEO Mathew Prior shares how their Series A was timed to capture the post-COVID tailwinds the business was experiencing, which had a huge impact on their revenue and membership size.
Investors look for coachable founders. The notion of “strong opinions, loosely held” encapsulates the balance of conviction and coachability that makes a good founder. Investors particularly value this—they want to back founders that they can help, and who are open to their help. When we’re hiring founders, we intentionally pick an area of improvement from a founder’s pitch, to see how they respond to the feedback.
…about building your business model
Take inspiration from other successes. Gauthier van Malderen describes his business Perlego as a “Spotify for textbooks”. And in truth, that’s really where the inspiration came from. He saw a huge problem around the rising cost of academic textbooks, and sought a tried-and-tested solution: platforms like Spotify and Netflix. “Not only have these widened access to vast volumes of music and film, they’ve made them considerably cheaper.”
Ask yourself: can you survive without consumer spend? Scan.com founder Charlie Bullock shared one of the best pieces of advice he ever received, which came from Treatwell founder Lopo Champalimaud. “He asked us to consider a business model with zero consumer spend. Essentially, if we cut off all marketing channels, our business would still survive.” That guided Scan.com towards a B2B2C model where, instead of going for consumers, they’ve targeted clinicians and insurers, bringing in swathes of customers without any need for consumer advertising
…about strengthening your network
Remember the four Cs. Namely—Customer, Colleague, Cash, Coaching. “Any time you are interacting with someone, you should be quickly trying to figure out which one of these four categories that person fits into, and saying that to them as quickly as possible,” explains DRIFT’s Ben Medland.
…on making big decisions
Be wary of the sunk cost fallacy. Whether you’re hiring, expanding internationally, or changing business models, big decisions need to be made quickly. But they also need to be evaluated quickly. “There’s a fallacy about sunk costs, where you can overemphasise the time you’ve already put in. But in general, I don't think we’ve ever regretted cutting something too soon–the biggest regrets come from cutting too late,” explains Scan’s Charlie Bullock
…on building impact
Impact doesn’t mean bad returns. Impact venture is often misunderstood. The way we define it: “An impact venture is defined by a business model where impact is correlated with, and driven by, commercial success. A good litmus test that we use is—if you remove the impact, you remove the business, and vice versa.”
💥 Founders Factory: A year in numbers
48 investments made this year through our Accelerator programmes—including 8 startups spun out of our Venture Studio
$1.1 billion, our all-time global fundraising total—including notable fundraises this year from Storyblok ($80M), Perlego ($20M), and Tembo ($18M)
#4, our place in the Financial Times’ European Startup Hubs ranking
4 new partners joined—Rio Tinto, the Government of Western Australia, Vonovia, and Enterprise Singapore
2 exits—Landvault, acquired by Infinite Reality for $450M; and Versed AI, acquired by Exiger
📚 Best of the rest: 2024 summaries & 2025 predictions
State of European Tech 2024 (Atomico)
AI eats the world (Benedict Evans)
Big Ideas in Tech for 2025 (a16z)
That’s it for 2024! See you next year 👋
Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.