As most of this blog’s readers will know, Robin Wauters is the founder and also founding editor of Tech.eu (as well as co-founder of Syndicate One VC and Be Central Brussels). A few weeks ago he announced that he was stepping down from his role at Tech.eu. For now, we don’t know what he will be focusing on next, but we’re glad we got to chat with him in one of the last recorded interviews before stepping down. Coincidentally, our first-ever episode of Runway, our new podcast in which we talk to experts that can help startup founders and business builders better understand how to grow their companies.
Back in the day (OK, a decade or so ago), European tech was missing something that would show the entire mosaic of all of Europe and truly cover what was happening in the continent in all its geographic extension. That’s why Robin started Tech.eu.
And in a way, why we are also starting Runway. There are so many podcasts talking to startup founders and VCs. And the typical PR agency starts podcasts talking only to journalists, and only to ask about the best ways to pitch. With Runway, we’ll try to break the mould a bit and invite experts from across the business spectrum (sales, marketing, product, PR, journalism, more) to talk about a variety of topics.
We caught up with him just before the Tech.eu Summit in London, the first one in the UK’s capital after the two initial editions in Brussels. As well as talking about Tech.eu, its origins and the summit, we also asked him how he saw the business of media outlets, the impact of AI on a number of topics around European tech and his opinion of the ecosystem.
Check it out!
For those of you looking for specific key words or keen to read the interview instead of listening, here’s a full transcript:
Julija Jegorova: Today we have a very special guest, the man, the myth, the legend, the founder of Tech.eu, Robin Wauters. Robin, thank you so much for joining us.
Robin Wauters: Thank you for having me.
Julija Jegorova: Robin, let’s kick off with the most pressing question that I have. I saw you last year in Bucharest, I saw you a couple of weeks ago in Latvia, and I’ll be seeing you this week in London. So we keep seeing you at a variety of different events. How many events have you been to in the past six months?
Robin Wauters: In the past six months, I could probably count 15 or so, ranging from very small ones in Brussels to having to travel for it. I’m glad you didn’t ask me how many conferences I’ve been to in the last 15 years, because that would be impossible. Hundreds? Thousands?
Julija Jegorova: How do you find this kind of jet-set lifestyle, going to multiple events across different countries? It must be exhausting.
Robin Wauters: If you have my kind of lifestyle, the last thing you would refer to it as is jet-set. I always joke with my friends that they think I travel and go to all these exotic places. Like, it’s just a lot of waiting at airports and a lot of looking for your way around cities and checking into hotels or finding taxis. So it’s not glamorous, I will tell you that. It is incredibly exhausting. I will say that I focus a lot on Europe. So I guess 95% of my travel has been in Europe, which means short flights, no jet lag. So it’s not that bad. And I really enjoy connecting with people, especially in their local startup ecosystems. Because it’s always different. If you talk to founders and investors at a conference in London rather than where they’re based, whether it’s Slovenia or Helsinki, it’s always better to connect with them where they are. So the reason I do it so much is because of that.
Julija Jegorova: How do you choose which events to go to? As you said, there are so many different events, especially in Europe right now. Something is happening probably monthly, and I assume you get invited to pretty much all of them. So how do you cherry-pick which ones to attend?
Robin Wauters: The basic rule is if I have my children that week, I’m not going to travel, or it’s very rare that I travel. So I only travel half of the time. Let’s put it that way. And then I choose based on what is in it for me in the sense that, am I going to learn something? Am I going to meet people that I can learn from? Am I going to learn something about this ecosystem that I don’t know? Have I been to the city or region before? Then there’s the less important things like, is it relevant for Tech.eu? How many interviews can I do? Is it a paid gig? If I dedicate three days of my week for this without being paid, are there other benefits that make it worthwhile, which is often the case? Is it for corporates, which means sometimes you need to do less for compensation? Is it a startup organization that’s a nonprofit? So all of these things are criteria that I take into account to decide where I travel to or where I don’t travel to. And of course, we can fall back on a team. So we can always say, “I can’t make it, but we have an editorial team or someone who can fill in or someone local that we work with who can attend.” So lots of different factors go into these decisions. A lot of moving parts.
Julija Jegorova: Which brings me to the next question about the team and Tech.eu. You have the Tech.eu summit happening in London on the 16th and 17th of May. That’s the first event you guys are doing in London, correct? How did that come about?
Robin Wauters: We did some small events in London, but this is the first time we’re doing a summit. So first of all, let’s take a step back. Eleven years ago when I founded the company, it was founded out of London by the way. So it’s based in the UK even though I’m not, because some of our early investors and co-founders were based there. And I very consciously said, “Let’s not do a big event,” because even at the time, there were things like Pioneers, Web Summit was coming up, Slush was already happening. So we didn’t want to do a big event to compete with those because we thought there’s not that much room for big tech events anymore. This has been covered. Let’s do smaller events, smaller meetups. And we kept that philosophy or that principle for many years until three years ago when we got acquired by Webrazzi, which is a Turkish media holding that is very specialized in doing big events. They’ve been doing this for 16-17 years, especially the Webrazzi Summit in Istanbul. So they very quickly said, “Let’s at least try. Let’s do it in your home base,” which was Brussels. So we did Brussels two years in a row, a one-day event to test the market, test the waters, see if this makes sense if we can attract the kind of content and the sponsors that we would like. There was a resounding success. So now we’re basically scaling it up a bit by going from one to two days and by moving it to London, which no matter how you slice it, is going to be the epicenter of European tech for some time to come.
Mauro Battellini: What guided the decision to move it to London? And also, generally speaking, what is the vision for the Tech.eu summit?
Robin Wauters: So we’ll tackle the first one first, which is the decision that led us to London. As I mentioned, this is where still a lot of stuff happens. There’s a lot of investors, a lot of founders, a lot of international headquarters for companies that are operating globally. So it does make sense to be there just for the sheer community that you have there for the ecosystem. The other reason was that doing it in Belgium was fine for the first two years. But if you want to grow when you want to scale it up – and I’m not talking about doubling the number of attendees or anything like that – but if you want to mature the content and mature the business around the event, then London was just an obvious choice. And they welcomed us with open arms, which was another reason. Brussels didn’t really make enough of an effort to try and keep us, to be honest, which is a whole different story. So that’s the factor that went into this decision.
And then to answer your second question, it has a lot to do with the first one as well. You have to look at the landscape, like which events are already taking place in that region, city, country. Does it make sense for us to go there and do something? Our focus is European tech scale-ups, investments, not very specific to any sector. So we’re not a FinTech event. We’re not a health tech event. We’re quite general in that sense in terms of content. But of course, you need to look at a bit of the trends that are happening. You’re talking about AI, you’re talking about the changes that we have in health tech, stuff like that. So you have to see, what is the landscape? Is there room for another event? And when you look at London, you don’t really have that many startup scale-up investment-focused events. You do have a lot of topical ones, really big ones on things like FinTech or climate tech, etc., or deep tech. But you don’t have that many that sort of encompass everyone. So what we’re trying to do is bring the European tech community and by extension also the global tech community that’s interested in Europe to one place, regardless of the sector that they’re in, the stage that they’re in. It needs to make sense for everyone, which is a hard feat to accomplish. Because when you start building this event, the first question you get is, “What is the theme? What is the focus?” But we just say it’s European tech. That’s what it’s about. And then they ask you, “But what about European tech?” So everything, the whole nine yards: the trends, the sectors, the investments, all of it.
Mauro Battellini: Yeah, interesting. How do you then measure how saturated the landscape is? Right? And if you look at London or the UK in terms of VC funding, it’s always number one [in Europe]. So if you made an invention, a measurement of VC funding to events ratio, and if you look at that, yeah, I guess London definitely doesn’t have enough events.
Robin Wauters: It doesn’t have enough events for that focus. It has a lot of events, obviously. But it’s weird because, France, for example, they have Vivatech. Web Summit happens in Portugal, used to happen in Dublin. Slush, one of the other biggest ones, is in Helsinki. This one, top 30 cities aside from Paris, Viva tech, of course. London is really… they have London Tech Week, there’s the Sifted Summit, there’s a couple of other events. But really, when we looked at the landscape, like April, May, June, it wasn’t really that filled up. So it made sense for us to at least try to build something there.
Mauro Battellini: London doesn’t have Belgian beer, I hope you get some of that.
Robin Wauters: For those who love Belgian beer, it’s a lot more expensive though. It’s a good point because Brussels has a lot of… Belgium in general is where I work and live. It has a lot of things going for it. A mature ecosystem is not one of these things. The beer, the fries, the chocolate, okay. But you have to have somewhat of a mature ecosystem to really scale it.
Mauro Battellini: I guess events are also a good opportunity to go somewhere a bit different. Because, yeah, like you said, Web Summit is in Portugal, and there’s a lot of stuff happening in France and even in the Baltics. So there is this phenomenon, a little bit of migration. You have a lot of London people at those events, they probably enjoy being somewhere else. And we had a really good time by the way in Brussels. So I was just wondering if you feel a bit melancholic from moving the summit there.
Robin Wauters: There was no other choice, to be really honest. And we did get contacted by a few cities in Europe to see if we would like to move it. We even looked at Ghent, which is of course another city here in Belgium, which doesn’t have an airport or an international train station. So it has to have a lot of things going for it to really make that possible. And it didn’t end up working out. But we did get contacted by quite a few. But London is still the correct direction, I would say, of the European tech ecosystem.
Mauro Battellini: Robin, if we could move backwards in time. I know you get asked a lot how you started in journalism. But if we could re-ask you the question, but with a focus on like, how do you actually run a media business? Right? And we’ll follow up with a question about the acquisition by Webrazzi. Because I think everyone in the startup world is, they have the chip already that they want to exit. And everyone knows how a startup exit or acquisition works. But how does a media business acquisition work?
Robin Wauters: I have said this in different interviews, but I’ll quickly summarize. Because I went into college or high school trying to become a journalist. So I tried to study journalism for one year and said, “This is not for me.” So I ended up going into marketing instead. I never thought I’d be an entrepreneur, let alone a journalist, let alone a media entrepreneur. But this sort of happened because I was always very curious. So I wanted to learn about tech and startups and innovation and VC. My way of learning was by writing about it. So I naturally became a writer about technology and the business behind it or around it. That led to a series of decisions that led to me creating Tech.eu. But there was never a plan.
There was never like a big master plan to do it. But I think that also comes with benefits, right? If you don’t know how media typically operates, you just do what you think is right for the ecosystem, for your audience, for your community. And that’s the exact way that we built Tech.eu. It wasn’t with, “Let’s hire a bunch of journalists and cover this topic and try to make money this way.” I think we spent the first two or three years not even trying to make money because we raised a small round of funding. We just focused on the content that we think makes sense for us, the stuff that we would read. And it all led to Tech.eu maturing alongside the European tech ecosystem.
Because 11 years ago, there wasn’t a given. You didn’t really know what to expect, whether this was going to grow to the size that it is today or not. So I think the timing was right, which is also part of luck. But then, as you mentioned, you don’t start a media business typically to exit or at least I don’t know anyone who has ever started a media business with the intention to sell it down the line. But then of course, you’re in a niche, you’re a trade publication, you’re in a certain sector that’s relatively hard to reach for a lot of publications that don’t necessarily have to be in it.
For a mainstream publication, for example, or for example, a tech publication that covers the US, suddenly going to Europe would not really make sense for them. There is a way that you could carve out a space for yourself that makes it interesting for others to buy into that. And that’s exactly what happened with Webrazzi. They’re a Turkish media company. They’re very dominant there. They did some things in the Middle East. They’ve tried to expand to Europe and to English language tech coverage for a while. I think they tried two or three times over the years but never really panned out.
So for them, it was kind of a shortcut to just buy Tech.eu and start building the foundations for their European business on top of that, which is exactly what happened. It’s also timing, if I’m really honest. The fact that we were coming out of COVID, which was a difficult time for everyone, but you lose the travel and the connections with people. So it made it a little bit easier to start thinking about, “What would it mean if I sell this company? What would it mean for me personally as a founder? What would it mean for the team, for the business?” So it all just came to a point where it made sense. If we had been a year earlier or a year later, maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all. And then I don’t know what Tech.eu would look like today.
Mauro Battellini: You also mentioned that you raised a round of funding quite early on. When was that? How does that even look like back then? And how does it work for a media business? Because with a startup, it’s pretty clear that a startup is gonna go through certain stages, get a certain valuation. So how did you raise funds for Tech.eu and who was behind that?
Robin Wauters: I had already built a network in the European founder and investor community by then because I spent a couple of years working for TechCrunch and The Next Web. So I knew some people who really wanted to grow the European tech ecosystem because it’s a collection of ecosystems, of course. So when I came with this idea, not alone by the way, so I had co-founders with me while making introductions to investors and whatnot, we came with this idea: let’s level up the European tech ecosystem by showcasing the role models that we have, by opening a window for the rest of the world to look at Europe and say, “Okay, there is some stuff going on there. There’s some innovation, there is some talent, there’s some capital.” So when we went to our early investors, which included people like Carlos from Seedcamp, Daniel from Balderton, the Arkwright team from 500 Startups, these were all people who very well understood where the European tech ecosystem was and where it needed to go to level up. And part of that is media and events. It’s not just capital, it’s not just talent. You also need other elements in an ecosystem to keep it growing. So it was an easy decision for them. It was a small round, I think we raised about 150,000 euros, which is in comparison quite low. If you look at Sifted raising about 5 million pounds in total to date, it was a low amount but it was just to get us started. It was just to prove our hypothesis: European tech is worth showing to the rest of Europe but also the rest of the world. There are stories that need to be told or entrepreneurs that need to be featured or highlighted. And we ended up being right. But we only needed that starting capital because of course, we needed to prove that before we could think of doing some business on top of it.
Mauro Battellini: And staying in that rabbit hole, what did the European tech media landscape look like back then? Because you came out of TechCrunch. Obviously, they do have European writers but the impression is that they focus a lot more in the US. And they try to have as good of a global coverage as they can. And yeah, when you say 150k and you mention those players, then it just becomes obvious that probably there was a huge ROI in terms of the visibility for the entire collection ecosystem.
Robin Wauters: You hit the nail on the head, right? Nobody invested to make money off the investment or to get a return. Their return was to help the community grow by having a media company that focused on it. I do remember when we started, we had… it’s not like we didn’t have competition in the sense that there were local blogs covering their local ecosystems, even in English. I remember Venture Village was doing Germany, Rude Baguette was doing France. And where are they now? I’m not talking bad about them because it’s very difficult to focus on one ecosystem only. But at the time, I thought, “This is great.” Because if we can capture all of these things happening in Germany and France and the UK and have a river of news or an aggregation of content coming from the ecosystems, that was actually the initial idea behind Tech.eu. It was not to do as much news and leave it to the other local players to do news, but do more analysis and data on top of that. But then they started disappearing, right? So we took their place in covering the news from around Europe because nobody else was doing it. At the time, there was EU-Startups, still around, Silicon Canals, of course, also still around. And then there were a lot of them.
Mauro Battellini: Do you think those that failed just failed to monetize?
Robin Wauters: They failed, but there’s like an expiration date on every business, I think. Whether in media, events, Web Summit is not going to last 100 years, media companies are very rarely around for that long or they get integrated into some other company or get acquired or whatever, which is the same thing that happened with Tech.eu, by the way. But Rude Baguette vanished, I think. Venture Village, same story, it’s not around anymore. I’m trying to think of another example. Novobrief is another good example. There was a Spanish ecosystem newsletter that’s still around. But the guy who runs it used to work for Tech.eu for a while, by the way. He is now with a fund. And he still keeps doing it to keep the ecosystem updated in English, which is great. But it couldn’t survive as a media company on its own. So you could see that going local was really not the way to go. There’s just not enough of an ecosystem in Europe to sustain like one local media company, in my opinion.
Mauro Battellini: We’re also interested again, like how do you actually run a media business from the inside? Because I think PR people especially, we focus on pitching. And so we see the stories that you cover, we see your interests, we meet and talk with you guys. But I don’t know of anyone that’s actually gone into a newsroom and just spent like a day there and seen how it works from the inside. So if you can shed some light into that but also things like, to what extent do you guys look at things like brand? Because even for startups, quite often being associated with a media brand, it’s almost like sometimes it’s more important than what’s actually in the piece. And you guys obviously know that.
Robin Wauters: Yeah, and building your brand is the hard part, right? Like it’s very difficult to build credibility. That takes time. You can’t do that from day one. Even if you have the best journalists, you still need to prove and grow as you go along. But how do you run a media business from the inside? I don’t know. I can only tell you what it’s like to run a media business. That’s Tech.eu. I don’t know what it’s like in other companies, to be really honest, because I never learned. It’s not like I was part of the business side of a media company before I started Tech.eu. I was part of the writing team at TechCrunch and The Next Web. But you see the way that they run their businesses based on advertising, events, services, in our case also European projects. So that’s where you go looking for monetization. Right.
In the end, we ended up monetizing the data that we had through subscriptions and reports. We ended up doing advertising, which was sponsored content and display advertising. And then the rest of it was basically services, events, speaking at events, moderating discussions, interviewing people, etc. And on top of that, we got the European Commission projects. We’re in our third. So that’s like a four-way street to make money. But I wouldn’t recommend anyone to study media companies and look for those four things. It probably works differently in another media company. So I can’t really… there’s no blueprint as far as I’m concerned.
Mauro Battellini: So you had the editorial inside, and then obviously the archetype of the media business monetizes through events and other sponsored opportunities.
Robin Wauters: Look, I know if you’re a small team or you’re even a solo entrepreneur, if you write good content, eventually stuff is going to happen around you that will ensure that you get something out of it. And that could be a job, it could be some other type of business opportunity, it could be that people just pay for the content or want to advertise on your platform. So I think realistically, if I were to start Tech.eu 11 years ago, it was a different environment, right? You didn’t have Substack or Patreon or all these platforms. If I would start it today, it would probably look a lot different. If I’m honest, I could probably do more on my own now than I could have in the last 10 years, if that makes sense.
Mauro Battellini: And that’s like a huge thing in media. Obviously, there’s fragmentation and atomization. It feels like especially traditional or traditional media is being attacked from all sides. Because you even have people just talking about news on YouTube that are eating market share. But yeah, I guess in tech especially, you can even have VCs or newsletters. One-man newsletters get a lot of traction.
Robin Wauters: The amount of great content that’s being put out on newsletters, Substack, on LinkedIn groups, on Twitter accounts, X accounts, is staggering. It’s absolutely mind-blowing to me how great the content is that’s out there. And you don’t necessarily need to be a journalist or an author to create good content.
What is very difficult though is to keep consistently putting out quality content very frequently at a high level over many years, right? That’s always the hard part because people change jobs or they change geographies or whatever. And something always happens that sort of lets them drift off course. I don’t want to name any specific examples. But I read some really good stuff from people who were putting out stuff every week. And now you don’t hear from them for years sometimes. So where did they go? Like where did the content go? It’s not like they ran out of ideas or stuff to write about. Probably something happened in their life or career that ended up being a blocking factor. And that’s the hard part if you do it alone, right? If you have a team, you can compensate for that. You can build around that. As a solo writer, it’s tough.
Mauro Battellini: Yeah, and you were talking about brand longevity, right? And I guess when you build a media brand, you do want it to last for as long as possible. Whereas I feel like a lot of solo content creators, they are trying to reach certain objectives. For example, build an audience before they launch a product or something. I wanted to ask you, like still, solo creators are going to keep emerging. So where does the media brand, like a Tech.eu, how does it continue thriving in an environment like that? What should you specialize in?
Robin Wauters: I won’t say it’s easy, that’s for sure. And I’m also the wrong person to ask because I’m very… I’m going to make myself sound very old. But if I just watch my kids, how they consume content on YouTube, TikTok, how they look at news, and what news is, it’s just so vastly different from what I was brought up with and the business that I’m in. That I’m very happy to be working in a very niche trade-focused publication. It’s European tech business, so it’s relatively small. If I were a mainstream publication or covering sports or whatever, I’d be scared shitless. I’d be really terrified of the way that these kids are starting to consume media. And not just kids, right? It’s also young adults who are making up a big part of the workforce for obvious reasons. So I don’t know where it’s going. But it scares me. And I wish I could say, you know, of course, we’re going to experiment with all the new platforms. But the reality is a lot of our audience is in the same boat that I am, right? So maybe we lose touch with sort of the new generation of entrepreneurs and investors. Is that something that does keep me awake at night? Not really. But I do think about it.
Mauro Battellini: By the way, speaking of things that are a bit scarier and keep us awake at night, a lot has been said about AI’s influence on journalism. So what is your opinion? We’ve seen a lot of backlash. I don’t know if you’ve heard about this story about Sports Illustrated. Futurism found out that Sports Illustrated was employing AI journalists. So, you know, fake images, the content potentially also AI generated. And this came out, the CEO of Sports Illustrated was fired. And there was a huge outcry. So there are a lot of pushbacks. My impression is that people want to read people, human-created content, especially with journalism. But everyone has a feeling that it will happen.
Robin Wauters: Big topic, of course. Think about it a lot. I can’t imagine a single media company not already thinking about AI, working with AI, testing, experimenting. Same with us. So we use AI, for example, internally in the backend to make suggestions for headlines. For example, we use AI for the data that we have to generate ready-made content that we can then, with human beings, polish to publish a piece.
I don’t necessarily agree with you on the assessment that AI is not good enough for human-created content because I think it literally gets better by the hour, right? And I think for some sectors… I remember, you know, when you have these earnings releases, when publicly listed companies put out their quarterly information for investors or for shareholders. It was already 10 to 15 years ago that I started seeing certain media companies just fetching the information that they were going to have to manually get out of it and put it into an article and maybe add a paragraph and… Even then, I thought that was totally fine because it just saves you time. You’re going to do the same work manually, it’s just going to take you more time.
For things like sports, if you analyze the results and statistics, why not use AI? However, you will not go to the Tech.eu summit in London and talk to an AI in the hallway who will tell you that, “Hey, that investment firm’s got really burned on this startup,” or “This founder is leaving this company.” You’re not going to talk to an AI at the reception of an event or in the hallways or hear from an AI on stage something that you haven’t heard before. So that’s the one thing that I think will still differentiate a lot. And then again, if you’re in niche trade publications where network and your connections and your sources really matter, I think AI is less of a threat than if you do generalist content. If you do generalist content, then you’re in deep shit. Unless you innovate with AI, you’re going to get taken over very soon. So I do think it’s an opportunity for a lot of media companies. It’s a big threat for some of them. And that’s going to… it’s only going to amplify and accelerate, I guess.
Mauro Battellini: I guess my question, if it boils down to it, would be, is that journalist someone that you go to because you trust that person? And it’s almost like you’re going to a friend or family member that you could get the best insight from some machine or some paper or something, but you want to specifically go to someone that you trust, like a human.
Robin Wauters: And it could be a person that you trust. It could also be the brand. We talked about brand earlier. If I refer someone from my team and they say, “Hey, you need to talk to Cate, for example, in our editorial team,” that person doesn’t necessarily need to know Cate to know that because I introduced them because there’s a Tech.eu that you will be treated in a professional way. So that’s the trust that you built that you cannot do with a machine. There is a lot of manual labor, like the work that just goes into any content piece that you can just waste less time on. So that’s an obvious one. The why we did not do that is the same with lawyers.
You can go to a law firm that you trust or a lawyer that you trust. 90% of the time, they’re also using AI behind your back to make their jobs easier. But as a customer, I would encourage that. I want them to waste less time on the manual sifting through documents and more time on me. And I think the same goes for journalism, right? You want someone who’s connected with you and understands the wider business.
I’m sure that AI cannot remember, for example, if I had a conversation 15 years ago with an entrepreneur and he ended up building things and he ended up becoming a VC. That’s the relationship that AI can never replace. That’s a person that will come to me for certain things or become a source on certain contents. How do you replace a human connection? It will never ever fade. Everything else around it, though, will inevitably fade. So it’s a tricky balancing act.
Mauro Battellini: There’s two camps. One is like the New York Times suing OpenAI. It’s like a pushback or reaction. And the other one is like the FT, and they’re partnering with OpenAI. So, like, you would be together with the FT?
Robin Wauters: Yeah, have to think about it. Why would the New York Times sue OpenAI? Is it to hurt them or is it to get a better deal out of it? My bet would be on the second, right? Probably they sued OpenAI because they couldn’t agree on the terms and they wanted a better deal. So suing them was a way to advance the discussion. I think that’s what happened. I think if you’re The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or the FT, you have a lot more clout. Small media companies like ours can get through the door with OpenAI, but we can use their publicly available tools with the same effect. We’re not going to get a business deal out of it.
They’re probably using our content just the same, but just for a smaller amount of people. I think it’s inevitable. It’s not going anywhere. And again, AI is not new. We keep beating the same drum, but AI and machine learning isn’t new. It’s just that it’s become so mainstream so very quickly and that the investments on a technological level, both infrastructure, model making, the way it’s distributed, has been happening so incredibly fast that it took almost everyone by surprise. People as well as organizations. So a lot of companies that have very difficulties to be flexible and to act fast, they’re going to be in trouble. If you’re flexible and you’re open and you want to learn, I think you’ll be fine. But it depends more on your sort of personality than the technology.
Mauro Battellini: Yeah, it’s funny because it’s not only a technology that matters, but it’s also the speed, right? Because everything is disrupted too quick or like extremely fast. A lot of people won’t be able to adapt. A lot of organizations won’t be able to adapt.
Robin Wauters: Exactly.
Mauro Battellini: Generates a completely different kind of winner-loser situation.
Robin Wauters: It’s such a cliché thing to say, like, AI is not going to replace you, but someone using AI will replace you. It’s such a cliché that I have become sort of a hater of the expression. But at the end, that’s exactly what’s going to happen, right? Someone, whether it’s an individual or organization, using the AI tools that are available to you in a better way or faster than you, in a more innovative way, is going to win. It’s just going to be the case. So I don’t like talking about job creation or job destruction because that’s always going to happen. It’s just the nature of technology and the evolution of the business that we’re in. But the speed at which it’s happening is quite stunning. Sometimes frightening, sometimes very exciting.
Mauro Battellini: Yeah. Okay, let’s leave AI aside for a bit. I bet everyone’s hearing a lot about that anyway. So after the acquisition from Webrazzi, how did your role change?
Robin Wauters: That’s a good question. My role didn’t change that much insofar that… So when you’re a small media business, at the time of the acquisition, we had a couple of journalists. We had someone as a CEO running the operations of the business. We had me being the public face and trying to manage the editorial team. When we got acquired… Well, let me put it differently. Imagine that we would grow our business significantly and suddenly we had a stream of revenue. I would have to choose, do I hire another journalist? Do I hire a developer? Do I hire a salesperson? Do I hire an event manager?
And with the acquisition, all of that evaporated because suddenly you have a bigger team at your disposal that’s already doing sales, that’s already good at organizing events, that has experience working as an editor or journalist in a certain market. So you could just fall back on a bigger team, still do the same thing you were doing, that just makes your job a little bit easier.
And you can think a little bit bigger, hence why the Tech.eu Summit was born. Hence why we started expanding our coverage to be more guest posts, more opinion, more policy-related, for example. Hence why we could do the European Commission project and really make a difference there as well. Otherwise, we would never have been able to. So my role hasn’t changed that much. Of course, I’m part of the management for the Turkish group, so I try to help them out where I can as well. But most of my time now goes to the European Commission project. And if we didn’t win that, my role would have done exactly the same. Now it’s slightly different because of that reality, but not that much changed.
Mauro Battellini: What exactly are you guys doing with the European Commission?
Robin Wauters: Yes, natural question. Good question. So we are part of a consortium called the EIC Scaling Club. EIC is the European Innovation Council. So it’s a 10 billion euro budget flagship program for the European Commission to try and scale up tech, right? To try and get the tech startups funded, to get science away from the lab and into the market, stuff like that. The EIC also has a fund, so they’re making investments, equity, blend finance. And what the EIC Scaling Club is or does is more on the scale-up level. So if you’re a deep tech company that’s already gotten traction, you’re Series B or up level, you’re operating globally, you still need to get to the next level.
And this is where Europe doesn’t shine. Like we’re generally not very good at scaling scale-ups to global leadership. So with the EIC Scaling Club, the European Commission is basically trying to also help scale-ups grow their business, grow their impact, make sure that they’re connected to an international community of investors to help them fund the next round, whether it’s Series C, etc. Also surround them with media companies, service companies, mentors to really just help them scale. Tech.eu is part of that group, that consortium. There’s Bpifrance, Hello Tomorrow, Tech Tour, a couple of other companies. ESADE Business School is also involved.
It’s a three-year project. We’re trying to help European deep tech scale-ups basically scale up, and not a few of them, it’s gonna be over 100 companies that we’re going to help. And Tech.eu is responsible for the communication part of that. So we do a lot of outreach. We help companies communicate, but also the EIC Scaling Club itself communicate to a wider audience of corporates, investors, and anyone who’s interested in deep tech. So that’s the gist of it. Was that a good pitch?
Mauro Battellini: It was a really good pitch. How do you see deep tech playing out?
Robin Wauters: That’s the big question, right? It depends on what your definition of deep tech is. For me, deep tech is sort of the science-driven that needs patient capital, that needs seven to 10 years to come to fruition. But it spans multiple sectors, right? Even if you look at the EIC Scaling Club, we have smart mobility, we have cardiovascular therapies, we have renewable energy, stuff like that. So it’s often related to climate, not always. So it’s all of these, right? So it depends on your definition of deep tech. Now, if you take a step back and look at what Europe has done in terms of innovation and tech in the last, let’s say, 20 years, is that we’ve missed the boat on so many things, right? Operating systems, social networks, consumer-driven businesses, even enterprise SaaS for the most part.
The big tech companies are, of course, still very much concentrated in the US, in Asia, China in particular. So we missed the boat on so many things. Deep tech is the one thing where I think personally Europe can still shine because of the talent available, because of the realization in policy circles and investment communities that that’s where the money and the attention needs to go for Europe to continue playing a leading role. You have companies like ASML, for example, which is the biggest tech company in Europe today for good reason. That’s a very science-driven, deep tech company, very hard to replicate, very difficult to compete with. But that’s no guarantee for success. You need all of the deep tech scale-ups now to be able to go to the next level and maybe grow up to become an ASML or maybe even a Google or Amazon down the line. We can dream. Hope. But at the end of the day, that’s where I think the attention and the focus should be for Europe. We’ve already missed the boat on so many things. Let’s not waste the opportunity that we have there.
Mauro Battellini: Yeah, you’ve probably seen there’s a lot of discussion on Twitter and elsewhere. Recently, everyone’s sharing these graphs and memes about how European tech is lagging behind the biggest public companies in tech in Europe versus the US.
Robin Wauters: Eleven years ago when I started… no, let’s go further back, right? Fifteen, sixteen years ago, I was working for TechCrunch, and they would make fun of Europe. And they would show the same charts, but even worse figures, right? Eleven years ago when I started Tech.eu, they made fun of Europe, showing charts with slightly bigger figures for Europe. It’s still ridiculous compared to the US. Now they’re showing the same figures and charts, still Europe lagging behind very far, but a little bit bigger than it used to be. So I don’t really care. And I try to block out all these conversations and the hate sometimes that European tech gets. Because if you look at Europe only, what you see is growth. And of course, there are contrarian theories behind this. But you see the growth. You see the growth in funding, in impact, in the ambition for the founders, better investors, just more ambition all around, more mature ecosystems. And that’s what matters to me, is that if you stop growing, if you stop maturing, then you have a problem.
You don’t have to compare yourself to the US or Asia to look at yourself and be somewhat proud of what you’ve achieved. There have been European tech figures that way too little celebrate the wins and just look at how far we’re lagging behind. Or we’re lagging behind on AI, for example, which is the other discussion. We’re lagging behind on chips, semiconductors, manufacturing, and whatnot. Yes, we are. But things are getting better. And at least in policy circles, there’s a renewed movement for attention on these positions, which I think is very important.
Julija Jegorova: You touched base on the fact that the hard years are behind us. And I think everyone will agree that it’s been pretty difficult probably in the last year and a half in terms of funding and scaling and everything else. It feels like it’s changing slowly, but it’s changing. What are your predictions for the next year or so? Are we going to be getting out of this winter or still in it?
Robin Wauters: The thing is, Europe is not one place. When it’s cold somewhere in Europe, it’s probably warm somewhere else. The same goes for the startup environment. I think we are coming out of the very bad period in terms of especially on the scale-up side. If you’re a fast growth, highly valued company two, three years ago, you’re in trouble. No matter what you do or what you say, it was tough, right? It was tougher. Scale-ups, startups a bit less. But then again, if you look at the startup scene in Eastern Europe, for example, it took a huge hit. I don’t think they are going to be coming out of it anytime soon. Because if you’re still in the maturation phase and you’re still early stage as an ecosystem, if you get hit that hard, it’s just more difficult to recover.
Elsewhere, the more mature ecosystems like France and the UK, you can see the recovery is going to be very quick. Right? You see the big mega rounds are coming back. You see the investors are getting back to the table. And on the investment side also, we know that funds have been raising large amounts of capital to deploy. And of course, they froze their investments and they were a bit careful and they doubled down on the winners and they were less involved in early stage startup bets. All of that is going to change very quickly. Because there’s going to be a tipping point where the capital is going to start flowing again. And we’ll hit the high valuations again and everybody will say, “We’re back.”
We’re not going to be back everywhere. There are certain sectors or certain geographies within Europe that are going to hurt and keep hurting for many years to come. Which I don’t think is something that you can ignore. Even if things improve, if you look at the total funding size, it’s going to go back up this year, of course, compared to last year. And everybody’s going to celebrate for good reason. But then if you’re going to zero in on certain sectors or certain countries or regions, it’s still going to look very dire, which I think we should also pay attention to and be aware of.
Julija Jegorova: You mentioned the Baltics. I’ve been talking to quite a few founders recently that are trying to raise money. And they see the numbers are fine. They feel great, but they can’t fundraise considering that there’s a war going on next door. And some of the investors are like, “I’m not sure if I want to touch that or invest in it.” Do you have any advice for the startups in not only the Baltics and the C region, how to perhaps battle those questions from the founders, from the investors, frankly?
Robin Wauters: No. Geopolitical macroeconomic reality hits everyone as hard as it can. So I don’t know. I would just keep my head down, keep building, keep proving that you have a business and a sound idea and that customers are willing to pay for what you’re building. That’s the number one priority that they should have.
Fundraising gets tough because of reasons outside of their control. But it’s also an opportunity to double down on actually talking to your customers rather than a potential investor, talking to a potential partner rather than a potential VC. At the end of the day, that’s what the business should be about. Making something that people are willing to pay for, hopefully more than you need to manufacture, make or build that thing. So that’s the basic business 101, right?
If you’re in the Baltics or in Eastern Europe, you’re going to face… you’re going to be faced with that reality for many years to come. So while of course, you need to worry about it on a personal level, but why continue taking that into account as you build a business? Maybe move for a bit, maybe set up a remote team or maybe find different ways to reach communities outside of your home countries. I don’t know. There’s no silver bullet here. But I would just keep my head down and build. But I would do that regardless if I was in the Baltics or in Spain.
Mauro Battellini: Just wanted to ask you what you’re excited about in the future. And also if you can let us know a bit more about what’s in store for Tech.eu, what to expect at the summit, and so on.
Robin Wauters: At the summit, expect great content, great conversations, great networking. Of course, we’re going to try and scale it up in London. So I don’t see us moving away from London anytime soon. Building a conference is like any business. It takes time. And I’m not talking about the financials. It’s also about where do you want to take this? How big can you make it but still make it valuable for everyone involved? How do you select the right partners and whatnot? So it’s a work in progress that I’m quite excited about continuing.
On the editorial side, I think we need to double down as well. We need more quality journalists to deliver insights on top of news and data, which is always the key thing to do. I think if you’re a niche trade-focused publication. What else gets me excited? As I mentioned, I feel like I’m repeating myself, but on deep tech in Europe, there is quite a lot of excitement in investment circles and policy circles. I’m part of that group of positively minded people who think, no, here we have the talent, we have the capital, we have the… finally convert it into companies that are market-leading, that are impactful, that have a positive effect or impact on society, humanity, the world, the planet, you name it. It doesn’t always need to be about business only.
And I think the fact that we’re having these conversations about climate, about energy, about sustainability, is just something that for the rest of my career is going to be the common thread. It’s going to be that deep tech, climate tech, sustainability, innovation. How do we accelerate that? How do we level up? How do we make a positive difference in the world? So if I can help with that, I will. But we’ll see.
Mauro Battellini: Perfect. So if there’s any journalists out there, especially if they have an interest in deep tech, they should contact you?
Robin Wauters: Yeah, they should contact me. Regardless, I like every conversation.
Mauro Battellini: Perfect. Robin, thank you so much for being with us.
Robin Wauters: Thank you for the questions. Really appreciate it. Thanks.
