Dear reader,

But why, even though I don't understand a thing about music, did I invest in a startup that wants to reinvent the job of music promoters after just half an hour of meeting them?

The startup is called Gotobeat. It's based in London, has an Italian CEO, and just announced a pre-seed round led by Velocity Capital. I also invested a ticket (my first ticket of 2024).

What convinced me:

Team

Max, the founder (31 years old), is on his second startup. The first, Blasting News, didn't scale to unicorn level but managed to grow to over 100 employees in various geographies.

After Blasting News, he got into the hospitality industry in Venice, bringing together players who provide tour guides, and as a side project, he opened 2, soon to be 3, restaurants.

Max has a track record of someone who knows how to deliver. He is extremely pragmatic. He is committed to winning big with this project.

He's the prototype of the founder you want to invest in.

Trends

The elephant in the room for this project is scalability. Too many people are needed to organize concerts. It's all so bespoke that technology cannot create economies of scale.

Before AI, I would never have invested in a project like Max's. However, I am convinced that today, with AI and the modularity of components that can be attached to operations, it is possible to scale things that seemed unscalable six months ago.

With the efficiency that AI is bringing, the best VC investments could be in those ventures that we had become accustomed to considering human-intensive and therefore not scalable enough for venture capital.

Traction

They launched in October 2022, sold 30k tickets. Last month they made 30k in revenues completely bootstrapped. They are growing at a rate of 50 concerts per month, numbers that no promoter can achieve except for the biggest players.

Total Adressable Market

The role of entertainment is becoming increasingly important in the post-AI world. I've written in detail about this here. People will increasingly need to be entertained, and live music is positioned to grow more and more.

2 Tools to advance to pro

Investment datails

Deal source: A LinkedIn connection I have never actually met in real life

Time allocated for the decision: a 30-minute call, 1 day of research on the sector

Amount invested: £10k

Tax implications: SEIS. (British Seed Enterprise Investment Schene), 50% deduction immediately, another 20% if the project should fail.

In pre-seed, if I like the entrepreneur, I make small and quick investments knowing that a good portion of the risk is capped by the tax benefit. I consider pre-seed as options to invest from a position of advantage at the seed stage.

My portfolio performace

At the end of the year, I published a detailed report of my portfolio as of the end of 2023. The link is here.

1 Reason to smile

Serious issues. 😄

Have a great weekend,

Simone

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