Startup ROI Turns 2
Failures, Pivots & Game-Changers
Welcome to Startup ROI! I’m Kyle O'Brien, an early stage deep tech investor — alongsideRand Hindi— and community builder based in Paris, France. I write what I see. These days, it’s mostly explorations into various categories of interest including:
The Future of Computing
Blockchain Infrastructure (Privacy & Encryption)
Frontier Health
I enjoy taking complex topics and reducing them into accessible articles and top-notch memes. I also throw bangin’ dinner parties for cool people in tech and venture.
Well well well, here we are. Two years into this and we’ve managed to keep it together! I’ve got to say, this whole experience has been unexpectedly challenging yet enormously rewarding. In fact, the current incarnation of this newsletter is much, much different than how I pictured it when “launching” 730 days ago. What I imagined as my new career path (mini media mogul) was actually a lever for steering me on a completely different trajectory. Life tends to be funny that way. I’d like to provide a summary of what’s taken place in the past year, but more importantly, I’m going to highlight what I’m most proud of — something I rarely, if ever, take the time to consider and share.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane…
FUN FACT: The date I started this newsletter coincides with the date I originally moved to Paris as a child. Here’s me at the final leg of the Tour de France circa 2000.
As a quick refresh, the original plan here was to build and monetize this newsletter. I was inspired during the pandemic by the likes of
and to build something akin to or but for Europe. It was a tall order, perhaps overly ambitious, but it set me in motion for what was to come next. The newsletter became an engine for personal growth and networking. I was writing about an ecosystem in which I had worked, but rarely took to time to step back and recognize all the other interesting people, companies and investors that made it work. For me, this was the biggest unlock. This project has facilitated an exploratory phase like none other in my career and resulted in phenomenal outcomes (if I do say so myself).I just re-read my 1 year anniversary piece to make sure I had a previous benchmark in mind. If you missed that one, check it out below:
To keep this short & sweet, I’m going to highlight:
1 Failure
1 Success
1 Game-Changer
And to be clear, I’m proud of all of them!
The Failure: 🚴🏼♂️ Le Tour de French Tech
In an effort to expand my reach (and perhaps due to the promised land of media distribution, TikTok), I decided to create a video series covering startups across the 12 departments of France. The timing was aligned with the actual Tour de France and I figured my clever twist on the concept my boost me on everyone’s For You page. I didn’t go “viral” but I did learn some new video editing and script writing skills and created something outside of my comfort zone. Was the juice worth the squeeze? Who knows. But it’s part of the process! In the future it would be incredible to do a real docu-series covering the top startups in each region, but that’s a project for another day…
You can check out the full playlist here or get started with the first of the series below:
The Success: 📩 The DM Dinner Club
A year ago, I had just completed my first dinner club event. At that stage, it wasn’t a dinner club, it was a one-off dinner that was so popular we decided to turn it into a series. Originally, we cobbled together a few personas in the tech and venture scene in Paris to trade notes over a delicious meal. Today, we’ve hosted over a dozen events, manage a WhatsApp group with 100+ engaged community members and throw elevated, curated private dinners and cocktail hours with guests of honor that rank among some of the most influential players in European tech.
I’m incredibly grateful to have Josh Dzielak — community guru extraordinaire and CTO — and the entire Orbit team at my side. Without their support, we wouldn’t have been able to scale and evolve these events into what they’ve become today! Josh wrote a great piece on the evolution of this community that’s been picked up and shared by community thought leaders around the globe. I’m also incredibly proud of one of our most unique events: Marché After Dark where we ate and drank in a privatized covered market in the 6me arrondissement — pictures here!
If you want to get involved, do as the name implies and DM me for details on how to participate! So far, we’ve focused on Paris, but I’m eager to explore opportunities to spread these joyful occasions to tech hubs around Europe — if you’re an ecosystem developer in London, Berlin, Munich or elsewhere, perhaps we can link up :)
The Game-Changer: 🤝 Joining Forces with Dr. Rand Hindi
It’s been about half a year since I formally joined Rand to amplify his angel practice. Our core focus at the moment is developing and strengthening community in the European deep tech sector. We are a startup disguised as an early stage venture fund (emphasis on “early stage,” less so on “venture fund”). Our inside joke is that were are not VCs — more like entrepreneurs and operators — which we think gives us an edge as we speak founder-to-founder and develop partnerships with more established funds across Europe. We’ve hosted dinners on Next Generation Computing and panel discussions on Artificial Intelligence, Psychedelics and Consciousness and we’re just getting started. Oh, did I mention we’ve invested tickets in 5 startups thus far in 2023?
🙌🏻❤️