Guest at the European Business Angels Network

The BBA want to continue to position themselves internationally and are therefore establishing contacts with other European networks. So our CEO Julian von Hassell took part in the EBAN’s annual general event.

EBAN (European Business Angel Network) is the European umbrella organization of regional angel networks. Soon the BBA will also be a member.

We were invited as panelists on the topic of deep tech angel and VC investments. For Julian, it was also a trip down memory lane – after all, he had lived in Thessaloniki for several years as a student. Two VC fund managers and the chairman of a tech funding fund from Greece, the chairwoman of the Slovenian network and an Irish VC investor and angel who moderated the panel were Julian’s interlocutors.

Julian’s personal highlights of the congress were:

1. The „fireside chat“ between New York Angels chairman Mark Schneider and the German ex-head of EBAN Peter Jungen about angel investing in these difficult times. The aged German (born 1939), who has been friends with Mark Schneider for a long time, was mentally fully present. Discussed was the striking similarity of the U.S. and European angel scenes pre- and post-Corona, and the opportunities for syndicated angel investments, which are naturally greater in the larger and more legally homogeneous U.S. market. Implicitly, this shed light on the difficulty of transnational angel investments. Another topic was the lack of hunger of American investors for early-stage European target companies because the local market offers sufficient targets.

2. The keynote of the Danish inventor of Google Maps Lars Rasmussen, who is married to a Greek woman and lives in Athens and spoke mainly of his many mistakes before he was lucky enough to hit the mark with Google Maps. Resilience and always getting back up pays off.

3. Julian’s realization that cross border angel investments are an opportunity especially for countries whose small populations and startups force them to expand their deal flow and syndicate transnationally. This is quite common in the Scandinavian-Baltic region, in the Balkans and Austria as well. Our German home market, on the other hand, is so large that we have not been so dependent on such cross-regional syndicates, which have to overcome legal costs/legal hurdles.

4. DanBAN chairman and founder Jesper Jarlbaek’s presentation on angels network organization: The network founder reported on the management of DanBAN, which was voted the best European angels network for the second time in a row based on hard facts (number of members, transaction volume and volumes).