Insight
Briggs: European regional leaders often get steamrolled by global winners
“And what we have seen in Europe quite a bit is companies that became, you know, regional winners, But then the global winner came in at some point and kind of steamrolled, not completely, but, you know, eroded their market and stopped them from growing.”
Opinion
Briggs: European startups almost always botch their first US sales hire
“You know, probably the hardest role that I see in the companies I work with is, you know, a European team hiring their first US sales director, and they always seem to get it wrong. And they probably always give that person a bit too long before they realize t…”
Insight
Briggs: International expansion shouldn't be an escape from domestic growth problems
“So I think the question that you should be asking when you're thinking about going international is Are you expanding to escape your problems, or do you actually have something worth scaling?”
Insight
Briggs: Marketplace retention cohorts should improve as the platform scales
“Ideally, particularly in marketplace businesses, cohorts should be improving as you scale.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Briggs: Paddle's US expansion only took off after hiring a dedicated US team
“It wasn't really until they hired a dedicated US team, so they were UK based and selling globally from the UK for a long time. It wasn't until they had a team completely dedicated to the US that the US really, really started to take off.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Briggs: MacPaw's organic growth flattered Paddle's early startup growth metrics
“They had one huge whale customer. They're called Mac Paw. And Mac Paw kept growing themselves. So it was flattering their growth numbers.”
Assertion Supported
Briggs: Plum Guide shifted to vetting homes only upon first booking
“They were only approving 10% of homes. That's hard to scale. But the pandemic actually helped them because, you know, it forced them to be way more efficient. It forced them to conserve cash and they managed to automate a lot of those tests and they changed th…”
What-if
Briggs: Firefly would have fared better focusing on UK product-market fit first
“And I think if we had really, really focused on, okay, what is our playbook in the UK to, you know, reach true product market fit and really, really figure that out, I think it would have been better.”
Assertion Supported
Briggs: Gousto reached a $1B+ valuation by focusing solely on the UK
“Gusto, again I, I've been an investor while I was an investor in a previous fund, and Gusto is the sort of more premium HelloFresh in the UK, if you like and they've become the market leader in the UK and by relentlessly focusing on executing in the UK, you kn…”
Insight
Briggs: Expanding markets requires waiting for an A-player hire
“One B player in a team can lead to a lot of C players quite rapidly and making those calls early, and keeping the bar high, and only entering a market once you've found that A player, I think is probably key to their expansion.”
Insight
Briggs: The second international market is usually the hardest
“Clearly when you're expanding internationally, the second market is usually the hardest because you don't have a playbook yet. And you're going to be hit with a whole lot of surprises.”
Insight
Briggs: Organic inbound demand is the best starting point for international expansion
“When you start to see organic demand from a market, that's often a good way to start, because then you can go to those customers and say, you know, why are you buying this?”
Assertion Supported
Briggs: Uber once scaled by opening a new city every three days
“At one point they were opening a new city every three days.”
Assertion Supported
Briggs: GoCardless accelerated scale by shifting to B2B invoice payments
“They were particularly going after companies that sold a lot of consumer direct debits. But shortly after I stepped off the board there, they figured out that actually the biggest market they could go after was B to B invoice payments. And the moment that they…”
Disclosure
Briggs: The Hut Group was his only portfolio company to succeed in China
“The only company I've been involved with that has expanded to China successfully was the Hut Group out of which is an e-commerce player, and the reason that they expanded was that they started to get demand there.”
Disclosure
Briggs: Firefly Drinks' 2012 private equity sale yielded little return for founders
“And in 2012, we sold the business to private equity made some money for our investors. Sadly, not a lot for ourselves.”
