ReadWriteWeb

XING founder Lars Hinrichs has launched a new pre-seed investment company, HackFwd.

Although HackFwd provides financial support and mentorship to tech startups, HackFwd is not an incubator. In other words, rather than expecting startups to relocate to the company's headquarters in Germany, HackFwd meetups will be distributed - something that might be very beneficial for European startups.

The following is one in a series of guest posts we're running here on ReadWriteWeb. This one is by Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp, the global organization dedicated to helping entrepreneurs grow successful businesses. Prior to her role at Seedcamp, she was an associate at 3i and Softbank's eVentures India, and Senior Manager in Commercial Strategy at Vodafone.

Having listened to pitches from over 140 startups from all over Europe, working with 14 of our companies during the past two years, and reviewing applications for our annual event in the next few weeks, I am struck by just how different the requirements of early-stage investment are (for both investor and entrepreneur) compared to those of venture capital or private equity.

We have been tracking Series A deals in Web technology since the market mayhem in October 2008, and since May we have been working with ChubbyBrain, which tracks this kind of data full-time. Early-stage funding is important for the whole economy, so we decided to report every month, not waiting for quarterly data. The executive summary for July: steady progress and a lot of deals in the Boston area. Read on for details.

We started tracking VC funding in October 2008, as the financial markets were melting. What caught our eye in those dark and gloomy days was True Ventures' announcement of its Series A investment in Syncplicity. The more we looked, the more we found that the headlines were wrong. It was not all doom and gloom, not in our corner of the universe: early-stage Web tech ventures. So we figured that getting (and passing on to you) good reliable data on a timely basis would be a good idea. Searching for that turned out to be harder than we thought, and herein lies a tale.

The following is one in a series of guest posts by venture capitalists that we're running on ReadWriteStart. This one is by Paul Jozefak, a VC based in Hamburg, Germany, who used to run SAP AG's European venture activities and is now a managing partner at Neuhaus Partners. The original post can be found on his blog.

One way or another, I've addressed the question of "Where is the Silicon Valley of Europe" a hundred times, be it in interviews, in blog posts, on Twitter, or on panels. Ultimately, there isn't really a "Valley" in Europe, only some places kind of like it. If you want my ideas on that, I have other posts on the topic.

The following is one in a series of guest posts by venture capitalists that we're running here on ReadWriteWeb. This one is by Paul Jozefak, a VC based in Hamburg, Germany, who used to run SAP AG's European venture activities and is now a managing partner at Neuhaus Partners. The original post can be found on his blog.

I was thinking about what questions I would ask if I were raising venture capital. Funny thing is that I often think about what to ask entrepreneurs when deciding whether to invest in them. I've told entrepreneurs often enough that they should ask their VCs just as many questions. I have never really clarified, though, what they should ask. My bad. So, to be fair, here is what I would ask a VC if I was interviewing one for the highly coveted opportunity to invest in my business (note the satire).

We recently spoke with Jean-Francois "Jeff" Clavier, founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most active seed-stage investors in Web 2.0 startups. He invests from a $15 million fund, investing from $100K to $500K in companies, generally alongside other funds or angels, making up a total of $750K to $1.5M per venture. He invests in consumer Internet companies working in areas such as social media, communities, search, gaming, and consumer infrastructure, almost exclusively in Silicon Valley.

For the sixth in our investor interview series, we went east to India to chat with Alok Mittal, a partner at Canaan Partners, in the company's office in Gurgaon, India. We got his perspective on early-stage investing and specifically the challenges and opportunities for a venture starting out in India.

For the fifth in our series of interviews with investors, we decided to do something different. Elliott Dahan, of the START Fund, cannot write you a check. At least not yet; he is working on that. But he is trying to do something much more ambitious, which is to create a totally new model for funding early- and seed-stage ventures. VCs love to fund disruptive ventures. But the VC model itself has been pretty immune to change for decades. So Elliott has set himself the tough job of disrupting the disrupters.

For our third VC Interview, we decided to check out the early-stage VC scene in Europe. So we spoke with Paul Jozefak, Partner at NeuHaus in Germany. We found him via his excellent blog. We wanted his perspective on how the venture scene in Europe differs from the one in the US. We also wanted to see if the surprisingly healthy early-stage financing market that we are seeing in the US is echoing in Europe.