Northzone and Creandum invest in Spotify - confirmed
Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek has confirmed that venture capital firms Northzone Ventures and Creandum have invested in Spotify. No word on the amount invested or the valuation.
It is simple but not easy
Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek has confirmed that venture capital firms Northzone Ventures and Creandum have invested in Spotify. No word on the amount invested or the valuation.
Spotify has launched. Free version invitation-only. Premium version at 9 SEK/day or 99 SEK/month available for everyone. Press release.
... is obviously the rumored ?15 million investment in Spotify's at a post-money valuation of ?86.9 million. As no party is officially confirming the report, it is hard to say if all the specifics are correct. Even if some details are wrong, the amount doesn't sound that crazy given what Spotify are trying to accomplish (and the funding needed to do that), the track record of the founders and the previous absence of outside capital.
Ebay has acquired BillMeLater, which I first heard about from Kreditor founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski about four years ago, for $945 million. BillMeLater and Kreditor provides somewhat similar services, making it easier for e-retailers to invoice their customers. One of BillMeLater's investors was Amazon.com. With the acquisition eBay is expanding its interest in online payments beyond Paypal.
Charlie Munger on the Art of Stock Picking. "And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don't. It's just that simple." ... "How many insights do you need? Well, I'd argue: that you don't need many in a lifetime. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its accumulated billions, the top ten insights account for most of it. And that's with a very brilliant man Warren's a lot more able than I am and very disciplined devoting his lifetime to it. I don't mean to say that he's only had ten insights. I'm just saying, that most of the money came from ten insights."
Good coffee is one of the luxuries of life, so consider this a public service announcement.
Yesterday I went to the release party of Annonskartan.se, Ted Valentin's latest map project. Interesting idea, but it will be even more interesting to see if it can avoid the wrath of Blocket. Mapping is getting more interesting by the day (and the by the mobile devices used), but Blocket's strategic interest doesn't align with Ted's. Met some nice people (as usual) like Mjukvara's Christian Rudolf and Nätkoll's Gunnar Lindberg Årneby. And Gitta, Björn, Bloggy-Jonas and VA-Micke (who thinks I'm getting bigger by the day), IW-Miriam and others.
After a loooooong time I made my first purchase at the iTunes Music Store last Sunday night. Even though I primarily listen to music with Spotify, the Spotify beta hasn't contained recently released music and I wanted to get my hands on a few new songs.
I've gotten a couple of new Spotify invites. If you want one, leave a comment or send me an e-mail. If there are more requests than invites I'm giving priority to close friends, blog and industry friends and people who give on Kiva in that order.