Introducing the French Cloudscape

For some reason we keep finding great early-stage SaaS startups in France, and it's not because of my command of the French language. In the last few years we've invested in four awesome SaaS companies from France: Algolia, Front, Mention and Critizr. We recently did #5, which hasn't been announced yet, and are in advanced talks with a potential #6. Besides our SaaS investments, we're also proud investors in StarOfService, an online marketplace to hire a wide range of professionals. Something is clearly going on in France, and we like it.

Our good connection to the French startup ecosystem was one of the reasons why we picked France as the first country for our "European SaaS Landscape" project. Another reason was that Clément not only speaks French, he IS French, and knows the market very well.

Without further ado, here it is: an industry map of the most important SaaS startups founded in France.

To learn more about our methodology and some of the insights we got while doing the research, check out Clément's post on Medium. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, give us a shout!

Truffle pig reloaded – Point Nine is looking for an Associate

About three years ago, we were looking for an Associate to join Point Nine and put up this landing page:

We called the position "truffle pig", because just like a truffle pig is digging up the best truffles from the ground, we as an early-stage VC try to find the best startups among a large number of potential investments. I have to give full credit for the truffle pig analogy to Mathias Schilling and Thomas Gieselmann of e.ventures, by the way. "Truffle pigs" is what they (young VC Associates at that time) called themselves when they approached my co-founder and me back in 1997 after having stumbled on this website. Fast-forward almost 20 years and we still haven't found a better way to describe the role. :)

Anyway, our search three years ago led to two fantastic truffle pigs, Rodrigo and Mathias, both of whom got promoted to Principals at Point Nine in the meantime. And today we're excited to kick-off the search for a new Associate. Here are all the details.

This is an incredible opportunity for a young, super-smart, super-driven person with outstanding analytical skills and a solid user interface. I'm pretty sure that it took me more than 10 years to get the expertise and network which you'll get during three years in this job. 

If you're interested, please take a look at our job ad. If you know somebody who could be great fit, please pass on the link. Thanks!