Bad: Seating is the regular economy 3×3 with middle seat left empty. Which is fine, except that the leg room is no better than that in coach 👎👎
Good: Lounge access, specially the breakfast. Blessing for two starving souls! 👍
Best: Not remembering we were flying business till we were already seated in the lounge.
Getting invited to the lounge felt a pleasant surprise. Having 2×2 seating was even more so (we even discussed which could be this small jet aircraft in the BA fleet that has 2×2 seating).
Conclusion: If the surprise of flying business, having forgotten that we paid for it months back, is the best part about flying business, there’s little reason for anyone to be paying to fly business within Europe.
TLDR: No. It’s less than even the quarterly VC investment rate in Europe.
There was a bit of chatter in the London startup investor community recently about the welcome increase in amount of funds being raised.
I remember Jon Bradford specifically mentioning close to a £1 Billion raised in a few months by 9 funds. There was a bit of a flutter around the group when JD mentioned the figure at #fplive – people wondering if all the money could even be deployed in the relatively nascent European / London tech startup ecosystem. Someone may even have mentioned valuation bubble, or some such gobbledygook.
Take a quick look at this chart from Dow Jones (source):
Click to view full image.
Last quarter VCs invested €2.4 B (~£1.8B) in European companies. At an investment run-rate of £1.8 B a quarter, and increasing, that £1 B raise in a quarter doesn’t look that big anymore.
There will be some additional liquidity from investment exits[1] – IPOs and acquisitions. But given the relatively young ecosystem in Europe – most maturing, successful European startups move(d) to the US for better valuation & operating environments – there can’t be too many exits providing the rest of liquidity.
Makes me wonder the other side now: If this £1 B raise is such a big deal, where has the VC funding been coming in from so far? We’ve been above a quarterly £1 B quarterly investing rate for over 6 quarters now. US VCs investing in Europe without direct presence?[2]
Either way, that £1 Billion figure doesn’t look as big as it sounded first up. And we really do need more of them, more frequently.
