Lena Stocker, VC from DTCP Growth on European B2B Software Investing

**Grace Gong** (0:00)
However, I think the first one. Oh, we're live. The first one.
Perfect, we are live. Sorry, I clicked before streaming our annals, but okay. North. Hi, Lena, welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Lena Stocker** (0:11)
Hi, Grace, thanks for having me.

**Grace Gong** (0:13)
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Okay. So I want to start with, obviously, I'm a huge fan of DTCP, you and Lance and the team, and maybe we could start with your background since you were based in Europe, and now you come to the Bay Area very often.
How did you get involved in DTCP? Obviously, you have worked at various different investment roles, whether it's from Northzone or Redstone, among many others. What were some core lessons that you've learned early on in your career shaping into who you are today?

**Lena Stocker** (1:26)
Sure. So actually, my way into venture was, well, it takes time to understand the game and to break into it. Back then, I wrote my master thesis about data-driven sourcing and investing.
Everything around, like now you have Harmonic and Spectre and all those tools. I mean, it's many years ago now. But it was at the beginning of this whole trend of, do you want to buy it? Do you want to build? How do you basically find the best deals? And not only volume, but also quality of deals. And with that, I interviewed a lot of VCs. And one of them was Redstone. And then I actually worked for them right after. It was an internship in the beginning.
But then I felt the classic NBB logo, and kind of school also doesn't hurt. So I felt like doing basically BCG before actually really going back into Venture makes more most sense for my personal career. So I went to the Boston Consulting Group in Munich, was staffed on various projects. I think still it's a really, really great school. I'm glad that I got to see that. Also, there are quite a lot of due diligence there, which then actually became relevant later for my job at DTCP because BCG has a so-called pipe practice where you do tech due diligence for private equity companies and also for other type of companies. So that was very, very helpful, like laid a good ground to move into that space.
And then, yeah, I was tired out of BCG earlier than I was planning to. But yeah, it was basically headhunter coming, approaching me and then, yeah, I went to Northzone in Berlin. And from then, it was much more focused on seed series A.
And then from then went to DTCP. And so it was not a huge, huge difference because DTCP series B onwards. But I feel like especially now, if you look at rounds and dynamics and sizes of rounds, today's series A's are almost like series B's we had a couple of years ago. So it was a pretty smooth transition, I would say. I think the only difference and that's actually what I really like about DTCP is, we're very, very numbers driven. So obviously we look at the classic things like, what's the team looking like? Are they strong? Do we believe in the team? What's the market looking like? The TEM, also the timing like why now? Why should we invest right now in this very moment? But not only that, but we're very, very numbers and metrics driven. So really, before we go into the depths of anything else, we really look at the metrics of the company and you see a lot. By having the key numbers, like top line growth, efficiency, sales efficiency, cash efficiency, ARR and revenue run rate development, churn retention, all those things are telling you a lot about the company, both the history and also where you feel like it's going to go in the future.

**Grace Gong** (4:15)
For sure. I have so many questions on all things metrics because I feel like the Silicon Valley do everything great besides the metrics.
Everything looks super crazy on paper. But I want to start with I guess, when you're thinking about the Europe investing versus the US, and obviously we have a bunch of our dinner or different stuff, and you probably have seen a lot of the Bay Area culture. What would you say is the main difference between the European ecosystem?