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How Sweden built one of Europe’s hottest startup ecosystems

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  Sweden is perhaps one of the world’s hottest tech hubs right now. It has long been home to Spotify and Klarna, but this latest wave of companies — from legal AI startup Legora to vibe-coding tool company Lovable — has left everyone wondering what’s going on in one of the world’s happiest countries. Sophia Bendz, a general partner at Cherry Ventures, stopped by Equity to break down the latest in Stockholm’s startup ecosystem. Her answer for why the country has produced so many buzzy startups: Being a founder is actually cool. When she worked at Spotify years ago, the cool thing was to become a banker or go into consulting. “Now, I think a lot of people optimize for creating stuff and optimizing for both sort of freedom and probably wealth.” This year, the startup ecosystem has raised $2.8 billion in funding, according to Dealroom , and is projected to hit at least $5 billion. Last year, the ecosystem raised $3.2 billion. Nothing has quite matched the $8.5 billion raised in 2021 — ...
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Hollywood celebs are getting into microdrama apps

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  Hollywood’s finest — the people accustomed to massive eight-figure checks and exotic movie sets — are now betting on something much smaller: microdramas. Microdramas are short, scripted series designed to be watched on phones. Episodes typically run just a few minutes, and often feature soap opera-style plots, dramatic twists, and cliffhangers designed to keep viewers watching, and often paying, for the next episode. The format took off in China before rapidly gaining traction internationally. Omdia estimates that U.S. revenue generated by microdramas is expected to reach $1.5 billion this year. A growing number of apps have emerged to capitalize, including ReelShort and DramaBox, and even TikTok has entered the market, launching its own app, PineDrama , earlier this year. Now, Hollywood talent is starting to get involved, whether by starring in new series, launching their own companies, or investing in platforms. It’s understandable. Movie studios are looking for cheaper and fa...
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“We’re not doing 30 bets a year”: Vijay Pande on betting small after running $4 billion at a16z

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  It used to be that Vijay Pande was better known in academic circles than investor circles. That changed pretty abruptly a dozen years ago, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — who’d spent their firm’s first five years explicitly avoiding healthcare and life sciences — decided the category was worth betting on after all and handed the keys to Pande. At the time, he was a Stanford chemistry professor who was best known for building Folding@home, the distributed-computing project that turned millions of home PCs into a supercomputer for disease research. Over the next decade-plus, he grew a16z’s bet into a practice managing close to $4 billion. So it was somewhat unexpected when in June of last year, Pande walked away from it all to start something much smaller. In fact, his new firm, VZVC , co-founded with longtime investor Zach Werner, is built around a handful of concentrated bets a year rather than dozens, it has no associates, and it relies heavily on AI for its day-to-day o...
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