As China's economy stumbles, some Chinese investors are heading to the UK instead. Cocoon Networks, a $713M fund backed by China Equity Group (first investors in Chinese search giant Baidu) and Hanxin Capital, launched this morning in London. The new fund also announced it's partnering with the University of London to build city's biggest incubator.
Speaking of the U.K. tech scene, Harry Stebbings of The Twenty Minute VC sat down with Accel's London-based GP Fred Destin yesterday to chat about the European venture scene, the intimacy of founder-VC relationships, and the main reasons that startups fail.
If you ask Anshu Sharma of Storm Ventures, though, startups fail because they're falling for the stack fallacy: the mistaken belief that it's trivial to build the layer above your own. It's a problem that plagues many of today's biggest tech companies, too, including Oracle, which is losing to Salesforce in Oracle-powered CRM SaaS, and Apple, which has had difficulty going up the stack to build simple apps (maps, for instance).
Heads up, it's another down round: Just days after news of Foursquare's down round broke last week, audio and wearable tech unicorn Jawbone announced it's raised $165M in equity at a valuation of $1.5B. That represents a 45% cut from the $3.3B valuation Jawbone reported in 2014 along with its last equity round.
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