Titans of Tech 2019 by GP Bullhound

Every year, GP Bullhound runs an event titled “Titans of Tech”. Yesterday, it was the opportunity for Manchester to learn about the past performance of the largest European tech companies and learn about future unicorns. When the research report came out in June 2019, I blogged about it. But yesterday was our chance to listen and engage with the GP Bullhound team including Hugh Campbell, Javed Haq, Edwin Prior and Bev Boettcher among others.

 

 

It was great to see UnifiedVU Partner, Pipedrive recognised as one of the forthcoming European Unicorns. Pipedrive has done an amazing job in attacking the CRM market dominated by Salesforce.com, taking a bottom-up approach. But they entered the market by being the first company to visualise the sales pipeline, which we replicated on UnifiedVU for Salesforce, SugarCRM and CapsuleCRM before any of them offered the feature.

 

 

Some of the highlights of the research presented include:

1. The number of new European tech companies becoming unicorns in 2019 increased to 21 from 13.
2. Among the European tech companies who lost unicorn status include On the Beach from Manchester and Purple Bricks and Wonga from London.
3. Europe now has 84 billion dollar companies of which 27 comes from the UK. The UK produces far more unicorns than any other European country.
4. Index Ventures have invested in 18 European unicorns, followed by Accel and Insight with 11 each.

 

 

Manchester hosts many tech events by many organisations these days, unlike when old Techcelerate built Manchester’s Tech Ecosystem from 2006 to 2013. Among these, I value GP Bullhound events highly. Unfortunately, most events are only attended by a dozen or so tech entrepreneurs. To me, these events should be must-attend events in any tech entrepreneur’s calendar. It is sad to see about a 50% drop out on the day.

 

New Techcelerate only runs an informal event series called Techcelerate Coffees. We achieve a near 100% turn out for our Manchester events. In order to achieve this, we had to cap our events at 25 and make damn sure everyone attends. If not, they are reminded to cancel their tickets so that those in the waiting list can attend. Perhaps GP Bullhound should consider a similar tactic. It does add an extra overhead to the organisation, so it comes at a cost.