As in previous years, we’ve been ambitious about the data partners we’ve partnered with: teaming up again with LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Dealroom.co, the London Stock Exchange, Quid, European Startup Initiative, Signal and Invest Europe, and adding new partners including the European Investment Fund, Craft.co, and TokenData.
The strength and integrity of our report relies on being able to draw meaningful insights from a number of different sources and data points. With the support of our data partners we have been able to carefully build the most accurate picture of what is going on in European tech, right now.
One area we wanted to double down on in 2017 was geographic diversity, to ensure our report had roots across Europe’s broad and diverse ecosystem - not just the traditional hubs.
So this year we have worked with a number of strategic distribution partners to help us delve deep into Europe’s ecosystem. Our survey was conducted from 6th September - 15th October 2017 and with the help of our distribution partners we received over 3,500 responses - including over 1,000 European founders from across the continent. The survey enabled us to gather thousands of qualitative insights from those right at the heart of what’s happening on the ground, across the wide European ecosystem, not just London, Paris and Berlin but also Reykjavik, Sevilla, Sofia and everywhere in between.
We have also spoken intimately with a select group of over 50 founders, entrepreneurs, investors and policymakers at the cutting edge of Europe’s technology landscape - capturing their insights in different sections of the report to bring the hard data to life. In the process of putting together this report we spoke to José Neves (Farfetch), Herman Narula (Improbable), Ian Rogers (LVMH), Mounir Mahjoubi (Macron’s digital minister), Dr Jeannette zu Furstenberg (La Famiglia), Ilkka Paananen (Supercell), Urska Srsen (BellaBeat), Antoine Bordes (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research - FAIR), Fleur Perellin (Korelya Capital), Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp) and Robin Klein (LocalGlobe) - to name just a few.