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Hi Sifted Reader,

Happy Friday! Here's today's line up:

🚪 When's it time for a founder to go?
💥 21 SaaS startups set to boom this year
🤖 How to make GPT-3 sound less drunk
🇪🇸 Inside Spain's new startup law

\Startup Life

How do you know when it's time to step down?

There are plenty of examples of founders stepping down and starting again.

Tom Blomfield left GoCardless to start Monzo, Josefin Landgard left healthtech giant Kry to start wellbeing startup Mantle and, last week, Amit Gudka announced he's leaving energy startup Bulb to start a new company.

What makes some founders stick around, while others move on?

Miriam Partington finds out.

\A message from our sponsor Techleap.nl

How a small country became a tech heavyweight

Techleap’s 2021 Summit featured interactive sessions and deep dives into the rapidly growing Dutch tech ecosystem. Missed it? You can still watch the keynotes, including a Q&A with Constantijn van Oranje on the Dutch startups that made it big like MessageBird, Adyen and Takeaway.com.

Watch the video here.

\For Members Deeptech

21 European SaaS startups set to boom in 2021, predicted by VCs

European SaaS is having its moment in the limelight. UiPath is now Europe's most valuable private tech company and Hopin — which has built a SaaS platform for online events — is the fastest growing company in Europe.

But which other SaaS companies are set to have a bumper year in 2021?

We spoke to Europe's top SaaS investors to find out.

See their predictions here.

\Deeptech

How to get AI to sound less drunk

GPT-3 has created a lot of buzz since its release a few months ago: the system can generate plausible conversations, write op eds for The Guardian and post comments on Reddit.

But GPT-3 still can't make a point; it behaves as a stream of consciousness, which means its next sentences feed off its last ones.

AI still lacks an understanding of the world — but that might be about to change.

Laurent Sorber explains how.

\Policy

What to expect from Spain's new startup law

Spain's set to pass a new piece of legislation, aimed at giving entrepreneurs better tools to compete on the world stage.

Members of the country's startup community have long been calling for better investment incentives, reforms to stock options, and new visa options for attracting international tech talent.

So what will the law offer, and will it help?

Tim Smith finds out.

\Opinion

How to coach your leadership team to greatness

As a company grows, a founder's leadership style has to evolve too.

Gillian Davis, a leadership expert who has worked with tech companies like Google and WeTransfer, says one key step a founder of a scaleup must make is shifting from being the performer to being the coach.

Read Davis' tips on how to do just that.

News that Matters

😱 London-based virtual events platform Hopin is looking to raise a $400m funding round at a pre-money valuation of $5bn for its Series C, according to Techcrunch, adding that Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst were likely to lead the round. It's a wild valuation for a company that launched less than a year ago, but the company has seen remarkable pandemic-fueled growth. For more on the company, see here.

💰 2020 was a record year for VC investment across major European cities. But fortunes of different cities diverged sharply, with London and Paris surging ahead, while Berlin and Tel Aviv fell back. Sifted's Maija Palmer looks through the data.

🇬🇧 Latest data from the UK government's Future Fund, which issues convertible loans to companies, shows that 1,140 companies have been approved for the scheme, with £1.12bn given out in loans. It's a lot more than the £500m the government originally committed to the scheme.

⚽ Paris-based digital football platform Sorare has raised a €40m Series A round, led by Benchmark and including participation from angel investors like Reddit's Alexis Ohanian and German footballer Oliver Bierhoff. The company's mission is to build a platform where fans can share their passion for football, and is also currently designing tradeable digital football cards.

💰 Maze, a user testing platform that helps companies run tests at scale on new design features, has raised a $15m Series A round led by Emergence Capital.

🌲 TreeCard, a UK fintech that offers spending cards made out of wood and promises to give part of its interchange fees to fund reforesting, has raised $5.1m. The company was founded last year by Thiel fellow Jamie Cox, who previously cofounded Cashew. TreeCard says it wants to become the "leading green finance brand".

🌿 In France, the government has said it will commit €300m to finance more greentech in the country, along with outlining measures to increase the reconditioning of smartphones, tablets and computers.

🚍 Everdrop, which produces a dissolvable cleaning tablet, has raised $21.8m, in a round led by Felix Capital. The tablets are designed to be dissolved in water and become a cleaning spray for the kitchen or bathroom, meaning there's no need to ship water.

🚍 Bluebus, an electric bus manufacturer, has announced it will partner with Navya — which is working on self-driving car technology — to develop autonomous, self-driving buses.

Sifted Suggests

💸 Javier Perez, Mastercard's former European president, is setting up a new $100m fund for early-stage payments startups. Despite the new fund being based in Miami, his eye is firmly on Europe. Sifted spoke exclusively to Perez about his plans.

🌳 Carbon capture tech is garnering more and more interest as countries around the world pursue goals like reaching global net-zero by 2050. Sifted's Connor Bilboe looks at the ways Europe's startups are capturing carbon, and what challenges they face.

🇪🇺 In Europe, entrepreneurship isn’t equally accessible to everyone, and neither is a career in tech, says Sifted's Marie Mawad. The situation isn’t specific to Europe, but it is a problem the region needs to tackle with more insistence. As part of the Scale Up Europe initiative, here's a look at the problem and what's at stake.

🌴 The future of remote work? 46% of remote workers say their companies are planning on permanently allowing remote work, according to Buffer. But what do first-time remote employees think about this new working life? We ran through the data.

🚗 The Supreme Court owned Uber, what happens next? An interesting read on the deluge of lawsuits the company could face in the future, and what it all means for the rest of the gig economy.