Byline, from Timetric

The Royal Mail is — yet again — in the news, with strikes looming in the run-up to Christmas. Regardless of the rights or wrongs in the dispute, the purported decline of the Royal Mail’s service is one of those perennial British conversational topics; everyone has a story about post turning up late, or going missing.

As a regulated service, the Royal Mail is required, via PostComm, to publish statistics of their performance. The Freedom of Information Act, though, allows the public to request some rather less-common performance statistics – not least, the quantity of rubber bands used, as employed by postmen across the country for holding together bundles of letters — a number which ought to be related to how often post goes missing!

Using this together with the PostComm stats, we can indeed see that between 2006 and 2008, the number of rubber bands increased steadily, while the number of complaints about lost mail dropped quite dramatically.

Hopefully that’s not due to angry postmen using the rubber bands to restrain complaining customers …

Our friend Mark Littlewood, of the Business Leaders Network, has got his hands on some very juicy data about dealflow in the venture capital industry.

We’re spending a fair amount of time talking with potential investors at the moment, so I couldn’t resist digging into it a bit more. Turns out there’s a lot in here to be found. Here’s the Calibre One/Business Leaders Network dealflow data on Timetric, so you can start looking yourselves!

We’ve put together a report, but to get you all started:

The typical venture deal in the US is nearly twice the size of the typical deal in Europe. What’s more, the UK (which is somewhere in between) skews that; if you took the UK out of the European figures, there’d be an even bigger disparity.

What this means is that even at the depths of the current slowdown, when more deals were being done in Europe than the US:

the total value of deals in the US was still greater:

In fact, it really wasn’t close. Here’s the ratio of number of deals and ratio of capital allocated.

North American VCs, on the whole, do more deals; when they do them, the deals are bigger.

But we’re based in the UK, so…

The UK’s coming back – at least in terms of value. But are the number of deals going up? Not really:

There was a big spike in Q1 ‘08, which is surprising given the events of late ‘07 — the fall of Northern Rock. Even if that wasn’t one of the Horsemen, it was at least the first outrider of the apocalypse. Q1 of this year was anomalously bad, too. Maybe, given how long a deal takes, that’s a sign of everyone having shut down and gone home in the third and fourth quarters of 2008…

Still, what’s clear is that – at least for our purposes – the trend in the UK is going in the right direction!