March, 2009 : Seedcamp

The Mini Seedcamp mission continues with applications now open for Mini Seedcamp Ljubjana being held at the wonderful Tehnoloski Park Ljubljana on 14th May 2009. We are encouraging strong, quality startups from Slovenia, the Balkans and surrounding regions to apply, including Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia. Continuing our open door policy, any EMEA-based startup with next big web tech idea can also apply.

With local startup Zemanta being a Seedcamp Week 2007 winner, we are very excited about coming to the region and seeing what the local web tech talent has to offer. We are looking for strong, quality startups that have the talent, drive and capacity to fully embrace the opportunities that participating in a Mini Seedcamp brings. Which is receiving quality advice from top industry leaders and start building those key relationships to help drive your business. Relationships that normally take years to build, you’ll have access to in one day. Mini Seedcamps are not a conference, but an entrepreneurial ecosystem of support to strengthen and catapult your ideas into a viable business.

Check out our blog posts, videos and follow us on Twitter to see what we’re looking for, what teams get out of it and what you can do to improve your chances in winning a spot at one of the most prestigious and rewarding web tech events in Europe today. Spending the time to fill out the application comprehensively is key and communicating to us clearly your idea and strengths of your team is critical for consideration, so no skimping here!

Mini Seedcamp Ljubjana will connect 20 top quality, early stage web tech startups with over 50 regional and European esteemed, sought after and highly experienced entrepreneurs, investors and developers that will blow your socks off. From the likes of our own Saul Klein, to Ales Spetic and Andraz Tori of Zemanta and many more.

Through an interactive panel discussion and informal 1:1 sessions, teams benefit from engaging with and listening to a variety of distinguished mentors and industry leaders from PR, HR, product development, business development, marketing to name but a few. All at the top of their game – all there to help you.

You will gain invaluable insight and a solid foundation to help kick-start a viable business in Europe today. Not to mention being inspired by fellow entrepreneurs and a chance to broaden their scope within the European startup ecosystem.

Our goal is always to help as many great startups as we can to have that initial capital to kick-start their business and, of course, to make the most relevant relationships possible. As such, Seedcamp may also invest through the Mini Seedcamps or the teams may be invited to apply for the Seedcamp Week in London in September 2009, whereby 20 teams are selected from around the EMEA to attend and compete for seed funding and garner world-class connections for startups.

Applications are now open and close at midnight on Monday, 27th April 2009. For full details, updates and how to apply go to the mini site.

Rodolphe Ardanton from Wozaik, who were one of the Mini Seedcamp Paris winners in February this year, wrote an amazing Seedcamp feedback blog post and more important, what they gained from it to improve their “art of pitching”.

For all the future startup hopefuls applying to Mini Seedcamps or beyond, this is a must read! About pitching (or the complete Seedcamp feedback) by Rodolphe Ardant, posted March 24th, 2009 I think it is time to write our feedback on the Seedcamp day. Seedcamp was a really unique event as it provided us the opportunity to meet more than 50 experts in our field (entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, consultants…) and to be challenged on our vision. We have had dozens of insightful and relevant feedback on our product, our business model, our strategy… but I think that the best practice we experienced there was the “art of pitching”.

The coffee pitch The day started at 9:00 am at the Microsoft Technology Center. We were welcomed by a small breakfast and got the “team” flag stuck on our chest. Tagged like that, we had no other solution than to experiment our coffee pitch. The goal of this one is to awake your future audience (coffee is there to help you!) to get its attention during the coming elevator pitch. It is also the occasion to practice and correct your first mistakes (hoping that your target won’t pay to much attention to it due to the early hour).

The elevator pitch On the stage, you have 5 minutes (and no extra sec) and you want that these 60-70 people to remember you during the whole day (and even longer!), and get a good opinion of you and of what you do. The challenge is even harder when they already heard about 18 other start-ups and had no break for almost two hours. You should definitely practice a lot for this one.

The lunch pitch Now, if you got it right, people remember whom you are and what you do. They have in their head the single message you wanted to pass them (that you and your startup rock) during the elevator pitch, and they come to you to get deeper information. The lunch pitch is a difficult one: you have to keep talking and pitch your interlocutors, while trying to grab food everywhere to refill your batteries. If you fail eating at this time, you won’t make it until the end of the day…but it is the opportunity to have a privileged contact with the people that felt the most interested in your project.

The mentoring pitch During the rest of the day, we had four mentoring sessions with a panel of 5-10 advisors. 40 minutes shared between two teams to pitch and ask for advice. You better get prepared also for this one, knowing who are the people you are talking to. The difficult but most interesting part comes from the questions. You have to be prepared to answer specific questions on your business, and believe me; these people are smart and quickly point out the strength/weakness of your project. You better perfectly know these points to get as much as you can of these short discussions.

The restroom pitch Time to fresh up… but it is likely that the very famous guy you unsuccessfully tried to talk to during the whole day is the one washing his hands next to you. You cannot miss this opportunity…pitch him!

The wrap up pitch The day is almost over, it is 9pm and your throat feels like dry paper, having pitched the whole day. You feel exhausted, and these cups of champagne seem to be the definitive answer to your throat issues. You think you have succeeded, as you have been among the five winners. But it is not over yet. The wrap up pitch is the opportunity to gather the feedbacks of your day pitches. It is also the moment when you can engage in more passionate discussions, being more deconstructed and show that you might also be a pleasant and sympathetic person.

The investors pitch The day after, we were asked to pitch in front of the Seedcamp Investment Committee. OK, it seems that they liked our service and the team, but the question here is “should we put money in this project?” Of course they want to go deeper into your product, understand the problem you are trying to solve and the solution you propose, understand where you are in your development road map and what and when do you expect to launch. But they are also very interested on the value that their investment would procure: what are your expenses, your funding history, and how much do you need their money. You get into much further detail here than you did before, and have to be pretty convincing, as you will be highly challenged.

The TechCrunch pitch We were then invited to pitch during the TechCrunch talk held in La Cantine during the afternoon. It was almost the same format as the elevator pitch. However we only had 3 minutes to present Wozaik. This is a “media” kind of pitch; the goal is to convince potential users. They must feel that you are building the killer app and must be eager to test your product. I think the success of this kind of pitch should be an exploding beta invite queuing list.

So how to pitch? Even if we had an extensive two days to practice pitching, I am still a young beginner pitcher (and I must confess that most of the time Vincent was pitching). However, in a discussion with Laurent Chiozzotto, we agreed that a good early stage pitch should answer the 5 following questions, in this order:

What problem do you solve? Who will use your service? How do you solve the problem? (Your product/service) Why are you doing this? And finally, who are you?

We are definitely going to follow this advice to prepare for Mini Seedcamp Berlin pitches!

Nokia, ABBA, IKEA, LEGO, and saunas are just a few things the Nordics are famous for. There’s also a great pool of web tech talent mustering in the region and we can’t wait to dip into it.

Applications are now open for Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg, being held at the über cool Helsingborg SHIP on 5 May 2009, along with the help of Øresund Entrepreneurship Academy. While we are on the lookout for teams from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway, we encourage any EMEA-based startup that is ready to wow us with your product or idea to apply.

We are looking for strong, quality startups that have the talent, drive and capacity to fully embrace the opportunities that participating in a Mini Seedcamp brings. Which is receiving quality advice from top industry leaders and start building those key relationships to help drive your business. Relationships that normally take years to build, you’ll have access to in one day. Mini Seedcamps are not a conference, but an entrepreneurial ecosystem of support to strengthen and catapult your ideas into a viable business.

Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg will connect 20 top quality, early stage web tech startups with over 50 regional and European esteemed, sought after and highly experienced entrepreneurs, investors and developers that will blow your socks off. From the likes of Joachim Samuelsson of Biomain along with these notables:

Hampus Jakobsson, Co-Founder & VP Business Development, TAT
Hjalmar Winbladh, CEO, Rebtel
Martin Gren, Founder and Board Director, Axis Communications
Sam Aston,CEO, Epsilon Information Technologies
Thomas Weilby Knudsen, Manager Partner, NorthCap Partners

Applications are now open and close at midnight on Monday, 19 April 2009. For full details, updates and how to apply go to the mini site.

It’s one of those things… sometimes you get so deep, it’s difficult to get yourself back out. But we’re doing it, we’re moving our twitter account from @Seedcamp_News to @seedcamp . So, sorry to the many of you who have to re-follow us, but hope you won’t mind too much. What I like is the story behind how we got the name back. So humor me will you!

A good samaritan who apparently had our @seedcamp name on twitter one day emailed us out of the blue and just handed over the name. He thought (rightly) we could do more with it than he could. In an age of ridiculous demands on prices for URLs, it’s reassuring to see some kind folks out there in the Internet mist. So, now we’re all well aligned between all our Flicr, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, web identities. Feels good to have the house in order.

And all this time I thought I actually had the @seedcamp name and just didn’t know which email address I signed up on. I racked my brain for weeks trying to figure out what brain cell I was using when all this went wrong. I was encouraged and tempted to contact Biz Stone to see who in the world (oops, maybe me) had the name but gotta admit, I felt my request a bit small in the grand scheme of things and so waited and waited for divine inspiration.

Luckily, that kind person did get in touch with us. So thank you to him again! And pls do follow us on @seedcamp on good ole twitter.

Today saw the 20 finalists and over 60 mentors join for an intensive day of mentoring, presentations, and panel discussions at the Agora Centre in Warsaw.

The four winners are:

Thanks to all participants and partners who helped make this event such a success. If you are in Warsaw please come and join us at Balsam Bar (ul.Racławicka 99, Warsaw) from 8pm for celebratory drinks.

We are happy to announce applications are now being taken for Mini Seedcamp London, being held at the prestigious NESTA headquarters in London on 20th April 2009. While we are on the lookout for the next best startups to come out of the UK and Ireland, we encourage any startup from the EMEA to apply who are ready to take the plunge and show us what you’ve got. To increase your chances in gaining a spot, we would strongly recommend that you spend a good amount of time filling out the application comprehensively so that you can communicate with us as clearly as possible the critical strengths of your team and idea.

Once again, Mini Seedcamp London will connect 20 top quality, early stage web tech startups with over 50 regional and European industry leading and highly experienced entrepreneurs, investors and developers to participate in a day of mentoring, panel discussions and presentations.

The teams will benefit from engaging with and listening to, a variety of distinguished mentors and industry leaders from product designers and marketing specialists and venture capitalists to serial entrepreneurs. Through a series of interactive panel discussions and informal 1:1 sessions, the selected teams will gain invaluable insight and a solid foundation to help kick-start a viable business in Europe today. Not to mention being inspired by fellow entrepreneurs and a chance to broaden their scope within the European start-up ecosystem.

Our goal is always to help as many great start-ups as we can to have that initial capital to kick-start their business and of course to make the most relevant relationships possible. As such, Seedcamp may also invest through the Mini Seedcamps or the teams may be invited to apply for Seedcamp Week in September 2009 held in London, whereby 20 teams are selected from around the EMEA to attend and compete for seed funding and garner world-class connections for startups.

Applications are now open and close at midnight on Monday 6th April 2009. For full details, updates and how to apply go to the mini site.

Once again, we are very happy to announce the top teams chosen that will be wowing the Warsaw entrepreneurial community at Mini Seedcamp Warsaw on 18th March 2009 at the awesome Agora Centre.

The quality of the teams was superb and with only 20 places, choosing them was tough. Outside of the many Polish teams to apply, there was also a great mix of teams from the surrounding regions including Estonia, Hungary and Lithuania.

Some of the hopefuls are:

Autentika Contails.com EMP Game Geogoer.com HumanWay Joobili Mepi.pl myPolitIQ Opiekun Inwestora oQuizo PlayerAware Pol-Art Sp. z o.o. Programeter Psychik SkryBot Statystyczni.pl Super Developer Tacholab TimeCamp

The teams will have a chance to show off their talent and engage with distinguished mentors such as Saul Klein and Michał Brański, Founder of o2. Along with these, teams will learn from 50 other top European industry movers and shakers including VC’s, Investors and product specialists including:

Artur Kurasiński, Serial Entrepreneur/Aula Grzegorz Marczak, Blogger Krzysztof Kowalczyk, Managing Partner/President, UBIK Business Consulting Krzysztof Mikulski, Agora S.A. Michal Kreczmar, Business & Technology Publishing Director, Agora S.A. Mirka Puczko, Ex-VP of Merlin.pl, Entrepreneur/Business Angel Piotr Sienkiewicz, Entrepreneur/Business Angel, Founder of MSP and Polska On Line Tomasz Berezowski CTO/CIO TVN SA, Supervisory Board Member Onet

We look forward to coming to Warsaw in a few weeks time and being impressed by the awesome line up of web-tech talent and mentors the region has to offer.

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