Our good friends at Swede recently hosted workshops with each of the Seedcamp 7 companies to discuss brand, user experience and design, Swede’s specialities. The teams found it very useful indeed.

For those too busy to read the whole post, here were our key takeaways:

  1. Balance of speed and introspection – Startups are under constant pressure to move fast and show step change in progress all in a short time. It’s critical, especially at the early stage to take a step back and go back to what problems are we trying to solve and what users needs are 

  2. Let others in – I think all the teams learned to bring others into their small nucleus and use that fresh insight to really develop their offering and products. It’s hard to let go but important to learn how to as you grow 

  3. Guidance versus direction – There is an art itself to taking feedback and applying it. We see real growth and maturity in the way the teams participated in the sessions, took in feedback, and retained ownership rather than letting others direct their business and products  

    For more, here were the insights gleaned by the teams in their own words.

    “Swede have an excellent way of merging creativity with business logic. They walked us through the creation of a high level visual representation of the market prior to BaseKit – helping us to understand the key problems and pains that need to be addressed. We then projected an ideal solution forward into the future, creating a visual of a new better market with BaseKit as a central point. Swede helped us to see our business from refreshing angles, have helped us to gain a deeper understanding of our customers – and have helped us start to shape our ideas regarding the delivery of an exceptional user experience. Thank you Swede!”

    Richard Best, CEO BaseKit 

    “It is said that about entrepreneurs that they are so focused on their daily startup work that they can no longer see the forest from the leafs. It was our case and I think the case of every web entrepreneur out there. What Swede managed to do so elegantly was to help us extract all the things we knew about our business, mix them with our goals and aspirations and sketch a clear path for our company and us as entrepreneurs. Don’t think of them as consultants as they will not push ideas at you, but as trainers who will help you crystallize what you already knew and felt. Working with them was extremely rewarding for us, useful and fun.”

    Vladimir Oane, CEO uberVU  

    “You rarely get the chance to go into this much depth about your product with someone not immediately involved in it — such a several-hour mentoring session is immensely useful, and I’d recommend it to anyone starting a business. It’s not that *they* necessarily give you new ideas, but they make you re-examine your own assumptions by putting them up on a big board, which can lead to all kinds of insights.”

    Chris Clay, CEO Soup.io 

    Swede also wrote a summary post stuffed with useful start-up advice on brand, user experience and design. Good stuff.

    Thanks to Swede for hosting the workshops, Scottish Equity Partners and Eden Ventures for letting us use their offices.

Seedcamp is proud to have been selected as a Network Partner for the Microsoft BizSpark Program.

In summary Bizspark allows start-up very low cost access (USD $100) to Microsoft’s development software and server tools. See below for the full spiel.

Microsoft® has an exciting new program specifically designed to provide early stage Startups with software, support, and visibility to help ignite your success. The program, called BizSpark™, provides access to:

Eligibility requirements are minimal: If you’re a privately held company, building a software-based product or service (even using open source code), in business for fewer than three years, and with less than USD$1M in annual revenue, you’re in!

To join BizSpark, you must be sponsored by a BizSpark Network Partner, such as Seedcamp. You’ll find more program details here www.microsoftstartupzone.com. When you’re ready to sign up, contact us (alasdair[at]seedcamp.com) and get your enrollment code.

Once you have your enrollment code, joining BizSpark is fast and easy. No payment or credit card information is required, and there are no upfront costs. (Microsoft will assess a USD$100 program offering fee at the end of participation in the program, or the end of three years, whichever comes first.)

Get your Startup fired up! Visit the Microsoft Startup Zone to learn more!

Silicon Valley, as everyone knows, is home to many of the innovative companies like Intel, Google, Sun, Yahoo and countless others that were all born and raised here.There must be something in the water (or the mineral deposits) which encourages free thinking, innovation and daring.

We firmly believe that in seeding European teams that are building global companies, we should also integrate them in a global mentor network. As such we organized a Seedcamp excursion to this mecca of innovation and introduce the Seedcamp teams to some of the pioneers.

Seedcamp in the Valley

Eleven of the Seedcamp winners and finalists met with over 50 mentors at Microsoft’s Mountain View complex. The format consisted of panel discussions and our signature mentoring sessions.

The first panel focused on founders with Peter Pham, Leonard Speiser, Eric Ries, and Jo Beninato, all speaking with Dave McClure as moderator.

Topics/themes:

The second Angels and VC panel featured Saul Klein, Ariel Poler, Chris Sacca, Jeff Clavier and was moderated by Michael Arrington. This led to an entertaining discussion fuelled by Michael challenging the panellists who certainly had differing opinions.

Topics of contention included:

See what attendees thought through our Friend Feed.

Many thanks to The Microsoft Conference Centre, our kind hosts. And Orrick who treated us to some post event drinks and food at their offices.

Investor Day was hosted by our friends at Polaris Ventures and TextMarks at the nautically themed and yet excellent, Dogpatch labs in Pier 38.

At Facebook we met with the guys in charge of Facebook connect and internationalisation.

A somewhat impromptu meeting with Twitter led to the teams chatting with the founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Jeff Veen.

Yahoo lined up some key figures from the teams in charge of the APIs and the Developers Network, you can see videos of the teams here.

At Google teams met the Adwords, Android, YouTube and Analytics for some technical nitty gritty.

The Mozilla Labs also met with the companies, and wrote this awesome blog post!

Down on the Techcrunch ranch teams presented what they are working on and uberVU got TCed! The TC team also shared valuable advice on dealing with the media, product launch, and being very conscious about the timing of everything in order to get the most return for any PR/Media outreach.

In summary the teams met 70-80 experts from Silicon Valley who will be an integral part of their global network and help these companies grow and succeed. Huge thanks to Dave McClure, master of 10,000 hats, and our host for the week.

With Seedcamp back from making the rounds in Silicon Valley last week, Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp, will be amongst other distinguished industry leaders speaking on a panel focusing on Gathering Resources at Cambridge University’s popular Enterprise Tuesday event this evening.


Enterprise Tuesday aims to introduce participants to the world of business, as well as to encourage and inspire individuals to pursue their entrepreneurial ambition.  It is a free evening programme open to all Cambridge University staff and students, other universities and members of the local high tech business community.  For more information on the event, check out www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/enterprise/index.html.

At last Friday’s Seedcamp ‘Demo Day’, the Seedcamp 7 showed off what they’ve been working on for the past six weeks. We saw some great progress and equally interesting comments from the mentors who came along for this web show-and-tell.

A quick progress update

• The main progress has been on the companies’ products, which now show an increased focus on their customers’ demands.
• We saw encouraging sign up and retention analytics.
• And some companies already have clients wanting to implement and pay!

Comments from the Advisors

The mentors who came to Demo Day gave our start-ups some indispensable feedback for taking their ventures forward. But much of their advice applied not only to our Seedcamp 7, but is also valuable to anyone running a tech company at the moment.

Seedcamp week, back in September, coincided with the collapse of Lehman’s Brothers and the start of a massive shake-up of the world’s financial system. Inevitably, the financing of tech companies has been affected and surviving the downturn has been the focus of much of our mentors’ advice. This is what they had to say about how to stay ahead of the game…

We are now in a buyers’ market and start-up valuations are likely to fall. This is because investors’ reckon it’s going to take longer for them to get their return.

  1. Minimise burn rates and be as effective as possible with spending. You will achieve more without needing new funds and it will impress investors by demonstrating that their money will be worked hard.
  2. Make money! Running a profitable company puts you in a much stronger position when it comes to funding growth simply because you don’t need the money.
  3. It’s all about your product, so make sure you focus on it! As was commented, the ‘land grab’ is over, so worry less about market share, just make sure you have the best product released as soon as possible.

Al

Already six weeks has passed from Seedcamp Week 2008 and the teams have submerged themselves into growing their business here in London. This could not have been achieved without the help of Seedcamp supporters like Sun Microsystems and their Startup Essentials programme which helps startup companies grow and scale. They have kindly sponsored desks for three months to both UberVU and Basekit at one of their own start-up companies, Huddle, within the trendy Bermondsey area, a perfect set-up to access and mingle with the brightest minds coming out of the UK today.

We are very excited to announce the dates of this year’s mini-Seedcamps!

Tel Aviv – February 2nd 2009
Paris – early March 2009
Warsaw – mid-March 2009
London – mid-April 2009
Berlin – 5th May 2009
Stockholm – 19th May 2009
Kiev – 9th June 2009

The motives of our mini-Seedcamps are the same as those of Seedcamp Week (in summary attending a Seedcamp will give your start-up team enormous validation and access to a world-class network of advisors to help you with every aspect of your business, plus a direct route to seed and venture capital.)

By going on the road we hope to amplify Seedcamp Week’s activities all over Europe’s local geographies.

So keep checking our site for more details on how your team can apply. Or, if you are overwhelmed by the prospect of Seedcamp coming to your town and want to get involved NOW give me a shout Alasdair[AT]Seedcamp.com

Al

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