The organizers of Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin (CMP and O’Reilly) have invited Seedcamp to host a session on “Getting Started” from 1:30pm-4:30pm on Monday, November 5th. We’re excited to have this session in Germany as our first On the Road stop. Each national community is an integral part of Seedcamp and as such we look forward to meeting many start-ups and mentors from the local Germany community at Web 2.0 Expo.
When designing the session we thought through what would be most useful for the startups attending. We segmented the 3-hour session into 3 key pieces that model the experience of start-ups and mentors during Seedcamp Week.
In the first hour, we will have a panel session with Seedcamp Week participants to understand their experience in starting-up their companies and the key takeaways from developing their products and learning from mentors.
In the 2nd hour, we will hear from local mentors both about what they are doing in Germany/Europe to support start-ups and to address some basic topics on starting up. Panelists include Christophe Maire, Oliver Beste, Klaus Hommels, Lukasz Gadowski, Max Niederhofer, and Stefan Glaenzer.
In the final hour we will briefly discuss how Seedcamp works and applications for next year. We will end with what was one of the most valuable elements of Seedcamp Week , small group breakout discussions with the panelists and mentors. This is where you can get some direct feedback and advice so enjoy it! Mentors include Felix Peterson, Paul Jozefak, Stefan Tirtey, Eric Wahlforss, Fabian Hansmann, Olivier Schupebach, Gerald Heydenreich, Gayathri Radhakrishnan, Oren Michaels, and Bjoern Baehre.
So, if you haven’t signed up yet for Web 2.0 Expo please do so now using the promotional code MLUTBE05(this gives you €100 discount). We are dedicated to making it a very engaging and interactive 2-way session.
Also, come say hi to us. We look forward to meeting all the great new start-ups at the event.
As promised Seedcamp will be providing feedback for teams who applied to Seedcamp07.
This Monday and Tuesday, we will be offering feedback in 10-minute slots over a course of 4 hours. Please sign up for a slot at the Seedcamp Wiki . If the slots fill up, we will help find additional solutions for getting to you some helpful comments.
We hope this will be helpful to all of you.
Seedcamp Week is over and the Seedcamp 6 have been announced. The teams are now in London working 24-7 on building great products. Everyone involved can’t wait to see how they develop over the next 3 months.
What’s really inspiring is to see how active the start-up community in Europe is right now. There are so many great events coming up and Seedcamp is actively involved. Yesterday, Seedcamp was invited to Microsoft’s half-day conference focused specifically around supporting UK software start-ups. It was a good, small event that helps continue the discussion on how large corporates like Microsoft can support start-ups. The Startup Accelerator Programme is the kind of initiative that enables start-ups to work closely with and leverage what Microsoft can offer. We have been happy about the strong support Microsoft has shown from the early days of setting up Seedcamp, through the Seedcamp Week, and on an on-going basis.
We are also thrilled to be working with Ryan Carson and his FOWA. Ryan was a great mentor at Seedcamp Week and we’re looking forward to checking out the great content he and his team have put together. It should be another intense few days. Seedcamp and some of the Seedcamp 6 will be exhibiting at the Expo. Please do stop by our stand, say hello, and discuss more effective ways of supporting the entrepreneur community. It will be great to see many of the mentors that came to Seedcamp Week as well.
On October 19th, many of the Seedcampers will be in attendance again at Minibar in London. This is a great event targeted towards start-ups and developers. It gives a unique opportunity for folks to build a strong network with each other. I have already received great feedback from Seedcampers who attended the last one. So, if you fall in the target audience, you should make every effort to take part.
We have always said Seedcamp is about Europe at large. So from November, we’re taking Seedcamp on the road. This year, we’ll be in Berlin in November and Paris in December so we can start to reach out to the many teams that applied to Seedcamp this year and in general to talk about how Europe’s next generation of entrepreneurs can continue to build a strong community in each country but across Europe as well. Seedcamp is working closely with O’Reilly and CMP to organize a start-up focused session at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin in November. I’ll blog more about this in time. Finally, we’ll also work closely with Loic Le Mur’s Le Web 3 to organize another start-up and Seedcamp focused session to talk more with the local French community and see the best ways of building strong Seedcamp and entrepreneurship foundations there.
So, I encourage the Seedcamp community and Europe’s entrepreneurs to take every advantage of the various events organized for the rest of 2007 and beyond. We want to keep the conversation going so please contributing to our Facebook group , Forum , and if you have something you’d like to say to the Seedcamp world, we’re always looking for guest posts on our Blog . We love to talk, so let us know what more we can do and where you’d like to see Seedcamp on the road next year.
As part of the ongoing series of contributed blogs from Seedcamp’s 20 finalists, we hear today from Anne Soh at Picolex– an technology to help lawyers and bankers easily access detailed, industry-specific information through their Blackberries.
Danny Rimer’s quote on Day 1 of Jim Barksdale’s folksy mantra resounded throughout Seedcamp week. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. I certainly was inspired by the founders, developers, product people, and marketers who came to give us their time, tell us their stories and answer our questions. The panels and the contact felt intimate, supportive and unbelievably exciting. It was like getting a preview of a very small club whose members are brilliant, world changing visionaries, and who seem to always work within 3 degrees of each other. I wonder if this feeling would have been the same at a camp in Silicon Valley. My guess is ..not now. The community and market there, as in New York’s Silicon Alley, are already too mature. Although Seedcamp was modeled on YCombinator in Boston, there has been a significant amount of advance chatter about the likelihood of a Silicon Valley-like community working in Europe (slim). However, the feeling in London that week, gateway to Europe, Eastern Europe and beyond, was pioneering. More wildcatter, less jaded.
I asked Hussein Kanji from Accel whom I met at the Techcrunch party to define what was so singular about the Valley. “I miss the intellectual vibrancy of the place [Silicon Valley]. … there’s a lot more diversity in thought and there is a can do attitude that only really exists in the bay area.” I think what Seedcamp succeeded in doing was to import a critical mass of the “elders” of the industry who all share the change-the-world ethos that exists in California and also believe that it can be replicated in Europe. Put in a petri dish with 20 passionate European teams and mix with chaotic spontaneity.
I can see so clearly why Ryan’s Buildersite was chosen as one of the winners, in part because he almost made me cry on Friday morning with his simple, quiet explanation of why he does what he is doing, and the very personal, emotional seed from which his idea and company sprang. Someone during the week, probably one of the excellent women from Sparkpr, told us to find our stories. Our “Steve Jobs in a garage” story that we would one day tell to a reporter who was interested in our beginning. Ryan already has his. Mine was much less compelling and in the end, it and the lack of a strong team with chemistry (kind of like those guys and gal at schoolofeverything) knocked Picolex out of the running. Robin Klein, a gentleman, kind soul and curious mixture of old school and modern day VC, told me very simply on the last day of camp, “You needed to demonstrate your ownership of the idea, the product and your company.”
We took a straw poll at the end of each day of camp, as to which of the twenty companies we would buy shares in if we could, and three of my early week votes were Reavia, Wallstreetdocs and Zemant. Zemanta for its thrilling auto hyperlinking idea, Wallstreetdocs – which served a hyper-targeted parallel demographic like my own, and Reavia, whose idea was so solid, whose market pain as so obvious, I considered it in my own lay opinion to a globally disrupting force.
But in the end, I really just wanted to vote for everyone. For the Scots of Playfair, Dale and Gordon, because Gordon was good sport enough to change his serious, historical, and academic presentation on Monday by opening with a Paris Hilton joke by Thursday. For Oron, so modest as to ask me whether co-inventing the USB drive was really that much of an “impressive fact.” For the Urbee and Tagmore boys for their sweetness and camaraderie. For Richard of Tickex, honest enough to admit the real reason why he won’t join Facebook. For Dutch-American Ed, whose pre-occupation with a Ferrari on Friday was an interesting segue to what women really think about men. For Debatewise David for the many interesting discussions about everything, particularly the psychological underpinnings of public debaters and whether Arsenal is really all that. For the Ave 7 boys, for taking my Day One teasing with such equanimity. And finally, for Gary of WSD for putting up with all of my crap.
I had a really great time.
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