This Monday, we will be returning to Paris for the final Seedcamp event of 2012. Coinciding with LeWeb, the world’s startup community will be descending on Paris and we will be bringing over 100 of our best mentors together to meet twenty of Europe’s top startups.

Last year in Paris, we met some great companies and two (Bluefields and Sush.io) ended up joining the Seedcamp Family which already included some awesome teams originating from France such as Teleportd, Stupeflix, Kwaga, Sparkeo and Psykosoft.

This year we have again selected twenty great teams and can’t wait to meet them in person.

Please meet the teams that will be taking part in Seedcamp Paris and take a look at the great companies they are building:

Our gratitude goes to our event partner, Orrick, for their support and for hosting us in their Parisian office. We would also like to thank our event sponsors, SoftLayer and Yammer, who make it possible for us to host such a great event and of course not forgetting our yearly sponsors; Google, Microsoft BizSpark and Qualcomm Ventures.

Be sure to follow our blog, Twitter and Facebook accounts to follow the event on the day!

 

On November 14th we hosted our first Seedcamp in Lisbon. It was a busy week for Lisbon with the premiere of the Startup Kids documentary and the Silicon Valley comes to Lisbon conference also taking place. We were in great company with the 20 startups coming to Seedcamp – there was a strong Portuguese representation, proving it’s a great location for early stage tech companies and a region with lots of potential and talent.

We had mentors from all over Europe joining us for a day of pitches, masterclass and mentoring. In the morning, we had the honor to be greeted by Carlos Oliveira, the Portuguese Secretary of State, who himself has successfully built and exited a startup. It was fantastic to hear him talk with lots of excitement about startups and technology. Portugal is aware of its potential to build international businesses at the highest level.

After Seedcamp was over, we spent a few more days at the Silicon Valley comes to Lisbon conference, organised by our Event Partners Beta-i. The team around Pedro and Ricardo is doing an amazing job in putting together events, initiatives, even their own accelerator program, and more. We are pleased to be able to work with such engaged partners around the world to make Seedcamp what it is.

Within the space of two months we are happy to announce that we have gone from zero to now four investments originating from Portugal. Simpletax joined us post Seedcamp Week and now we’re happy to extend the Seedcamp Family by three more portuguese startups and one from our hometurf London:

We are excited about working with these teams and helping them reach their full potential.

Finally we want to thank our Event Sponsors for their contribution to the event making it all possible; Caixa Ceral de Depositos, Softlayer, Vodafone and Yammer. It’s great to see these brands taking initiatives and supporting the European startup scene with such passion and dedication to nurturing innovation and entrepreneurial talent.

Today we’re launching version 2.0 of the Seedhack Founder’s Collaboration Agreement (download here in .DOC or in .PDF). We’ve made a couple of adjustments to the previous version that we hope will further make this document a solid tool to help launch an informal collaborating team into a formal company.

One thing we’ve added is a Vesting Schedule to the existing reverse vesting clause. We’ve had a few questions on what this should look like (a simple table can suffice) and so offer up a template to help get collaborators started.

Reverse vesting in general and bad leaver/good leaver clauses in particular are topics we get asked about a lot by entrepreneurs.

In basic terms, reverse vesting aligns the amount of time a founder puts into a company with the amount of equity that founder can walk away with at certain date by holding the founder’s shares in escrow and releasing them over time, typically over three to four years.

In the beginning, when an idea is fresh and a team is quickly gaining momentum, reverse vesting may seem unfair or irrelevant. But a number of circumstances may arise down the road that can shake up a founding team. For example, a founder may need to take a break from the entrepreneurial lifestyle to pursue more regular employment due to cash needs. Or a founder might decide to focus on a different startup – a particularly common occurrence after events like hackathons where talent and ideas are essentially speed dating and a founder may face multiple startup opportunities. Or, simply, the founders might just not get along and decide to move on. Whatever the reason, founders do sometimes need to leave and when this happens, reverse vesting all of a sudden is a very useful and fair tool.

For a good primer and additional reading on reverse vesting, the benefits to founders to include vesting from the start, and what to expect down the road, check out this post by Dave Broadwin via Simeon Simeonov’s blog, or this one by Dan Shapiro. Also check out Fred Destin’s presentation at Seedcamp Ljubljana on the Startup Lifecycle for more information on how reverse vesting is founder friendly, as well as other great insights for budding startups.

We’ve also included in version 2.0 a broad non-compete clause. The intent here is to protect the startup by preventing the development of a competing technology by one or more collaborators should they decide not to move forward with the team.  A thank you to Phil Weiss for this language.

Another big thank you to Tina Baker from Brown Rudnick for drafting the original agreement.

Hackathons and other organizations that currently support the use of this document include:

 Usage of this document:

The spirit of the doc remains the same – a starting point for discussion – and can be used as is or modified to suit the founding team’s needs.

Thanks again for all your comments on version 1 and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on v2.0.

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.seedhack.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.seedhack.com.

Both Seedcamp and Brown Rudnick LLP expressly disclaim any and all responsibility and/or liability for any loss or damage whatsoever arising out of or in connection with acts or matters done or omitted to be done in reliance upon any document, information or opinion contained on this website. The documents, information and opinions on this website have been prepared for general informational purposes only, may not reflect the most current market and legal developments and may not address all relevant business or legal issues; accordingly, such information is not promised or guaranteed to be correct or complete. Further, the documents, information and opinions on this website do not, nor are they intended to (a) constitute legal advice, (b) create an attorney-client relationship or (c) be advertising or a solicitation of any type. You should not rely upon any documents, information and opinions on this website for any purpose without seeking legal advice from licensed attorneys in the relevant jurisdiction as each situation is highly fact specific and requires a knowledge of relevant laws. Certain parts of this site link to external internet sites, and other external internet sites may link to this website. Neither Seedcamp nor Brown Rudnick LLP is responsible for the content of any external internet sites.

On Wednesday this week we’ll be joined by over 60 mentors many of whom are combining their trip to also take part in Silicon Valley comes to Lisbon. It’s going to be a buzzing week with many international mentors, investors, and startups in town.

One of our core goals is to see the best startups all over Europe. That’s why instead of our usual stop in Spain, this year we’re going to explore the Portuguese startup scene. We’d heard promising things and as you’ll see from the list of selected teams the region has certainly lived up to expectations. So without further ado please meet our Seedcamp Lisbon Teams:

Our Event Partner Beta-i has played a critical role in planning the event and we’d like to express a huge thank you to the team especially Ricardo Marvao and Pedro Rocha Vieira. Corporate partnerships are key to us on many levels and we highly value the on going support Yammer and SoftLayer offers us. We would also like to thank Vodafone and Caixa Geral de Depositos for sponsoring Seedcamp Lisbon and of course not forgetting our yearly sponsors; Google, Microsoft BizSpark and Qualcomm Ventures.

 

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Seedcamp Budapest Pitch Training

Seedcamp Budapest Pitch Training
October 24th 2012

We celebrated our 5th birthday this year and after investing in two teams at Seedcamp Budapest, we hit another great milestone: exceeding 75 investments.

We arrived in the beautiful city of Budapest on the 24th of October and headed straight to ESSCA. Here we met with the 20 selected teams and spent a few hours together preparing for the big day ahead.

On the 25th of October we hosted the day at Corvinus University, a great iconic building and perfect setting for the event. We were joined by a hugely international group of mentors, some old faces and others new. All shared a passion for disruptive technology and wanted to share their experience, knowledge and network with the ambitious entrepreneurs in the room. We kicked off with a warm welcome from our Event Partner; Peter Záboji, Founder of the EEF, welcoming everyone to Hungary and later by Rupesh Chatwani, from the EBRD, our generous Event Sponsors. The 20 teams did us proud by delivering concise 3-minute presentations, keeping the buzz high in the packed auditorium.

After a short networking break, Klaus Hommels (early investor in Skype, Facebook, Xing and Spotify), took to the floor. He shared his thoughts on the investment landscape comparing Europe, China and the US.  The key message was to think big or you’ll never get big, something that resonated well with the audience -and a key takeaway for some of the participants from less developed startup hubs.

The rest of the day consisted of mentoring, the key value add for the 20 teams. Over 60 mentors from varying backgrounds worked to catapult the selected teams onto becoming the next generation of European Titans.

Comments from the mentors present:

Winners The quality of the 20 selected teams was at an extremely high level and we’re very proud to welcome 2 new teams to the Seedcamp Family:

Futurelytics

Daniel Hastik, Co-Founder said “Seedcamp Budapest was a great way to get extended business/technical feedback on our produce and value proposition through effective and intensive mentoring sessions. We’re proud to be part of the best known European tech seed investment programme”

Futurelytics is working on solutions that allow companies to target their existing customer base more effectively. We fell in love with the team and solution because it ticks all the boxes: a group of incredibly smart people with a clear vision of the market, combined with an easy to use product that identifies the customer’s pain head on.

Daniel, Miroslav and the team are some serious statistics buffs, and this is exactly what makes Futurelytics work. We are really happy to have them join Seedcamp and can’t wait to have them with us at Campus in London.

Stealth

We also invested in a second company out of Seedcamp Budapest – one which we’re equally excited about. As the team is still working hard on their product, they prefer not to be mentioned by name… we’ll leave it at they really know what they’re doing. Stay tuned for a future update about this one.

“The Seedcamp event was amazing. Budapest is definitely underestimated as a startup hotspot, keep an eye on that. For us as a startup, it was the perfect opportunity to expand our network, get feedback to our product and fundraising plans. Seedcamp is the ideal partner to reach our next milestone and push our business to the next level!” – Co-Founder of the second company

Thank you

We’d once again like to thank our generous Event Sponsor EBRD for making this possible and a special shout out goes to Peter Záboji who was instrumental in bringing Seedcamp to Budapest. We’re incredibly grateful for his efforts in boosting the local startup scene and the relentless planning and organising that he took upon himself to ensure that Seedcamp inaugural Budapest event went down with a big bang! Here is what he has to say:

“Seedcamp in Budapest was a big boost for the startup community in the entire region! Also, we gave the VC capos an opportunity to learn best practice mentoring. It was a true win-win for Seedcamp and EEF!”

We look forward to hopefully returning next year.

On December 3rd, Seedcamp will be returning to Paris for our last event of 2012. Applications close at midnight in Paris on Tuesday the 6th of November so be sure to work hard on your application over the weekend and submit it on time.

We have always been very impressed by the talented and passionate entrepreneurs in the region and, with LeWeb in town, we’re sure Paris will be buzzing with startups. The last time we were in Paris, we met the excellent teams from Bluefields and Sush.io who joined our great teams originating from France (Teleportd, Stupeflix, Kwaga, Sparkeo and Psykosoft) in the Seedcamp family.

From the applicants, 20 of the most promising early stage tech startups will be selected to attend the event in Paris for a day of presenting, networking and mentoring with over 80 of Seedcamp’s top mentors. The winners of the event will join the Seedcamp family and will benefit from our huge network, investment and the Founders’ Pack worth over €150K.

Mentors

The 20 selected teams will spend the day being mentored by a great mix of local and international mentors from the Seedcamp network. Here is a small selection of the top mentors that will be with us in Paris:

Sponsors

We would like to thank our event sponsors, SoftLayer and Yammer, who make it possible for us to host such a great event and we would also like to thank our event partner, Orrick, for hosting us in their beautiful Parisian office.

Apply Now

Seedcamp Paris is shaping up to be one of our best events yet and is your last chance to join the Seedcamp family in 2012. Are you building an awesome startup? Do you want to be a part of this great event? If so, be sure to get your team’s application submitted on time. Applications close at midnight in Paris on the 6th of November. For more information about the process, see here.

Apply Now!