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Last week startups, entrepreneurs, investors and the greater tech community joined us in Berlin for the final Seedcamp Week of the year. 2013 was a big year already for us and with Seedcamp Week Berlin marking the fourth and the last big event for Seedcamp following two US trips and 15 Mini Seedcamps all across Europe. We travelled Europe and the US, meeting exciting teams, all-star entrepreneurs, some of the world’s most renowned investors and local tech communities.

And what a great way to end the year! Seedcamp Week Berlin was a great success, with 19 teams from all over Europe participating in the year’s final opportunity to join the Seedcamp family. The teams descended on Berlin from all corners of Europe, with Lisbon, Moscow, Trento and Riga all represented.

With generous support from Microsoft and their Microsoft Ventures Accelerator, including use of their brand new event space at Unter den Linden in centre of Berlin and a mixer with their Ventures crew, the 19 teams had the opportunity to share their visions with the greater tech community and had the opportunity to meet some rockstar mentors from all over Europe. Each day kicked off with 3 minute pitches by the teams to an audience full of some of the most active and experienced in the tech community.

Following the pitches, we had some amazing speakers with us. On Wednesday, Seedcamp alum Lukas Fittl shared both inspirational and educational lessons he learned from building startups and gave a very insightful presentation applying his learnings. Eze Vidra, Head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, followed with a talk on tech ecosystem creation and proliferation, reminding us all of the importance of building bridges across tech communities. On Thursday, Marco Boerries, Founder of NumberFour, joined us at the inspiring venue Lehrter17 for a fireside chat moderated by Nicolas Gabrysch from Osborne Clarke. Reflecting on his decades of experience as a leader and innovator in the tech industry, Marco shared candid insights and learnings from his career, ranging from fundraising to life-work balance to sources of inspiration.

A big thanks to Microsoft Ventures Accelerator, Stephan Jacquemot and Evgenia Dobrovinska for helping us make Seedcamp Week Berlin happen.

We’re excited to announce the new teams to join Seedcamp following Seedcamp Week Berlin. Seven teams spanning fintech to email optimisation to content creation will be joining the Seedcamp program.

• Buzztale, Riga, Latvia – BuzzTale enables anyone to create rich, visual real-time stories.
• Cashtag, Lisbon, Portugal – cashtag is a cloud-based mobile payment network.
• myTips, Kiev, Ukraine – Interactive on-screen tutorials without coding
• Popcorn Metrics, Lisbon, Portugal – Makes it super fast and super easy to integrate advanced web analytics, without code
• Satago, London, UK – Technology to help businesses get paid on time.
• SquadMail, Berlin, Germany – SquadMail is like “Dropbox for Email”. Our shared email folders let teams collaborate over email.
• Zercatto, Porto, Portugal – Zercatto allows investors to follow the best in the financial markets, and profit like them.

Kristoffer Parup writes about his experience interning at Seedcamp. He shares some valuable insights what it’s like to be a part of the Seedcamp Team and shares where others before him have gone. 

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Growth is the essential part of advancing from A to B. Be it linear growth, exponential growth or even unpredicted explosive growth, the positive forward-moving momentum set about by successfully encountering new challenges (or opportunities) is critical for advancement. After all, it is what drives companies, sectors, economies – and people.

Seedcamp creates opportunity for growth. The startups that join the Seedcamp Family will be presented with a wide set of opportunities that, if seized, will result in growth – as underlined in the recent infographic displaying the results of 6 years dedication to growing companies.

What only a smaller group of people know is that Seedcamp also presents opportunities for growing as an individual by offering two internship positions. The Seedcamp Team consists of five people, and the two additional intern seats are therefore not only an integral part the team but also a factor for how Seedcamp operates. As an intern at Seedcamp you will – much like the startups in the portfolio – mature during your time at Seedcamp.

The maturation process The maturation process starts with a trial by fire first few days, where you are introduced to all the activities going on at Seedcamp. Being a global organization with strong ties across Europe and in the US, there are several logistical conundrums that need to be managed from day 1. Out of personal experience, it is never good to wear white gloves (in any situation), and getting your hands as dirty as possible is essential for getting up to speed.

Spending time as an Intern at Seedcamp will teach you to think on your feet. There is not much holding hands, some nudging, and generally an expectation of a self-driven work ethic to get the job done. In short: an entrepreneurial approach: figure out what works. This approach allows you as an intern to get involved in the various different aspects of working in a globally connected seed investment and mentoring program. Events: Mini Seedcamps, Seedcamp Weeks, Seedhacks, mentoring, deal flow, reviewing applications, tech trends and market research etc. are all things you can choose to get involved in. You can get your hands as dirty as you like – it is great!

Where are Seedcamp’s past interns now? The talented young individuals who have interned at Seedcamp, have all moved on in various different directions.

Everything from product management and development, Michael Orland at Songkick, Sander Saar at AOL, and David Fauchier at JustYoyo, the VC and startup industry Ricardo Sequerra at Seedrs and Vincent Jacobs at Kima Ventures, to founding their own companies: Azmat Yusuf founded the super useful Citymapper  and Fred Stevens-Smith CEO of Rainforest. Ahmad Bakhiet is currently part of Startup Chile and Naza Metghalchi recently joined one of London’s most exciting companies Onefinestay.

As I depart from my position as Intern at Seedcamp, I will move on to developing projects with Monocle.

Why you should intern at Seedcamp Apart from more obvious reasons such as a general interest in the startup/VC world, the greatest thing about interning at Seedcamp is the massive exposure to new and disruptive ideas and businesses that comes through the door at Google Campus. The environment, the people you meet and the sheer number of intelligent minds that surrounds you on a daily basis is incredible.

Interning at Seedcamp gives you an opportunity to help companies grow – moreover, the chance for you to grow and explore how and where you want to grow. It is the place where you can start something new – whether it is a business or your direction.

How to Apply? Apply here before the 1st December: http://seedcamp.workable.com/jobs/3224

Previous Seedcamp Interns  Azmat Yusuf: Founder Citymapper Ahmad Bakhiet: Managed several academic entrepreneurial societies and events. David Fauchier: Product Designer JustYoyo Fred Stevens-Smith: Founder of Rainforest Jakob Marovt: Various freelance projects in the startup community Kristoffer Parup: Business Development for Monocle Michael Orland: Business Operations Director Songkick Naza Metghalchi: Planner at Onefinestay Ricardo Sequerra: Business Development and Startup Community Manager at Seedrs Sander Saar: Product Manager at AOL Vincent Jacobs: Associate at Kima Ventures

Current Seedcamp Interns

Felix Meissner, Student at University College Dublin/ CEMS MiM

The US trip in fall 2013 was the second time we took our companies on the road this year. There are two simple reasons for this: We’re investing in more and more companies, and we want to give the companies timely access to the US market. 

Just as before, the US trip is a focused 2-week trip which sees a crew of about 20 Seedcamp entrepreneurs to the most important technology hubs in the US, where they meet with the top investors, entrepreneurs, platform builders, and local startups. In reality, it feels like a mixture between a class trip and the speed learning technique in the movie Matrix.

This year, more than ever before, was focused on extending the learning and networking opportunities for the founders on the trip, much like the Seedcamp Academy program does in London. Fundraising is always an important part (and the reason for the fact that a third of our companies raise capital from US investors), but the long term learnings and inspirations from the most successful people in the business are what we find most transformative for the founders.

East Coast – New York and Boston

Our tour always kicks off in New York, as it is the natural next step across the Atlantic for many of our founders. Zemanta and ERPLY, two Seedcamp veterans are based there, and shared insights into the very different ways they built their companies. Besides them, we spent time with Kitchensurfing, Barkbox, Fueled, Percolate, and heard how they are innovating in community building, the mobile space, and engaging in social media. MongoDB, who we visited on all of our trips for the last three years just moved into a new office – besides their big funding announcement, a very impressive sign of the size and impact of the New York Tech scene today compared to three years ago.  We met Union Square Ventures, Betaworks, RRE Ventures, and Bowery Capital – four investors with a very different outlook on the world, who shared their insights with us. These discussions always go far beyond pitching, and are highly useful for founders to make sense of the fundraising ecosystem and current developments. We also held a mentoring meet up with our friends in New York to introduce the Seedcamp startups to some of the most connected people in the city and get feedback from seasoned entrepreneurs and investors.

In Boston, we were focused on the great opportunities to learn from some great practitioners and theorists alike: Michael Skok of Northbridge shared his thoughts in a masterclass on company building from a VCs perspective, Seedcamp Investor Fred Destin told us both about the Boston tech scene, and cautioned reasons for startups to fail. Bill Aulet, who runs the entrepreneurship centre at MIT talked about the 24 steps of disciplined entrepreneurship and shared the learnings the MIT put together over many years of breeding and educating entrepreneurs. Company visits in Boston ranged from hardware design – GrabCADs new office space in Cambridge – to consumer champions like Runkeeper, where Jason Jacobs talked about his learnings in an incredibly honest an open session.

Both cities showed us the incredible activity on the East Coast of the United States – and while in previous years, there seemed to be a lot of talk about Silicon Valley and San Francisco, the local scenes were much more in focus now. It seems that both investors and founders are much more focused on building their businesses and supporting great talent locally, which is a great thing to see. Both Boston and New York are always most welcoming to us and our startups and we thank mentors and investors for the warm reception.

West Coast – San Francisco and Silicon Valley

Our focus in San Francisco itself was mostly on meeting the great companies that have evolved over the last few years, and are defining success of the San Francisco tech scene. Twitter, AirBnB, Pinterest, Stripe, and AngelList are all deeply disruptive for their respective industries, and have already developed a strong reputation on a global scale. We learnt about the different founding stories, saw the progression of teams and platforms we met in the past, and were inspired by the scale of thinking (and, the office buildings…). Besides mentoring sessions with our local mentors, we also organised an angel investor meetup including the investors from SV Angel, Crunchfund, Index, Bloomberg Beta, and many more local seed investors.

The Silicon Valley is still reigning supreme with some of the biggest names in Tech: our visits to Facebook and Google are a fixture. Being driven around in a self driving car is not, and it was definitely a highlight to experience the new areas of innovation Google is busy exploring. Insightful thoughts came from the investment team at both Greylock, where John Lilly talked to our founders, and at Andreessen Horowitz, were Sten Tamviki, one of Seedcamp’s early investors is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence. Sean Ellis took time out of his day to share important growth hacking tips, and Dave McClure and the team at 500startups invited us to their Mountain View tower.

One phenomenon was clear to see: a lot of activity has shifted from the Valley to San Francisco – especially in the early stages of funding and company building. Not only are our friends from 500startups opening a San Francisco office, but many investors are now living or working exclusively in San Francisco, and focusing on the vibrant scene that is evolving. Seedcamp Alumni Blossom, BrandID, and former Seedcamp founder Tomaz Stolfa, who is now building Layer.com, also showed us how the city is evolving, and innovative company builders like Heavybit are an interesting addition to the options founders have in financing their companies.

Take part in the next US trip

The next Seedcamp US trip will take place in February 2014 – just before the SXSW interactive festival. We will once again take our founders on the road to meet the best local investors, entrepreneurs, and tech companies. If you want to be part of the US trip, and would like to join the Seedcamp Family – apply to Seedcamp London now.

Are you a founder? Do you have early traction? Are you ready to meet over 300 of our best mentors? If yes make sure to apply to our first Seedcamp Week London of 2014.

What happens at Seedcamp Week London? Seedcamp Week London will take place at our home in the heart of Shoreditch at Campus during the first week of February. This is where we bring together 20 of Europe’s absolute best startups for a week long of intense mentoring. You’ll be able to glean knowledge from experienced founders, discuss product, design and scaling issues with our product mentors. Test your ‘go to market’ and pricing strategy with our marketing mentors as well as meet our corporate partners, who are working with us and our companies to bring their solutions to a wider audience.

We always end the week with a bang – on Friday 7th February we host over 80 of Europe’s top angels and investors for our Investor Day. If you’re in doubt read about the experience from Anirvan – who attended the same event during September.

What does joining the Seedcamp Family mean? Make sure to read about our deal structure here. Besides financial investment you can expect a strong peer-2-peer network – from the Seedcamp Family. You’ll benefit from some great offers in our Founders Pack, like sponsored Amazon hosting to the tune of 25.000, automatic enrollment in Bizspark Plus, and countless offers from legal support to discounts and free services from SaaS and infrastructure companies. We are also one of the first partners’ of the  PayPay’s Startup Blueprint initiative.

Take a look at our resources covering many issues startups face – this will give you a glimpse of the type of topics covered as part of Seedcamp Academy, our monthly program we run at Campus in London. Finally, make sure to see our key results, showing the progress of the teams we’ve invested in. We want to find new startups from across Europe to be a part of Seedcamp, and are keen to find the best of the best.

How to apply? We’ve been working hard at HQ to create a new application form. After iterating on our previous app system, we’ve decided to build a new one from scratch – like any good startup we’re keen to learn, iterate and improve the product for our users, so please let us know what you think by emailing us here bugs@seedcamp.com

Applications will be open until 12th January 2014. Make sure to take the time to give detailed answers to our questions. We want to know why you’re the right team. Tell us about the market, how big is it, and what part of it you aim to disrupt. Show us the product you’re building, and tell us how you built it. Most importantly, we like to see entrepreneurs who think big. Are you building a multi million dollar company? Tell us why your company matters and convince us you should be part of Seedcamp.

Be sure to apply now!

After our massive Seedcamp Week in London in September (11 new teams joined Seedcamp back then), we’re gearing up for the last big Seedcamp event in 2013. Not just for us, also for our teams and mentors it was an incredible year. We’ve seen many of the Seedcamp companies blossom and grow, with new rounds being raised, products launched, and people hired.

Seedcamp Berlin is taking place in Berlin this week, with some great support from the Microsoft Ventures team. Not only are we housing our investment interviews and prep day at Microsoft Berlin, we’re also holding the big Seedcamp Product Mentoring Day at the new Microsoft Berlin office in the middle of the city.

We have 19 exciting teams from all over Europe – literally from Lisbon to Moscow, and from Riga to Trento, in attendance. Also on the product and industry side we see exciting new things to talk about, from Bitcoin to charity payments, new email services and ways to understand web analytics.

• Buzztale, Riga, Latvia – BuzzTale enables anyone to create rich, visual real-time stories.
• Cashtag, Lisbon, Portugal – cashtag is a cloud-based mobile payment network.
• Coinative, Lincoln, UK – Coinative is the gateway to bitcoin.
• ContaKeeper, Vienna, Austria – Free Accounting Services with a social touch, designed for small entrepreneurs by small entrepreneurs.
• Copilot, Madrid, Spain – Flooded inbox? Copilot gives you back control and puts your focus on what counts.
• Makerble, London, UK – Makerble is your personal shopper for monthly projects changing the world that report their progress.
• MediCard, Moscow, Russia – MediCard is a service for patient recruitment for clinical trials.
• Memeoirs, Trento, Italy – Turn your online conversations into a real book with Memeoirs.
• myTips, Kiev, Ukraine – Interactive on-screen tutorials without coding
• Pangea, San Francisco, USA – Pangea will provide worldwide internet connectivity, without data or Wi-Fi
• PAYMEY, Berlin, Germany – PAYMEY is innovative payment for your smartphone. A secure solution enabling to pay online/ offline.
• Popcorn Metrics, Lisbon, Portugal – Web Analytics made easy for Business people. No code changes required.
• ProConfirm, London, UK – ProConfirm provides simple online bank confirmations for UK auditors.
• Satago, London, UK – Technology to help businesses get paid on time.
• sight.io, Lausanne, Switzerland – Get your photos organized and tell stories with them in a tiny fraction of time.
• SquadMail, Berlin, Germany – SquadMail is like “Dropbox for Email”. Our shared email folders let teams collaborate over email.
• Tran.sl, Berlin, Germany – People-powered translation.
• UnPay, Berlin, Germany – UnPay rewards your online activities with free and legal access to paid digital content.
• Zercatto, Porto, Portugal – Zercatto allows investors to follow the best in the financial markets, and profit like them.

We’d like to thank all the mentors and investors joining us over the next couple of days, sharing their knowledge and expertise with the startups. We’re also grateful to European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for sponsoring this event and of course not to forget our yearly sponsors who have provided us with endless support throughout the entire year; Google, Microsoft BizSpark, Qualcomm Ventures, Paypal, Barclays and Nokia.

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

On November 8-10, we had the pleasure of holding the 4th Seedhack – our biggest and most successful Seedhack ever. This year’s theme was ‘remixing content’ and attracted 100 hackers to join us for a weekend full of pizza, Redbull and hacking. Some of the brightest talents of the startup community from 17 countries showed up to take on the Seedhack 4.0 challenge, culminating in 16 hacks presented at the final demo day.

Using APIs provided by our partners for the event; BBC News Labs, EyeEm, Imagga, Facebook, Getty Images, Google, HarperCollins, Nokia, Thomson Reuters and Stupeflix – hackers were challenged to produce innovative products, all to be presented on stage only 60 hours later.

Located at Google Campus, the event kicked off Friday evening with inspiring talks by a number of corporates and startups. Gareth Capon, Product Development Manager at BSkyB, Ramzi Rizk, Co-Founder of EyeEm, Vinay Solanki, Strategy & Business Development Director, EMEA of Getty Images and Matt Shearer Innovation Manager at BBC News Labs shared their views on the challenging opportunities in the world of content. In another format, Nick Perrett, Group Director, Strategy and Digital from HarperCollins brought two authors (James Smythes and John Rogers) on stage with him and showed innovative ways of remixing their content. API presentations by the partners rounded off the formal presentations for the evening.

Over stacks of pizza, beer and Mari wine (good stuff), hackers mingled and exchanged ideas. After the Dominos-sponsored pizza fest, hackers pitched their ideas and quickly formed teams. And then, the real work could begin!

After a long night of hacking, teams kicked off day two bright and early with a gourmet breakfast – fuel for the long day of hacking ahead. In the afternoon, we invited mentors from Google, Twitter, Facebook, BSkyB, and others, as well as business angels to join and help the teams with their ideas. Throughout the day our various API partners were also present to support the hackers with API integrations.

Teams worked day and night to finalize their projects. Highlights of Saturday were a lottery, beer pong and the magic hands of Simon the Shiatsu Massager, who took care of the hackers. After a Bitcoin mining mafia attack, an electricity blackout and loud german techno music, the teams worked all night to finish their hacks in time.

On Sunday, teams presented their hacks to a crowd of over 100 people, a high calibre jury, and 160 viewers on the Seedhack livestream! The results were impressive. Fueled by endless cups of coffee, a fridge full of Redbull, and tasty catering throughout the entire weekend, the hackers turned 60 hours into 16 impressive new startups. The winners received Star Trek Enterprise Pizza cutter, a Playstation 4 sponsored by Getty Images and phones sponsored by Nokia UK. HACK YEAH!

Our team was truly impressed by the energy of the teams and would like to thank everybody who was involved over the weekend. We would also like to thank our sponsors who made the event possible: BSkyB, Domain.me, Facebook, Getty Images, Rackspace. We would also like to thank HarperCollins for sponsoring the drinks on Friday and Uber London for driving our hackers home safely and Twilio for their credits.

Here you’ll find the winners and awesome projects that came out of the weekend:

Judges choice: 

Seedhack Winner: Oppozeit

OppoZeit – shows two sides of a news story

Team:  Rob Finean, Florian Ratgeber, Thura Z. Maung, Thomas Lim, Ben Miles, Henry YP Ho

Find out more about their hack here.

Literatrip – Connecting people and places to their books

Team:  Guy Nesher, Ilya Venger, Julian Kuntorov

Find out more here.

Runners up:

Last man standing: Triber

Triber – Visualizes and quantifies relationships between people and their followers using Twitter API

Team: Klaus Bravenboer, Edward Woodcock

Getty Images Hack: Picit

Picit – attach pictures easily from the web to your Google Mail via drag and drop

Team: David Duckworth and team

Watch their video here and get the app in the store here.

BBC Hack (Trippiest use of BBC content award): 3D Visualization News Content

3D Visualization News Content – shows pictures of News content in a 3D model

Team: William Rood

Facebook Hack (most useful app for after a hackathon): Afterhours

Afterhours – iOS app that shows you where to drink a beer after 11pm

Team: Oyvind Henriksen, Jun Seki

All teams that presented on Sunday (in the order they presented):

1. Quicklearner – learning languages with pictures

2. Afterhours – shows you where the next bar is that is still open

3. Literatip – connecting people and places to their books

4. Moodmusic – play music to your mood

5. Sokrates – memory game for kids with audio and visuals

6. Braintrainer – brain trainer app that connects sport images with music

7. Tunez – music discovery app that combines user generated videos with 20s audio tracks you to share and discover music

8. destionationopen.com –  curated travel search with open destinations

9. Picit – easily attach pictures out of the web to your mail in a browser

10. OFDB – platform for aggregated soccer content

11. OppoZeit – shows two sides of a news story

12. Appp – helps users engage with content using various APIs (Facebook, Getty etc.)

13. Crowdmash – mixing content of an event to brands

14. Triber – visualizes and quantifies relationships between people and their follower using Twitter API

15. 3D Model of BBC Content by William – shows pictures of news content in a 3D model

16. Model Equity Calculator for Founders with Option Pool Expansion – helps founders to value their company and calculate equity

More here.

Judges

Matt Shearer,  BBC News Labs

Nick Perrett, HarperCollins

Bo Oloffson, BSkyB

Matt Jones, Facebook

Vinay Solanki, Getty Images

Ramzi Rizk, EyeEm

Nick Kermarc, BRANDID

Check out some photos: