Seedcamp Week 2010 – Day 3 - How to scale

The third and final mentoring day at Seedcamp Week 2010 is coming to an end, and teams and mentors alike are pretty exhausted from an action packed and busy day. It all started in the morning with short presentations of all the teams introducing themselves. Afterwards, the interest was piqued by a very honest and open panel on how large companies work with startups – business development folks from Getty Images (Michael Dreyer), MTV (Andy Chen), AOL Ventures (Mike Brown), and eBay (Jeff Wong) discussed with moderator Daniel Heaf (BBC) and former Seedcamp Winner Andraz Tori (Zemanta). We heard frank talk and good advice – follow some of our tweets to see more.

After the first mentoring sessions – mostly focused on the challenges and opportunities of raising bis rounds and working with big customers – we went into a second panel, this time revolving around the realities of building and working with a board of investors. Fred Destin from Atlas Venture led a refreshingly honest discussion between different types of investors – dubbed as the ‘panel of the dark side’. Charles Grimsdale (Eden Ventures), Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures), Christoph Janz (Angel Investor), and Stefan Glaenzer (White Bear Yard) discussed the merits of board composition and oversight, founder vesting, and some horror stories. Not only the long Q&A session but also the very active Twitter backchannel showed the attention this topic received.

The afternoon was again packed with mentoring sessions, resulting in lively discussions that extended far into the coffee breaks. The highlight of the day for many was the ever entertaining presentation style of Dave Mcclure, showing his “Startup Viagra” deck on how to pitch a VC:

Of course, we also have a short video showing a summary of the day. Tomorrow we will be locked in with the startups all day, listening to the refined pitches to decide on the winners for Seedcamp Week 2010 – looking to make some big announcements on Friday.