Seedcamp Week: Day 2 Highlights

Tuesday – day two – focused on getting a product to market. That’s an ambiguous concept, and an ambitious one, so we had to find a mentoring group diverse and motivated enough to fit the concept. Luckily we had just such the groups.

The morning consisted of our familiar panel format, with Matt Jones of Dopplr, Matthew Ogle of Last.fm, Taavet Hinrikus from Skype, and Adam Seifer of Fotolog all talking about developing and implementing a product at which users will throw themselves. Ryan Carson of Carsonified moderated and contributed his own valuable take when applicable.

The teams then broke out to separate rooms for small-group mentoring, which if memory serves me right I’ve mentioned is the crux of the entire Seedcamp Week experience. If I have, it bears repeating. By collecting a “dream team” of talent at Seedcamp, we’re able to connect the right participants with the right advisors, fostering not just a good hour-long chat, but potentially a career-long mutually beneficial relationship. Some of the connections from Seedcamp Week, whether the team in question has “won” or not, will last a very long while, and prove to be of great value down the road even when the short-term proposition isn’t immediately apparent.

After a quick lunch we listened to another “fireside chat” with Brent Hoberman and Martin Varsavsky, an engaging one to say the least.

After they chat we were treated to a marketing panel featuring Donna Sokolsky of Spark PR, Obi Felten from Google, Blake Chandlee of Facebook, Brent Hoberman of mydeco and lastminute.com, and Jamie Kantrowitz of Myspace. Jason Goodman of Albion managed to hold the rambunctious group together and inject some topical humor (apologies to the badly-jibed and collapsing global financial system – best of luck landing on your feet!).

Finally we finished off with another multi-hour mentoring session in small groups, which – not to sound like a broken record – is the real reason both our teams and advisors attend.

All in all the several hundred of us had another superb day, and are looking forward to another.