The view from the Bertelsmann Roof Terrace
We’ve been busy in the past weeks preparing Seedcamp Berlin – happening on May 15 – with our friends and investors at BDMI, who are kindly hosting us this time around. We held a small office hour session last week in Berlin, and are doing the same again in London this Friday – see here for details. The idea behind these session is to allow startups to meet the Seedcamp team, openly ask any questions they might have about us or the Seedcamp process, and learn some tricks about how to submit a better application.
Our best mentors, for Berlin!
Also, we have selected some of our best international and local mentors to join us for the day, giving advice and input to the startups that we’re ultimately looking to select. Check a small selection of that list below – these are folks who have been rated especially high by previous Seedcamp teams, and we are excited to have them as mentors again:
- Tina Baker, Partner at Brown Rudnick
- Jason Ball, Investment Manager at Qualcomm Ventures
- Jan Borgstaedt, Head of European Investments at Bertelsmann AG, Digital Media Investments
- Pawel Chudzinski, Partner at Point Nine Capital
- Ivan Farneti, Partner at Doughty Hanson
- Charles Grimsdale, Partner at Eden Ventures
- Paul Jozefak, Managing Director at Liquid Labs GmbH
- Lars Langusch, General Partner at Holtzbrinck Ventures Adviser GmbH
- Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Chairman at Podio, 23, etc.
- Christophe Maire, CEO at txtr GmbH
- Paula Marttila, Digital Product & Biz Dev at Paulamarttila.com
- Gabriel Matuschka, MD at OliveTree Ventures
- Max Niederhoffer, Venture Partner at Accel Partners
- David Noel, Evangelist at SoundCloud
- Nikolaj Nyholm, General Partner at Sunstone Capital
- Cornelius Rabsch, Head of Mobile at kaufDA / bonial
- Tobias Schirmer, Principal at BDMI-Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments
- Sitar Teli, VC at Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures
- Christian Thaler-Wolski, Principal at Wellington Partners
- Stefan Tirtey, Partner at Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures
- Alex von Frankenberg, Managing Director at HTGF
- Christian Weiss, Managing Director at Project A Ventures
We look forward to these and more than 50 other mentors to spend the day with us and the startups. Based on the current applications, it’s going to be an amazing selection of teams from all over Europe.
A special program, just for Berlin
On top of the usual Seedcamp program, we are proud to also announce that BDMI has moved mountains to make it possible to not only host the event at Bertelsmann’s beautiful representation in the middle of Berlin, but also have a live band for the evening event! It sure comes in handy to have investors that own a record label, and we are looking forward to enjoy some tunes from The Pickers, a Berlin local indie rock band. Seedcamp Berlin will feature a master class with the founders of DailyDeal, who sold their company to Google late last year. We are looking forward to hear stories from both the founder and investor side, moderated by Nicolas Gabrysch, Partner at Osborne Clarke.
Some frequently asked questions
Based on the feedback at the Berlin open office session, we want to reiterate a few details about applications that might be helpful for those looking to apply:
- You can literally apply from anywhere in the world
- We look for companies that are in prototype to first product stage
- Internet technology and mobile are the main focal sectors
- The Seedcamp terms of investment are displayed here, and you can read up on our usual process
- We are looking for teams with technical founders
- You can re-apply to any other event
- We are happy to answer any other questions at the office hours this Friday