Seedcamp Paris Demos (photo credit: @vicky_stoyanova)
Our visit to Paris was the last trip for the Seedcamp team in 2012. After 10 successful events all across the world, a huge US Trip in the spring, and an amazing Seedcamp Week in September, it turned out to be the picture perfect finish to the year.
Our friends at Orrick hosted us, like in the previous two years, at their beautiful Paris office. Besides great teams from all over Europe, we had an impressive line up of successful mentors – no doubt because of leWeb happening just after. We heard well polished pitches by all teams in the morning, and jumped straight into a Master Class by three Seedcamp founders who shared insights and secrets of their entrepreneurial journeys.
Philippe Laval, the founder of the successful address book update service writethat.name, shared how the company moved from a broad offering of various email services to their current laser sharp focus based on a religious concentration on customer feedback and tracking. Nicolas Steegman, the founder of video editing service Stupeflix, talked about his approach to hiring and building the company: the company only hired the absolute experts in their field and focused on maintaining a very good cultural fit. Andreas Klinger, cofounder of Lookk‘ took a different approach: his highly entertaining talk covered some do’s and dont’s from his experience and was a good way to reflect on a lot of critical decisions that are relevant for many startups.
The afternoon was spent in mentoring sessions – as always, highly engaging and with a clear focus on connecting the startups with the world’s best startup mentors, investors, and entrepreneurs. Some of the highly rated mentors of the day were Jeff Clavier (Softtech VC), Jim Franklin (CEO, Sendgrid), Gabriel Hubert (CEO, teleportd), David Bizer (HackFWD), Steven Willmott (CEO, 3Scale), Ivan Farneti (Partner, DHTV), Colette Ballou (Founder, BallouPR), Craig Forrest (ex Apple). In total we had more than 100 participants on the day.
Three new Seedcampers
Out of the teams that attended, we were especially intrigued by a few companies that we selected for subsequent investment. We made a total of three investments out of Seedcamp Paris. All these companies are joining us in London at Google Campus and will be part of the US trip to Boston, New York, and the Valley in spring 2013:
- knowable.org, Berlin, Germany – a social network for makers. We were impressed not only by the vision Simon and Emanuel have for their target group of makers, tinkerers, and hackers, but also by their speed of execution on the product.
- tldr.io, Paris, France – the Web, summarized by people. The team around Stan, Charles, and Louis took a great concept of the web and developed it further. If you use the product today, you will already see summarised content around the web – we’re sure the need for this will only increase in the future.
- Unifyo, Cambridge, UK – helps customer facing employees to get 360 degree customer profiles inside any website while browsing. Ben is a well rounded entrepreneur and has built a product that can already be used in lots of circumstances – we’re excited be part of the journey.
Thanks for all the support!
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. Sendgrid graciously stepped in as a sponsor for the evening drinks organised by teleportd, and made sure the evening went well, too.
Last but certainly not least, we want to thank the mentors who took part in Seedcamp Paris for their time and hard work of getting the companies on track with their products, strategy, and fundraising efforts. Not just at Seedcamp Paris, but throughout the year, we are incredibly grateful for your support.