Seedcamp Week: Day 3 Highlights

The theme for our third day of Seedcamp Week was “scaling” – not only how do you plan for and react to expansion of your technology, but also your business as a whole. With that aim we assembled a group of technical experts and seasoned investors – often perceived as somewhat of an “oil and water” mixture (no clear answer for which group has the dubious honor of being oil) but in the right setting perfect compliments to each other.

The morning panel was moderated by Matt Biddulph of Dopplr, who was joined by Stefan Magdalinski of Moo, Toon Coppens of Netlog, James Aylett of Tartarus, and Simon Willison, co-creator of Django. The group discussed in-depth the criticality of a medium-term plan vs. the folly of a long-term one and the importance of using the right measurements to determine the necessity of scaling – something that would be reiterated later in the day.

Immediately following that our teams mostly broke into small groups to start their last day of mentoring, while the women in attendance stayed behind to discuss issues relevant to their existence in a male-dominated field – the start of a hopefully ongoing series of talks.

Next the attendees (teams and mentors both) had the chance to listen to Dave McClure’s fantastic Startup Metrics for Pirates presentation, which harkened back to some of the earlier morning mentions of mandatory measurement.

Dave then handed it over to our afternoon panel on investment, moderated by Tina Baker from Brown Rudnick and featuring Charles Grimsdale of Eden Ventures,

Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, Robin Klein from TAG, Andrew Weissman of Betaworks, Anil Hansjee of Google, Tal Barnoach from Speed Up, and Andy Hart formerly of Ask.co.uk. Fred Destin of Atlas Venture also made a cameo as audience inquisitor extraordinaire.

Finally our teams had another mentoring session for several hours and returned for a quick wrap-up and preparatory advice for their Thursday presentations, where they’ll have to incorporate all they’ve learned during the week.