These guys took our event by storm!
MySugr cashed a cool 30k Euros for the Media Award of the best Austrian Startup sponsored by SevenOne Media and - just to round it up - the overall win of the Startup Week Challenge 2011.
They’ll enjoy 3 weeks in California including a tour de force to meet every cat and mouse in Silicon Valley sponsored by our frineds from speedinvest.
Wow. Ok so based on the input, feedback and ratings of over 40 investors, experts and experienced entrepreneurs from all over the world, 10 teams made it to the finals of the STARTUP WEEK 2011 challenge. Among the judges were Markus Jaeger (Red Bull Media House, AUT), Sitar Teli (Doughty Hanson Tech Invest, GBR), Stuart Chapman (DFJ Esprit, GBR), Zoltan Vardy (USA) and Jason D. Whitmire (Early Bird Ventures, USA). More info on the competition can be found here.
Today at 13:25 the stage is theirs to conquer – the winner taking home glory, fame, a 3 week all inclusive (Ramen only, sorry guys ) in the Valley! What more do you need to put your startup into hyper drive? Ok a lot, but this should add a heap of momentum.
The finalists are, in no particular order:
Thursday 9.30 - 10.30am at the interview area of the Startup Week venue.
uma SKIN™ Multitouch Display at the Federation of Austrian Industry Provides Interactive Information Board; shows new semantic social features on SKIN
For more details check out the press release!
Yesterday evening I arrived in Vienna for the European Startup Festival. It’s a conference I have been looking forward to for a while, anticipating loads of interesting start-ups, a beautiful city, and chance to support one of our CEOs, Christopher Kahler from Qriouslyon two panels!
For me, Startup Week is a reminder of why I decided to pursue venture in Europe, leaving Silicon Valley, where I had been working as an associate at another venture firm. I realized there was an opportunity to contribute meaningfully during a critical growth period of technology driven businesses in Europe - being in the right place at the right time. Silicon Valley is an incredible place full of amazing entrepreneurs, but it’s also a mature market where entrepreneurs have access to capital and high quality investors… it’s like a flywheel at full speed. The impact from younger practitioners like me is likely to be more marginal. I was attracted to Europe because the flywheel here is accelerating but hasn’t reached that point of critical momentum. There may be more room to make an impact.
We are beginning to see a wide variety of start-ups sprout up across Europe. Some are succeeding beyond wildest expectations, some are still figuring out what they want to be when they grow up, and some won’t make it, but all are contributing to an emerging European tech ecosystem that shows no signs of slowing down. I’m excited to work alongside these start-ups, helping to fund those that have the ambition and vision to become large global businesses.
Since backing Qriously in its series A last year, Accel has made eight seed and early stage investments in companies across Europe, some you may have heard of and some we hope to tell you about in the coming months. And I’m excited to be going to Vienna because we have no intentions of slowing down. Reach out to me at @tysosin if you are interested in learning more about how we approach early stage investing at Accel.
3 -7 October in Vienna will take place a significant event StartUp Week FestivalEurope, which will gather more than 70 international speakers: investors and business men, top managers and startuppers, journalists and bloggers. It will last 5 days and consist of 30 sessions and workshops from experts.
It really depends. If it was easy or there were a single answer, it wouldn’t be really new. But you do need to think about how it’s useful for the customer, not about why it’s new or different.
The combination, but without leadership and execution, an idea is worth nothing.
Remember to listen more than you talk! Admit your mistakes early and then fix them.
Not really. It’s more an issue of culture – both among men and among women.
A few cases where I fell in love with an idea and invested in a person who was not as good as the idea. If the idea isn’t good enough, the management can improve it (this process is called a “pivot”), but if the people aren’t good enough you have a big problem!
It’s legal and moral to reuse an idea and do it better, and ideally, to do so creatively with an understanding of the local market. It’s not moral to copy an interface and in extreme cases it’s illegal. In the end, as I said above, innovation is not interesting without implementation. Personally, I like to invest in new ideas.FWIW, I don’t think Groupon itself is a very good idea. It’s basically e-mail marketing, and the current margins are not sustainable.
Generally, investors prefer to invest in markets they know – which makes a lot of sense. However, yes, outside investors generally have a pretty negative opinion of Russia. In fact, it’s justified in many parts of the Russian economy. But in the Russian consumer Internet, there’s a culture of honesty and transparency just as in the rest of the world. In short, you can bribe one person for a small amount to win a big contract with a big business, but you cannot cost-effectively bribe consumers to use your products and services…
That really depends on what kind of company it is. But no, it is not always necessary.
Personally, I believe almost nothing they tell me… but then I invest anyway. One or two real wins make up for a lot of mistakes.
That depends. Usually you should go as far as you can before raising money so that you get a better valuation, but you should make sure to raise the money before you get desperate for cash, because that will *lower* the valuation (if it doesn’t put you out of business).
I’m going through a couple of these right now. They have to do with management issues… CEOs who aren’t managing effectively, conflict between managers and the like.
I do think there’s a bubble in some parts of the market, but I hope that it’s not broad enough to cause a crash when it pops.
Perhaps the best answer to that question is Yandex, based in Moscow, which just went public at a valuation around $8 billion. I am on its board.
To meet Esther Dyson personally come to StartUp Week Festival. You can buy tickets here. Till 10th of August price for “early birds” is only 149 euro.
And we will continue to publish actual interviews and posts with speakers for you. Keep in touch and don’t miss a chance to be part of historical European startup event!
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Daria Batukhtina
We continue to publish interviews with StartUp Week Festival speakers. Today I’m talking with Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp - one of the biggest incubators in Europe. Our discussion is about European startup ecosystem, its perspective, global tech incubator bubble and why European investors are not so aggressive.
Yes, I think so. And I think the important thing I to understand sort of what is it. What the term sheet does is that it not meant to be a kind of a standardized. What it is doing is bringing transparency. So this term sheet, the versions of it, has been used by the VCs and business angels for the past several years but they have been quite private. What we wanted to do is to bring it to public. And this is a very big deal because they have never been put to a pubic like this.
It’s a great step for standardization in Europe. For investors, this is the way to be more active. And for the entrepreneurs this is a possibility to have a generally accepted type of terms that they should expect in term sheet. And honestly, this is a really good step in education for EU startup ecosystem. This document should be something that entrepreneurs get to understand and figure out what parts they want to negotiate, what parts to accept, they can have more educated conversation with their own lawyers and investors.
I think the investors are part of the story but entrepreneurs are equally part of that story. I think entrepreneurs should continue to build differentiated businesses and really commercially exciting businesses. I guess I have 2 answers to that. One is it will take time. The European VC has been sort of burned in the past and also sort of it is more based in its own development. I think time alone will help us as European venture capital matures. Then secondly, actually what we see is IT companies they are able to attract both US funding and EU funding. I think the more US VCs invest in Europe, it will send even a clear signal to EU VCs that they need to step up the game and invest the European startups. So it’s probably both of those answers. And the third one is that the EU startups need to continue to prove how commercial they are, how aggressively they grow their businesses.
There is also tech incubator bubble in the US: large number of accelerators and incubators are appearing monthly. Maybe proportioned to the number of startups that we have, that sort of bubble seems even more obvious. I do think that in EU mentors do get stretched with different programs where they can be part of and the accelerator and incubators that are no different from each other, that are doing the exact same thing. So I would say that if you would want to start something up as an accelerator/incubator you should focus on something that should be really different, what’s you advantage as such. And I would look on such areas that aren’t addressed by accelerators to-date.
I just say it’s a really hard work. It’s easy to set an incubator up. Being as it is a small capital to rise in order to create a company. But to actually out-value it and to actually help those businesses to succeed is a very difficult job.
We’ve been doing it for four years now, long before anybody else in Europe at least got into doing such. I think there are few things: approach is really something different; it’s extremely scalable compared to anybody else. We are able to mentor more than 200 companies a year. That’s a huge difference when compared to anybody else. Secondly it goes to the quality of mentor network, quality of the companies that have been funded by us for the past four years, where they’ve ended up, the level of cap that they’ve been able to attract. Those continue to be two big differentiators.
I think its visibility. Both entrepreneurs and ecosystem that work with entrepreneurs need to bring European startups visibility in front of the US investors and the US corporate as well. So EU entrepreneurs really need to show that they have commercial ethic and commercial drive for doing their businesses. That is not just to get European startup for cheap. It’s potentially a better value investment. And actually you might have a huge business success in this.
When companies apply to SeedCamp we take a close look at formation of the team: who is working on the development, tech development, what kind experience do they have, whether there are superstars or whether it’s a competition and so on. Also we evaluate project in three aspects: design, development, distribution. And when we meet them in person at the SeedCamp it looks a lot like it. But in Europe we continue to see two skill sets that we need to improve on. As I said, the commercial which goes into distribution I guess, roughly.
That is cool, that is quite an interesting question. One of our companies, what they do is they spend one weekend a month and they work on something totally different from the business at hand. It’s taking Google’s 20% and making it actionable inside of small startup of four or five people. They work on a project that is completely not part of their business. That really helps them get refreshed. The other thing I always say is even for startup companies you just have to kind of go exercise, go do something fun, not just work 24h a day every day of the week. You do need to step out of it and get refreshment. So that is sort of exercise or being around family and friends or as there guys do work on a completely different project, using their skill set, do something different.
I think it’s incredible to have a week and to there are these people coming from different parts of Europe. So hopefully, I will just meet a lot of really interesting startups and people from ecosystem. For us is we just see a lot of good startups coming from the NL and coming from Eastern and Central Europe, continue making SeedCamp relevance to them.
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Daria Batukhtina
Young, creative entrepreneurs meet up in the heart of Europe
Entrepreneurship is not just a fad, it´s an attitude of an entire generation! And of course this is raising the demand for startup-events.
For this reason STARTeurope is organizing together with Initial Factor the Pan-European startup festival, which will take place in Vienna from October 3rd to October 7th.
The festival nature of the STARTUP WEEK comes from a variety of freely accessible side events. For example a Hackathon organized by Facebook or a TechCrunch brunch at sektor 5. Furthermore there will be side events with topics like gaming, e-Health and movie.
Vienna as a gateway to the East
Traditionally seen, Vienna always has been an important trading- and trans-shipment-center for East/West relations, but now the STARTUP WEEK should establish Vienna as a HUB for entrepreneurs and investors with focus on CEE.
Even if the event focuses on CEE, participants from all other regions are more than welcome. So far many of the applied startup teams came from Poland, Hungary, Russia and Turkey.
The application-deadline ended today. The lucky number 50 get to know soon!
Startup and Conference Days
The five-day event is split into two parts. The Startup Days (Monday, Tuesday) are devoted to the Startup Challenge participants and their skills development and networking opportunities. In battle-rounds, Europeans 50 best startups get selected into the Top 10. Because only 10 get their “10 minutes of fame” on Tech Crunch Day (Thursday) in front of a large audience and and enjoy media attention.
The Startup Conference itself starts on 5th of October and ends on the 7th. The conference includes three thematically separate days (Seed Day, Tech Crunch Day and Future Day). On those days, top-class keynotes (e.g. Lesson Learned, Success Story) as well as polarizing panels (e.g. Education-, China-, and Innovation- Panel) will be held by amazing speakers.
Among the top speakers : Steve Rogers , Morten Lund , Anil Hansjee, Christian Hernandez , Constantin Bisanz , Esther Dyson or Lars Hinrichs
The event will be a milestone in the European startup scene and represent a starting point for the networking of the local ecosystem.
STARTUP WEEK 2011 - Be part of it!
Do you always wanted to know how startups can work closely together with the pharma industry? What are new business models in healthcare? How can technology improve healthcare? The focus event “Digital Pharma Marketing” will be dedicated to these questions that are vital for both pharma executives and health technology entrepreneurs.
A perfect blend of speakers will be there to give you answers to the questions above:
Robin Rumler, CEO Pfizer Austria, Franz Wiesbauer, Professor of Cardiology, CEO of 123Sonography.com, Marie-Louise Plank, Lawyer specialized in medical-law and Bernd Schossmann, Head of Marketing, Novartis Austria.
The event is powered by MedMedia, Austria’s leading medical publishing house. Food and Drinks will be served - and it’s free!
You are cordially invited to join our event on Monday 03th October – 11:00 am – 02:00 pm at Telekom Austria Headquarter, Lasallestraße 9, 1020 Vienna
Register here:
http://www.startupweek2011.com/sideevent/3-10-health-2-0-diagnosia
