Mini Seedcamp Berlin: Review & Some Tips
Last week, I had the chance to spend a day mentoring startup finalists at the Mini Seedcamp Berlin. I’ll start by saying that I found it incredibly refreshing to be away from the day-to-day work at SoundCloud to a) escape the sandbox for a bit and b) hope to be of value for young and dedicated teams building a product/company.
Here are a few quick thoughts after a massively intense and fast-paced day:
1) I was surprised by the quality of some of the teams. The different companies were all in different stages, some were pre-product, some pre-launch and some were more mature and had already secured corporate client accounts and generally, the finalists presented some solid projects.
2) Presentations: team Seedcamp did a great job preparing the teams for the 5 minutes they’d have to pitch their project to the mentors. However, it still amazes me that some founders have a hard time getting their message across so here are a couple of tips for teams applying for a Seedcamp (and other startup programs).
Pitch session:
- Be crystal-clear about the problem you solve, bring it into a real-world context. If you have one, start off with an anecdote that introduces your story. (During his talk, Fred Destin of Atlas Venture and a fellow Belgian delivered the perfect example about how to do it, I believe there will be a video available of his talk soon).
- Use rhetoric questions to get attention from the audience. Example: “Do you know Flickr? Yes? Ok good, SoundCloud is like Flickr, but for audio.”
- Be energetic & engaging: you’re selling your idea & product. Sell it.
- Be thorough: address all parts of your business: problem, solution, target/customer/market, stage, competition, funding, exit landscape*. I understand it is hard to do this in five minutes, you’ll need to practice this over and over again to nail it. The company that in my opinion did best was Wordy and from what I heard, it took them several attempts to get to this point.
- Ask: make clear in which specific areas you need help from mentors so they can keep notes.
Mentoring sessions:
- When you’re two teams sharing mentors, ask to split the teams. In our case, we were 4 mentors for two teams per session. Each team got 30 minutes of face time with each mentor team.
- Ask mentors if they saw and remember your pitch. If they don’t, do a short recap (one or two sentences).
- If they do, remind them about the points in which you need help, advise or guidance and keep everyone on message.
- Time and attention are scarce, make the best use of it.
Check out Fred Destin’s Prezi slides of his talk about ‘Hacking Venture Capital’. Very useful, not only for Seedcamp sessions. I also highly recommend reading Jeffrey Bussgang’s new book ‘Mastering the VC Game’.
Fun side note: I spent the afternoon mentoring with Joe Neale from M8 Capital (new VC fund in London, focused on mobile). He is @Joe on Twitter.
All in all a great day, check out the winners. It was a pleasure meeting the finalist teams, mentors and the über-awesome Seedcamp team - Reshma, Alasdair and the new guy, Phil.
Thanks for the invitation and congratulations to a great event.
Update: Fred Wilson just pushed a great blog post about the importance of keeping your deck to a maximum of six slides. Read it. Excerpt:
“
We learned to simplify our story and we learned how to create six killer slides. And killer slides are not slides with a dozen bullets each. They are six powerful points that combine to tell the meat of the story.
So when you sit down and build your pitch deck, think of six slides that will inspire and leave something for the imagination. The best part of six slides is that you will get through them in time to have a real substantive conversation face to face about your business. Imagine that.
”
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* During the pitches, there was a discussion on Twitter about wether it’s needed to address the exit landscape during a pitch. There are pros and cons. My take is that depending on the stage of your product, it’s worth briefly (one slide with logos) mentioning it as it puts you on an investor’s radar and proves that you’ve looked at your business as a whole.
Edit: sorry for the missing comment feature. Can’t seem to find where to add the Disqus script into the html code of my new theme.
