David Noël

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Flight log Sep 6, 2011: TXL-LHR #seedcamp (Taken with instagram)

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Another great selection of early-stage startups at this year’s Berlin Seedcamp. 20 companies from 10 different countries. 

sitarteli:

Full house @betahaus for mini-seedcamp Berlin

Posted from the Lightbox Android app.

Vox.io will remind you of a little company with European origins called Skype. It enables you to place free calls over the web right from your browser, no need to install any plugins or clients, it runs right in your browser.

I had the pleasure to meet Tomasz and the team at Seedcamp London a few months ago and was really impressed by their hunger, drive and expertise in the field. Listening to Tomasz talk about the vision of the product was inspiring back then and I was happy to meet him again for the Seedcamp Silicon Valley mentoring session at Google today. 

Just got the invite to the beta and really liked the welcome message pictured above. Can’t wait to place my first call - just tested it calling my own mobile number and it was as easy 123. 

Seedcamp London

On Tuesday last week, I attended my third Seedcamp as a mentor.

If you’re not familiar with Seedcamp, it’s a European (and more recently, international) version of TechStars or YCombinator. The gist: early stage (often pre-product) startups pitch their projects to a group of mentors (entrepreneurs, investors, product & marketing folks) and spend the afternoon in rotating mentoring sessions to ask mentors for advice on their idea, product, go-to-market strategy, business model, fundraising etc. 

For startups, it’s an amazing and valuable experience to tap into a fantastic pan-European network of tech industry professionals from a variety of sectors: seasoned entrepreneurs, angels & VCs, product, marketing and engineering folks. Everyone is attending to give something back to the community and maybe advise a potential next big hit startup early on. Startups get early and honest feedback about their idea, prototype or product and have mentors help them find answers to the questions that keep them up all night.

For myself, it’s a welcome break from the day-to-day work at SoundCloud, a nice way to broaden my perspective, make new connections and maybe even find inspiration for my daily work. I was lucky to spend the afternoon with Obi Felten (Google’s Head of Consumer Marketing EMEA) and Chirag Patel (from Wellington Partners) and we had a great time and promised to stay in touch.  

Something I’ve pretty much heard every team say after all three Seedcamps I attended included the words “brain” and “fried” in the same sentence. It’s true. During Seedcamp, founders get hammered with insights, suggestions, introductions, tough questions and opinions that can leave you exhausted and perhaps even disillusioned. Be prepared for it, make notes, take a break and review your notes after a few days of distance. You’ll find the experience to be extremely valuable and your job is to find the golden nuggets that will help you move ahead. 

A few tips for Seedcamp teams:

• Make sure you can explain your product in simple non-technical terms
• If you can, tell the story about what made you want to solve this particular problem
• Ask mentors if they remember your pitch. If they don’t, do a short recap
• Ask mentors to briefly introduce themselves so you can ask them specific questions
• Time and attention are scarce, make the best use of both
• Don’t be afraid to disagree with a mentor. If you can back up your logic, do it
• Be prepared for food for thought rather than specific answers to your questions. Your job will be to translate these thoughts into something actionable for your own product
• If you liked a mentor or found them to be valuable, keep in touch. Seedcamp London 2010 finalist Profitero asked mentors if they want to be added to a quarterly email update about the progress. I love this. 

If you’re an entrepreneur you have to apply for one of the Seedcamps in the future. Saul, Reshma, Carlos and Phil are a truly dedicated group of people passionate about the European tech community and beyond. Watch them expand to Tel Aviv, NYC and Asia in the coming months. 

Photos from Seedcamp London are here.

Seedcamp picks 12 startups out of 23 to invest in →

Seedcamp just announced the winning teams of this year’s Seedcamp after a super intense week in London. I had the chance to be present as a Product & Marketing mentor on Tuesday and of the teams I saw during the mentoring sessions, all my favorites were picked, namely:

Garmz, Profitero, Nuji, UberblicLabs, EBITD and Wordy. 

Seecamp will invest into 12 of the a total of 23 participating companies. This is really really great for European startups and Seedcamp is absolutely amazing run by a fantastic team with access to an incredible network of mentors and investors. 

Congrats to all the winners, now go home and find some time to recharge your batteries for the weekend before continuing to kick ass coming Monday. 

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Seen in the elevator of The Hospital Club in London

The video from Fred Destin’s Seedcamp talk ‘Hacking Venture Capital’ is available now. I did mention it in my review post from a while back and it’s finally online. 

Must-watch for every founder & entrepreneur to get first-hand advice about how to have a best possible impact when getting started with VCs.

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.