As we discussed today about the importance of Networking, please find below a short video sharing a couple of tips to network.

In my mind, networking is pretty similar to maintain a romantic relationship : it takes time to build, it’s difficult to get the person’s trust and its needs to be updated and sustained to keep the person’s interest.

We often talk about networking and getting contacts that might be useful to our professional lives. However, the take home message from the video is that networking has to work in 2 directions : you are expecting a lot from your network. Therefore, you need to be able at some point to be the one giving a hand/advice/help someone as well 🙂

Celine

Tonight I was with a couple of classmates at the STHML Tech Meet up event. It was at the Hilton Hotel in Slussen and when we arrived there we noticed how crowded it was. The whole auditorium was filled and we had to stand at the site. It started with a short overview of this months biggest investments in Stockholm start-ups and a couple of the start-ups which got the biggest investments came on stage and talked a bit.

After that the subject changed to the refugee problem and how the tech society could help in this problem. Someone of Industrifonden (a VC investment company) came on the stage and hosted this topic together with the two main hosters. There were talkes from a refugee herself and two companies with had an idea for the refugee problem. The first one, was the company which develops the app “Welcome”. This will be an app in which information about Sweden and everything else a refugee needs to know is combined with a tool in which refugees can ask questions to Swedish people and in which Swedish people can post events. This app has the main idea to connect the refugees with the Swedish people and help them to fit in the society. The second company was Refugee tec. This company is going to organise a Hacketon with the refugee problem as its subject.

Then the investors of the Middle East and Asia came on the stage for a discussion. The investors were: Dany Farha (BECO Capital, Dubai), Richard Chen (Ceyuan Ventures, China), Ali H. Karabey (212 Venture, Istanbul) and Numan Numan (212 Venture, Istanbul). It was nice to hear the difference between the start-up world over there and here in Western Europe.

Last, there were two start-up pitches. The first one was from Gymgo. It was a bit strange, because he was cut of after he just spoke three sentences and he was than burned by the investors. It was a bit sad for the guy which was standing in front of whole croud and was ready to pitch his idea. After that he tried to keep on going strong, but the investors keep making fun of him. In my opinion it wasn’t really fair, but maybe this is how it goes in the Venture Capital world. The second pitch was from Zeifie, the security app which Pernilla Rydmark from IIS also told about. This pitch got some good feedback from the investors.

I wrote a post earlier about how I thought that the idea that Sophie Lööb presented about a refugee linkage platform would be great. I today read this article that made me think about it again.

http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/jobb-karriar/experimentet-natdelningar-ska-ge-jobb-pa-en-manad/

The plattform, Nätverkskollen, allows you to post that you want a job and spread it into your different networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter et.c.). The idea lets you specify your competences in a predefined framework that makes searching easy. Using that concept, you could easily link up refugees that don’t speak Swedish by simply allowing Syrian translation of your input. Thoughts on that?

Another, perhaps simpler, idea would be to create a Facebook group or LinkedIn group for refugees as to concentrate employers and employees that are relevant to this. Thoughts?

During our video presentation pitch about uniting all tet communication under one unified platform, we got some insightful feedback from the guest lecturer. The feedback was regarding how social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack et.c. are extremely dependant on users using their websites. This is because of several different reasons:

• Selling advertising – can sell it much more expensive/higher volume if there are a lot of users constantly on the site
• Overall valuation – the more people that use the website, the higher the platform is valued

So the point of this feedback was, if you try to redirect traffic from platforms that are dependent on that traffic, you are likely to reach considerable resistance. I totally agree with this and it is something that our group did not think about.

On that note, check out this article about a start up who want to unify news regarding celebrities. They should run in to the same problem.

http://breakit.se/artikel/1500/kompisganget-som-hjalper-dig-att-fa-annu-battre-koll-pa-kandisarna

Since we discussed the importance in developing professional relationships and networking during todays lecture it was a bit striking to directly stumble across two articles on the subject. The first one got me thinking about all the different types of social media we explore in this course, and that they really fill a purpose – especially considering promoting startups.

The second article is a bit humorous, but I like the new angle in social networking between entrepreneurs.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251620

http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/pif-is-tinder-for-networking-entrepreneurs/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=twitter

/Isac

Hello dear blog,

As my fellow students have written, there was a SUP46 event yesterday ft Atomico. To start with, there was a lot of people at the event. The floor was almost full.

Before I attended to this event, I promised myself to mingle when I arrive, which resulted in a couple of new LinkedIn & Facebook contacts. First I talked to Nikhil. An exchange student from India who had this “open-lab” startup in India which is top rated. Right now, Nikhil is taking his master in KTH at the mechatronics department. We talked a lot and decided to meet for further discussions.

Later on I met Per Bergström, co founder and Product Director of Nova Sweden. Nova is a student talent networking company which brings in the “top students” for connecting them with high status companies. Interesting talking to Per because of his humbleness.

By this time, I had a few beers and continued the mingle. I met Arish. He was developing an “Uber” kind of app for people who wants to “övningsköra”. In Sweden, not everybody has the opportunity to practice driving with someone, and I think this app will be used by many young students who want to take their drivers license.

To make this post short, I will jump to the last person I talked to. It was Alon Kuperman, Vice President at Investments for Atomico. Alon studied business in London, and is originally from Israel. Me and Alon talked about a business idea I had, which he thought was interesting. We also talked about getting investors, and that Atomico just makes A and B investments, and no seed investments. He gave me his visit card and told me to keep in touch with him.

As summary, this kind of events are really good to attend at. Not only for getting connections, but also for practicing your own social skills. At the end, it all comes to how good you are att selling yourself to other people and how good you are at convincing people that YOU are the right person for the job/investment/what ever you need. It can seem weird to just go and talk to people who you have never talked to, but that is necessary.

As my classmates, I went last night to Sup46 Happy Hours event co-organize with Atomico!

I was quite surprise with how crowded it was! The event was pretty popular :).

I got the change to mingle, network and meet startups founders in a really informal way.

People were relax, food and drinks were free and little Celine was amaze by how many creative and smart people are!

Would definitely recommend to attend those kind of events!

Picture : Douglas & myself at the event 😀 – same problem with the pic rotation but it appears right when looking at intopreneur on my phone.

Nice event yesterday with SUP 46, this time hosted by Atomico.

A great place to mingel and meet people from the Swedish start up crowd but also investors and developers.

I got to know a bit more about Atomico that I’d like to share. They are investing in innovative companies and have a history of investments in over 50 companies worldwide including Skype, Rovio and Klarna! If your interested in the effect of investments over the past years I would recommend you to take a look at their new illustrative tool at this link:

Atomico tool

Using the play button you can follow the success of their investments the last years. Cool to see the effect of investing in new companies. Also a great source to dive into new growing companies you may not have heard of. For me these were ZQGames and InsideSales.com. Check it out!

I would also like to share a function I learned about yesterday. If your interested in getting into the start up-world you should sign up here and take part of this creative way to find start up-jobs.

Start up-jobs link

For you who missed the event yesterday, the next AW with them are on 13th of November, that time hosted by Nasdaq!

Have a nice weekend 🙂