Author Archives: Tanvip.

Yesterday I went to an event called FemTech hosted by SUP46. It was an event created by women for women. During the evening we got to hear the stories of some successful women in tech:
– Frida Emilsson, Co-founder & CMO at Worldfavor
– Victoria Bastide, CTO at Lifesum
– Jane Walerud, Founder & Investor at Walerud Ventures. (Jane is a Business Angle, some of the companies she has helped become successful are Klarna, Tobii, Lensway)

These three women told us about their journey within the tech startup world. We also got to listen to 3 startup pitches by: SEVN, Simply Events and BlueCall.

I really appreciated the event. It was great to mingle with women only and to hear the stories of three successful women in tech. One interesting thing that I reflected about was when the panel discussed if they had ever experienced difficulties in the industry because of their sex and while Frida Emilsson and Victoria Bastide had not face any challenges in terms of equality Jane Walerud had. She told us about when she was younger and she had been offered a lot of short cuts to the top by older men and what they wanted in return was often sexual services. I think that Jane was the only one to experience this because she is a bit older than the other ladies in the panel and that men back in the days were less feminist than today. It makes me really glad that the other two women (Frida & Victoria) have never been faced with any kind of issue concerning sex equality, maybe it means that the younger generation of men are becoming more and more feminist compared to the older generation of men.

It was truly amazing to see so many women on the event (I think we were at least 150 women there), knowing that they are all interested in tech and startups. I hope to see many more women in the tech industry in the future and I hope to be one of them!

 

Picture: Jane Walerud (Business Angle) talking about why Sweden is a good place to be an entrepreneur: there is much to gain and not much to loose (your childrens education is free, pension you’ll get anyhow, healthcare is free etc).

 

Yesterday evening I went to STHLM TECH MEETUP with Ricardo, Alycia, Cholé and Mathieu. STHLM TECH MEETUP is Europe’s largest monthly event for startups. The event was held at Slussen in Hilton Hotel’s auditorium and it was packed with people for the event. During the evening there was interviews with H&M and Nordic Makers and in the end we got to hear 3 startup pitches which was a lot of fun.

More and more investors are looking to invest in tech, two examples being Zlatan and Alexander ‘The Mauler’ Gustafsson. One representative for The Mauler who was interviewed on stage explained that a key ingredient for them when deciding weather to invest or not is the people behind the company. They want  passionate and hard working people rather than big successful companies.

Most people know H&M as a fashion company but the company has become one of the most active investors in startups (two examples are IvyRevel and Sellpy). The two interviewees from H&M were Björn Magnusson and Nanna Andersson and they revealed what they look for when deciding to invest in a startup or not: 1) Sustainable Fashion, 2)Innovative Business Model, 3) Tech Enablers. Another thing H&M are looking into right now and that they are very interested of is some kind of machine learning stylist. So if you ever want to pitch for H&M, make sure that your business idea covers these areas.

Nordic Makers was created quiet recently when several top Nordic startup founders including Unity, Zendesk, Momondo, TAT, TwentyThree, OnlinePizza and others  joined their talents and wallets to invest and help build the next generation of Nordic startups. It was really interesting to hear their story.

Apart from these two companies being interviewed, we also got to hear three startup pitches. The fun thing about this activity was that the person pitching the startup got feedback during and after the pitch, both from the people on stage (people from H&M, Nordic Makers and the STHLM TECH hosts) but also from the audience. It takes a lot of courage putting yourself out there and pitching for an overcrowded auditorium and receiving harsh feedback in front of everyone, nevertheless it is a great experience. The three startups that held pitches were: 1) WOK (World of Knowledge), 2)Fooever, 3)Palaver. I think that the people who pitched could have been more prepared by getting early feedback from people, before getting up on that stage. They didn’t really get the crowd with them from the beginning as it was difficult to understand the value proposition of their business ideas.

There were many other people from the course on this event, so I am sure you will get to read a lot of blog posts about this event, so I will not write much more now 🙂

 

Last year I took a course in Business Creation where focus was on how to spot trends,  find new business opportunities and how to realize them. We worked a lot with sequential back-casting, market sizing, customer segmentation, marketing etc. What I enjoyed the most with this course was how I was constantly challenged to reflect outside the box, solving problems with the tools the course provided me with.

The course was given by two teachers at KTH and one of them has now started an online course called “The Impact of Technology” through Coursera (the topic of MOOC in itself is worth a separate blog post!). I just found out that the work we did in the course “Business Creation” has been used as a foundation to start this new online course. As a favour to the teacher, Dr Martin Vendel, I gave some feedback on how to attract students to this online course. It felt great to be able to give some feedback to him as he had been giving me a whole lot of feedback on the business idea I worked on during the course last year.

If you are truly interested in entrepreneurship I think this online course provided by Martin Vendel will be a perfect complement to this Entrepreneurship course you are taking now. It will give you insight and tools to forecast potential impact of new technology which in turn I think will help you realize your future business idea.

Check out the course here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/impact-of-technology