Monthly Archives: October 2016

Yesterday I went to a tech startup event held on Hilton in Slussen. The event was mainly directed towards startups that needs investors, but also a great way to get contact. The event was packed with people standing along the walls to get a glimpse of what was going on, on the stage.

The last event I went to, 19@19 by SUP46, I found on startup-event on the tremendously good website meetups.com which is doing just that, making people meetup.

The event begun with discussions with investors and an interview determine what they were doing as an investor and what field they have the most interest in. The main investor invited to the event was H&M which had an interest especially in the field of new materials and sustainable fashion. Another big investor at the event was Nordic Makers, they have been investing in a popular and successful startup called OnlinePizza.

The main thing and in my opinion the most entertaining part of the evening, and probably why I would go there again, were the part when they had invited people to do their pitch on stage and was live commenting them. Like they mentioned, not at all a Swedish way of doing it. The pitcher was constantly interrupted and received comments on his performance, mostly or mainly critic from both the audience and the jury sitting on stage. The comments and the critic was all in line with what good critic is, but the way they were doing it was like a comic. You got yourself a proper laugh, I guess that was more pleasant for the audience then for the pitcher.

Overall a good event, comparing this event to the SUP 46 event I thought that the 19@19 event was easier to take part of and mingling with the nametags and the natural environment for the purpose. If you have a tech startup I think this is the place to go to get contacts and if you felt bad about your pitch, this is the place to go to feel better.

And the conclusion after the pitching:

• Show the product early in the pitch
• Show the problem
• AND show the product if the investors ask for it

Over and out!

Hello again!
Today I will write about my second start up event, namely the STHLM Tech meetup event held in Hilton hotel in Slussen. I have to begin with saying that it was incredibly packed, there was barely room to stand. The upside however was that the event holders were really entertaining and great at their job.

In the beginning, they talked a lot about how the event has grown and how it today establishes relations between start up and investors that are beyond expectations. I was actually quite shocked when one of the slides showed the incredible potential of the stockholm start up environment. There are some absolutely huge investment being made in Swedish and Nordic companies. For example, Starbreeze received an investment of 385 million kronor a few days ago.

As I’m generally very interested in sports and especially football, it was interesting to listen about how Zlatan Ibrahimovic is doing tech investments and how other Swedish athletes are moving in the same direction. One of them is Alexander Gustafsson, the Swedish MMA-star. His manager, Mr Ghassemi, was at the event and was asked up on stage to talk about some of these investments.

To summarise, I definitely recommend you to go to these kind of events. I’ve had positive experiences from both the events I’ve been to, the start up bar and this one.

So long (and thanks for all the fish…)!

My brother is a Google employee and a tech geek as well. So by chance as it happened, we were traveling together after the class when we discussed about Google Wave failing and how these big companies use the technology in some other place.

Though, I was still wondering, would you call it a failure and if yes, why actually did they fail. Over a conversation with my brother, I did understand a few things better and could relate to the actual things that happen around us. One more reason, why innovations (or maybe inventions) can fail is due to the product being ahead of it’s time, and there have been multiple examples of this. That the market and the world isn’t ready to adapt to the new technology at that time, though it might actually be highly be used in the coming time. Google Wave was one such product, and we see Slack today has a big market in the same idea. Even, Google Glass that was released a couple of years ago, is ahead of it’s time, and therefore though Google  went through an intensive testing and building phase, it never publicly released the invention because they saw no current value.

I think, as we move on from Virtual Reality to Augmented Reality, Google Glass will a very common thing in life when you can react with real life objects as well as virtually do stuff together.

What essentially I got to learn is that, when you create something and build a business around it, you also need to know two things apart from all the existing things that you consider while building a startup. Is the world (your target market exists) ready for your invention? If yes, then can you sell your invention. The difficult part comes where the you have a existing market segment but it’s a completely revolutionary technology in that sector, like the idea of Henry Ford but you are able to generate the need.

So it is not only important to have a great idea, it is even more important to be able to generate the need and use for what you have built to sell it.

Yesterday I was at the famous startup event organized by STHLM TECH MEETUP in Hilton Slussen. STHLM TECH MEETUP is Europe’s largest monthly event for startups. I was surprised to see how crowded the room was!

I won’t talk about what happened during this event because many people from the course were there yesterday and have already described the content of this event. It is interesting to read all your blogposts 🙂

Investors from H&M and Nordic Makers were on the stage and I thought it was really interesting to see that big and famous companies are always connected with startups. Each startup could be an opportunity for huge companies to keep innovating. I also realized that intrapreneurship is more and more common (read more about intrapreneurship in the interesting post from Mathieu here)!

STHLM TECH MEETUP is a great community for startups. This event was energetic and I’ll keep an eye on their upcoming events.

I follow your advice and I now plan to go to SUP46. Events for startups are new for me and it is really interesting to discover the “startup environment”. I think we can learn a lot from entrepreneurs even if we don’t plan to become one!

 

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 🙂

 

Today I’ve been at the STHLM TECH meetup event which was held at Hilton hotel, Slussen.

A lot of people attending the event.

It was a very different kind of event compared to the last time i was at a startup event which was interesting to see. That’s why i wanted to share my thoughts of the event.

The event was held by Mr Tyler Crowley, who is the founder and organizer of the event. Initially he introduced the event, but quite early welcomed two investors that had been invited as special guests (H&M and Nordic Makers).

H&M making their presentation.

They got to present their companies, what they do and what interests they had in joining the startup scene. They both had the same general idea that they wanted to find new creative people alongside with their ideas which they could invest in and in the end become mutually beneficial.
But to exemplify, H&M were extra interested in finding some kind of material that could replace the most common material used out there today (cotton) as well as to learn how to produce their products more efficiently.

After some other investors also had the chance to present themselves, three different startups that were invited got the chance to pitch their idea. At any point in time, the invited investors that were invited up on the scene could interrupt the pitch to give any kind of feedback.

The three different ideas were:

• Questions on Wikipedia
  Where the idea was based on an app where you would use the extent of Wikipedias knowledge in order to quiz yourself and learn more in a fun way.
• Foodmarket online
  Where you would use hashtags (e.g. #cheese, #soup, #vegitarian) as filters in order to see where your food that you would filter could be found. Either restaurants, foodstores or local people selling food in any way.
  
• An app to find office space
  An app design to provide a service that grant a suitable office space anywhere. This app could provide spaces in restaurants, office buildings, cafes etc. The possibilities were endless it seemed…

Pitcher performing their ideas to the investors (and audience).

All of the pitches got a lot of criticism. Mostly constructive feedback, but also comments in order to entertain the audience. It was really amusing due to the fact that I would have similar thoughts about their way of presenting.

There were three things they all had problems with which was:

• Too long pitch
• Way too complicated slides
• Did not show the product/solution quickly enough

All of this resulted in that the audience and investors were left confused even though the majority of the audience thought that the ideas had potential.

I got to speak a few guests at the event. I asked a guy named Eric, who was into the app development business, what he thought about the pitches. He could actually relate to the difficulty of knowing how to perform in front of a big crowd with an idea that you’ve been working on for quite some time. I debated the main problems of the pitchers and thought that it was somewhat obvious. It might be due to the fact that the Entrepreneurship course have given me a new view, but a lot also comes from a long background of studies.

I would like to end by saying:
Nobody isn’t really interested in the idea until they can see what the actual product looks like and what the possibilities are.

Today, I attended Sthlm Tech Meetup. Mr Tyler Crowley, a very energic compere, welcomed us into the big auditorium at Hilton Slussen.

A lot of people attended the event.

Mr Crowley started of by telling us about the number of startups raising money in Stockholm today, numbers that have grown a lot since the event started. The number eight doubled since the first Sthlm Tech Meetup. All these numbers prove that the startup scene in Stockholm has evolved to something greater.

Oscar, Andy, Nassif & me.

Later on Mr Crowley and his colleague presented some of the companies that raised money this year. He pointed out that a couple of years ago, representants from all these companies would be on stage, but now they are so many that not everyone get their own slide in his presentation.

They went on and talked about (famous) people’s investments in tech startups. Names like HM’s Stefan Persson was of course mentioned here, but I was more surprised by other one – like Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Alexander Gustafsson, the Swedish MMA-star. Thomas Ghassemi, the manager of Gustafsson, was brought up to the stage to talk about Gustafsson’s recent investments. It was very different and interesting. Mr Crowley later asked the audience if any of their startups would interest Gustafsson, and a couple of people got to chance to tell about their startup in a couple of sentences. An interaction that I liked!

The huge crowd

Adam from Nasdaq later talked about how Stockholm startup scene was becoming mature. The increasing number of IPOs a proof of that!

A talked with a couple of people regarding their startups ideas, and some had really great ones. Some had already started to make their idea become reality – inspiring us to do the same.

See you tomorrow!

The other day we talked a little bit about the actions of Elon Musk when he shared the patents of Tesla to the industry. Elon Musk is a sharp business man but also a real fighter for environmental and scientific improvement, so why release patents that must have cost a fortune to develop? According to a Swedish car magazine it is due to the fact that Tesla cannot produce enough environmentally friendly cars to solve the climate crisis (http://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2014/06/13/tesla-giving-away-its-patents-makes-sense/#534d91a567dc). This is one way of stating the same fact that Forbes did in this article where they stated that the actions solely were taken due to the lack of real competition in the market where Tesla is active (http://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2014/06/13/tesla-giving-away-its-patents-makes-sense/#534d91a567dc). I truly believe that the reason behind Musk’s decision is that he wanted to enhance and add new competition to the market to push the development forward both business and environmentally wise. If we believe in a free market we all know that competition is something good, but in business not everyone are your friends. In the case of Elon Musk he has not and will probably not experience any trouble with other companies taking over the patents trying to block the development of competitors due to different strategies and market approach.

With this said I do wonder why so few of you offered Impetus R&D licencing agreements…Don’t you want the market to move forward?! (Im not bitter)