Yesterday, I went to the Stockholm Tech Meetup with IBM Ventures and Schibsted. The Stockholm Tech meet up is the Europe’s largest event for start ups and it takes place every first Monday of each month. The main guests this Monday were IBM Ventures and Schibsted.
IBM Ventures helps start-ups to grow up, to become more visible on the market and to find investors to start their business.
Schibsted is a Norwegian conglomerate in the media domain. For instance, they own 20minutes, Aftenposten or Blocket. They have more than 200 million users in the 5 continents.
First, they spoke about investment in Sweden. Indeed, Sweden continues to increase its share of investment into the Nordic due to multiple hubs maturing and in particular in Stockholm. In 2016, 1,4 billions $ were invested into Stockholm. They explained that 25% exits of Nordic come from Stockholm. Moreover, acquires of Stockholm tech companies include Facebook, Microsoft or Cisco. Therefore, big companies pay attention to what happen in Stockholm. That’s why, Nordic and in particular Stockholm are strong markets.
Then different interviews of Sweden companies have been done to illustrate the increasing investment in Sweden. The companies interviewed were Swedbank, Dynamo and Drive Now.
Swedbank is a bank which helps lots of start-ups for the financing of their business. They receive 8 applications a day. Moreover, they explained the importance of partnering while they help a start-up. For them, the main goal is to give a better control to start-ups. They also want to optimize the subscription of start-ups.
Then, Dynamo was interviewed. Dynamo is a company of 50 developers. On the one hand, they are doing consulting, for instance, they helped a company to create a service to reduce waste of production. On the other hand, they work on projects which come from the company. During the interview, they spoke about their method to innovate fastly: the Design Sprint. This method is interesting because it’s better to create a slice of something than spending 5 months on something not viable. To do the Design sprint method you need: a facilitator/ conductor, a recorder/note taker, a product owner and the stakeholders, a white board and supplies, and market and competition research. The method is composed of 5 steps:
- Understand: Elevator Pitch. You have to find the right problem and it has to be clear.
- Diverge: Generate ideas individually or in team. Here the most important rule is “No judging allowed”.
- Converge: here is the judging time to chose the best solution. For that, you can use a vote map.
- Prototype: Make your idea real.
- Test: Test your prototype with potential users from the market target. It’s important to not do this test with just colleagues but with real future customers. After the test, you have to interview the testers. During the interview, you have to avoid questions of which the answer can start with “it depends”. Moreover you have to avoid using “how often” but you have to ask “when was the last time?” to collect more relevant information.
Finally, they interviewed Drive Now. A company of car sharing. This company offers an app where you can find their cars available near from you. Then, you can just use the car and let it wherever and whenever you want. You will just pay for the kilometers you have done with the car. It creates flexibility in the car sharing because you don’t need to reach a precise point to let the car. Drive now is present in various cities as London, Bruxelles or Stockholm. They explained that the helps from the cities depends on politics. For example, Stockholm is positively opened for Drive now, however, they not support the company. Currently in Stockholm, they have 300 cars available with 10% of electric cars. They explained that for the future, they would like to increase the number of electrical cars to become more environmental friendly.
After these interviews, there was a discussion between an investor of IBM Ventures (Christoph Auer Welsbach), a founder and two investment managers. They explained that banks as Swedbank are really important for innovation because without them we can’t innovate. Moreover, he shows that IBM is interesting because decreasing the risk is never increasing innovation, that is why IBM’ help is really important for start-ups. Moreover IBM is interesting because find the idea is the easiest part but build a successful company is the hardest part. He also explained that when he has to chose a company to invest, the most relevant thing he wants is a team which think for the future, because the most important thing is to create a long partnership to build something that will last for a long time.
To participate to this event was really interesting because we have learnt a lot of things about investment for start-ups and innovation in general. It was also interesting to heard different actors like investors or entrepreneurs.
PS: I went to this event with Marilena so we both wrote about this event, but I did it without reading what she wrote before so I hope both will be interesting for you.
