#STHLMTECH Meetup (2 Oct.)

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Two days ago I went with Timo Bunk to Europe’s largest event for startups. It takes place the first Monday of each month in the Hiltion Stockholm Slussen Hotel. Usually, three lucky startups pitch a special guest live on stage and the audience chooses which startup joins the investor for dinner afterwards. On Monday evening only two startups presented their pitches. I want to write about my impressions in general and also about the two pitches.

In the first hour the investment companies (Draper Esprit, Wellstreet) have been interviewed. That was not so interesting for me. In my opinion the focus should be on the startups. That’s the reason why I just want to say some general information about them in two sentences. Since 2016, Draper Esprit has raised over $1B to become one of the biggest and most active investors in Europe. Starting less than 2 years ago, Wellstreet has already made 36 investments making them one of the Scandinavia’s newest and also most active investors in seed and early stage startups. Now I want to present the two pitches.

  1. Pitch – Live Shop

Live Shop enables the in-store experience online by bringing the power of real people to companies’ websites. They believe that nothing is stronger than the personal meeting because it leaves no room for misunderstandings. The applications allows companies to enable a personal meeting with their customers, look what are you talking about, drag and drop interactive objects on the screen and to take things step by step forward. They are also able to analyze the data before, during, and after the video-call (http://www.liveshop.se/).

The investors criticize the technical aspects and problems regarding to such a solution (plug-in, software, live streaming). Moreover there are many competitors on the market, which are offering identical products. I have also heard form solution like that before and there seems to be nothing which differentiated them from other alternatives. They also did not mention their selected target customer segments. That was my first impression but for a comprehensive and differentiated evaluation of the application I need more information.

 

  1. Pitch – Valossa (Video Artificial Intelligence)

The second startup built video artificial intelligence. That means, that they created a system that understand videos like people do. It recognizes faces, it identifies objects and places and it listens to the dialog and audio, so that it can actually tell you what your videos are about. That means it extracts and analyzes information from multiple information pipelines. This creates comprehensive interpretation of key elements in the video. Moreover it categorize the video in different segments. So the system automatically extract a lot of data on your video content that was not reachable before. In the past it was a manual task. Now you can use the software to improve discovery and recommendations of videos, or it allows advertiser to target moments in videoclibs that are more relevant to their products and services. They provide their service to media entertainment companies and the advertisement side as well (https://valossa.com/).

If you ask me the idea seems to be great because it can used for several things. For example, Netflix can analyze in more detailed way what kind of movies you like to watch. Also in sport it can be used to analyze tactics and how successful they are. So it open-up wide fields of applications.

With a clear majority the audience chooses the second startup (Valossa) as the winner. For me it is also a well-deserved winner.

On Monday I learned how difficult it is to present your own idea in such a short time and convince the audience. The startups have to pay attention to several things and be prepared for several questions. To summarize, the event was a great experience because I learned a lot for the future.

 

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Additional Information:

  1. Next #STHLMTECH Meetup: 6. November
  2. Startup Matchmaking (Find your co-founder, build your team, or join a startup): October 16 ->Tickets link: www.eurpo.com
  3. Stockholm Innovation Scholarship: innovationsstipendiet.se
  4. Interesting article: Why Does Sweden Have So Many Start-Ups? (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sweden-startups/541413/)

 

An innovative recruiting process

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I am not writing about a start up but about an important bank and insurance firm, Groupama. They have 32600 employees in 11 countries, mostly in France.

Be honest, few of our generation dream about working in a bank. Young talents want to work for start-up style big companies like Google. But this bank needs new talents and want to find an innovative way to recruit entrepreneurial talents, not just people wanting to make money.

To change their image and the profile of candidates, they have changed their recruitment system. Instead of the usual meeting with HR head, candidates meet together at an escape game.

Wikipedia Definition : An escape room is a physical adventure game in which players solve a series of puzzles using clues, hints and strategy to complete the objectives at hand. Players are given a set time limit to unveil the secret plot which is hidden within the rooms.  Games are set in a variety of fictional locations, such as prison cells, dungeons and space stations, and are popular as team building exercises.

For 60 minutes, 10 candidates will try together to get out of the room. Depending of the session, a HR employee will be hidden in the master game room or will play with the candidates. They will be graded on their nature, group work appetence, strengths, weaknesses.

Personally, I love escape games so I would very much enjoy such a recruitment session. And that advertising on escape game made me look at jobs offer in that firm. In fact, in those games, your true nature is revealed because you are under stress during one hour. You can see who follows intuition, who is strategic, who is easily adaptable.

For example, it’s not that easy to take the leadership in such a situation, with people who don’t know each other very well and are under stress ; it is however an important role for someone to assume to ensure the success of the session. Anyone who manage to obtain this role, by natural authority, a vote, or whatever else, will prove (s)he has a strong managing potential.

So if you are truly competent, you will be hired whatever your experience or your diploma.

 

What about you ? Is the recruitment process important when you are applying for a firm ?

Entrepreneur and Innovation in södermalm

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Today i went with Estanislao to Södermalm because i found an event in Facebook called “How to succed”.  It had the same structure as other events i went before speech-speech-speech-free beer, so at the end i had the chance to talk with people about their own ventures and with the event managers. The event was organised by HEY WORK a new startup, they are nice people as i saw so let´s  make some publicity  https://heywork.se/ their idea is Turning homes into affordable and social coworking spaces during the day.

 

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Anyway let´s get into the speeches. First Aleksandar Goga from Servicefinder.com talked about how was his experience building this company who apparently just sold it for 300 million. His speech was about Vision, Goals and work  HARD. Followed by him, Hugo Galvenius from GOOGLE talked about innovation in this top company. He expoused some really interesting software that google is developing for free, emphasizing how useful are those tools for new startups such as:

–https://startup.google.com/ (service and support for new startups)

–https://trends.google.es/trends/ ( search trends around the world)

–https://adwords.google.com/home/ (Conect advertisement with Words)images

–https://console.cloud.google.com/start (machine learning software)

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I really recommend to take a look on them.

it was nice to find Anouar there!

Félix Campos.