Yesterday I attended the STHLM TECH MEETUP in Hilton Auditorium, Stockholm. The STHLM TECH MEETUP is the Europe’s largest monthly event for start-ups and takes place the first Monday of each month. This time two big guests were centre-stage: IBM Ventures and Schibsted. IBM Venture Capital Group is dedicated to driving IBM’s commitment to innovation in the venture capital community. The Group helps start-ups rise above the rest by increasing their visibility, differentiation and credibility. On the other hand, Schibsted is one of the world’s leading digital media companies with 6,900 employees in 30 different countries including Sweden where this company has partnership with big companies as Blocket. Today, millions of people interact with Schibsted companies every day.
These two companies showed how big companies are investing a lot in start-ups, especially in Stockholm and the Nordics. On details, the business environment of Stockholm is broad and the investment landscape is changing and growing day-by-day. In 2016, for example, the initial investments were about 1.4 billions while the exit investments around 1.75 billions.
The meeting started with interviews to some Swedish companies operating in Stockholm in order to highlight this changing in the Stockholm investment landscape. Mentioned companies were Swedbank, Dynamo and DriveNow.
Swedbank’s operations are aimed to help the people and businesses achieve a solid financial sustainability. This company made lots of different start-ups partnerships to build customer value. They are able to give their customer more control and they try to achieve optimal solutions. This bank is very progressive even more than American banks.
Dynamo is a company focused on mobile since this is what they do best. Their main activities are consulting, creating new own ideas trough a concept studio and acting as a technical co-founder or a development team for start-ups. Indeed, with their code-for-equity program they lower the threshold for great start-ups. The design of Dynamo is based on Design Sprints – a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Design sprint is used in order not to waste time, as a great ice breaker for new teams and is a good habit and process. Moreover, people after these 5 days are tired but very happy. This process is composed by 5 phases:
- Understand: This phase must be clear and reach common understanding of the working context including the problem, the business, the customer, the value proposition, and how success will be determined
- Diverge: Generate insights and potential solutions to our customer’s problems. It is necessary to make assumptions to create our idea and no judgement is allowed. Individual and time exercise is necessary.
- Converge: in this phase judgement is allowed and we try to find a common solution.
- Prototype: creation of a prototype and is prepared for the test with existing or potential customers.
- Test & Learn: before penetrating the market, testing the product is necessary by making the right questions to the customers.
The last one was DriveNow, car sharing company. DriveNow owns 300 vehicles in Stockholm at the moment and it provides a more flexible way to have access to a car. Their purpose, indeed, is to guarantee flexibility and quick solutions to their customers. Principal competitors are the owners of private cars and their mental perception that stop them from using shared cars since they don’t really own them. The company goal is now to move in the direction of a green and sharing economy.
The central part of the meeting was composed by interviews to Christoph Auer Welsbach, investor of IBM Ventures, one founder and two investment managers. There was a long discussion and Christoph stated how IBM is searching strong start-ups that holds for the next hundreds years and more and more large companies today are seeking cooperation with startups.
In the conclusion, the meeting ended with three pitches of some of the newest Stockholm’s start-ups as Einride and CIRQS.
It was a great to partecipate to this start up event since it helped me to get in contact with the entrepreneurial world. I figured out how in Sweden there is a high quality start-up business full of start-ups with great visions and ideas as well as a deeper and innovative technology environment.
The event: https://www.meetup.com/it-IT/STHLM-Tech-Meetup/events/238554307/
Read more about IBM; IBM Watson new creation: http://www.adweek.com/digital/ibm-watson-created-a-modern-sculpture-inspired-by-the-work-of-one-spains-most-famous-architects/