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 🙂
