I am just on my way back from two fantastic days at Seedcamp, an initiative by the father-son team of Saul Klein, a venture partner at Index, and Robin Klein, a venture partner at Atlas. Seedcamp exposed a group of 20 startups to some of Europe’s top entrepreneurs (e.g., Niklas Zennstrom, Marc Samwer, Martin Varsavsky, Brent Hoberman), top product, marketing & PR, operating and legal experts, and top venture capital investors (e.g. Atlas, Index, Accel, Benchmark Balderton, DFJEsprit, Advent, Highland, Wellington). In addition to input through mentoring, the top 5 teams chosen for the week will now stay in London for another 3 months to further develop their companies with EUR50K from the investors in Seedcamp (in effect, Europe’s top VC funds + Robin Klein).
For the record, the judging panel of which I was a part spent several hours deliberating the final winners (thanks Greg for moderating) and in the end settled on not five but six of the 20 companies. These are, in no particular order: Kublax, RentMineOnline, Buildersite, Zemanta, TableFinder and Project Playfair. The best acceptance speech was by Ryan Notz of Buildersite. An ex-stone mason, he succinctly summed up the pain of the tradesmen and their customers, the motivation of building a business that goes far beyond the financial and the excellent experience that everyone had at Seedcamp this week. His passion and industry expertise alone makes for a compelling case for funding.
Seedcamp has set out to showcase the much bemoaned “European ecosystem” for startups and has succeeded in proving that, if we come together, Europe at its best is a great place to start a company. I used to believe that Europe is a great place to start a technology business primarily because it’s so much easier finding top development talent in Europe than in Palo Alto. However, seeing all European resources come together like this for an intense week-long mentoring session is impressive. There is no question that Euro bureaucracy has impeded and keeps impeding new business creation throughout the EU25. However, constraints breed creativity and the tenacity with which many of these founders are pursuing their vision is admirable. I wish them all the best of luck and hope that many of them will be in touch with Atlas in the coming weeks and months (our first meeting is at 0830 am on Monday morning!).
For the seedcamp team, a big congratulation to Saul, Robin and Reshma for an excellent first event. I’m looking forward to many more Seedcamps to come! Finally, I once again met a slew of wonderful people working in this greatest industry of all: that of the founding and financing of tomorrow’s large companies. In random order, it was great meeting / catching up with Azeem, Nicola, Sean, Avid, Oliver, Fabian, Tina, Olivier, Sumon, Amanda, and not least the very awesome Collette of Ballou PR. If I’ve forgotten anyone that’s cause of Mike Arrington and Mike Butcher buying the drinks last night.
P.S. Next post will be more quirky and sarcastic, I promise, but this merited the above gushing, honestly!
