If you are in the startup scene in Europe you have for sure heard of Seedcamp or at least read an article about them on TechCrunch Europe. If not, here’s the short run down.
Seedcamp was initiated in 2007 by Saul Klein, of Index Ventures, and is run by CEO Reshma Sohoni and her team to promote the creation of startups in Europe and to seed finance the best of them (surprise, surprise). Many of the best known investors, entrepreneurs and mentors in Europe are investors or supporters of Seedcamp. Seedcamp orchestrated this year 7 one day events or “mini Seedcamps” in Tel Aviv, Berlin, Helsingborg, Ljubljana, Paris, London and Warswaw by choosing 20 startup teams to participate at each event. The teams get to pitch their ideas in front of a group of approximately 80 mentors and investors within a carefully orchestrated schedule which enables each team to have 8 mentoring sessions per day, with 3-5 mentors per session. This structure allows the teams to receive invaluable feedback from mentors with diverse backgrounds to their pitch, business model, marketing, product, strategy, technology – in short, all the aspects you need to build a great web business.
Next week, September 21-25th is Seedcamp week, which is *the* event of the fall for Europe’s upcoming startups. 21 finalists have been announced from across 10 countries in Europe including 1 from Israel and 1 from Jordan to come and meet over 300 mentors and investors in a full on program consisting of 4 themed days: founders day, going to market, how to scale and investors.
We are proud to announce that we are partnering with Seedcamp to select 3 of the finanlists in conjunction with our venture capital partners to provide each of them a one day Focus Workshop covering target customers and product core utility.
Why do we think this is of need?
We’ve found that the biggest difference between success and failure of a new venture is the teams’ ability to focus and execute. Using the Pollenizer methodology, we’ll identify the first target segment the company should focus on, scrutinize the core utility to serve that segment and develop a product and marketing action plan. We believe this focus exercise will be invaluable for these companies and are happy to provide our experience to these teams.
We look forward to seeing you at Seedcamp London!
About Pollenizer:
At Pollenizer we build web businesses and have helped more than 80 start-ups grow. Founders and investors engage our veteran team of technology, product, business and marketing specialists for focus and execution within their ventures. We tightly integrate the business focus with product development and technology creating value for the end user in alignment with a business model. We bring an ‘agile’ approach to all aspects of operations applying our experience learned at companies such as Kazaa, Yahoo, BBC, Naspers, Skype, Amazon and Xing. We like to share the risk and reward with our clients, which extends their runway and leads to a long term partnership.