This is a guest post from Christophe, CEO and co-founder of the the e-commerce startup Kireego. A couple of weeks ago, we participated to the London WebSummit, where our little venture was nominated amongst the 25 Startup Award finalists. The news came quite as a nice surprise in January, while we had still our hands full and heads down trying to finish some last tweaks before our Beta Release. We were (literally) in our bunker/cave bootstrapping – ok, we admit a little bit of seed – our project since many months. Of course, we were pulling our heads up from time to time to check with our targeted audience (independent merchants) if what we were doing and our concept made sense to them. “Kireego’s been selected for the finals at the London WebSummit!”. Well, it seems that out of hundreds …
London – some learnings
London is the older European startup hub that everybody is talking about, even if Berlin, Dublin and Stockholm are gaining a good reputation to launch businesses. As well I’ve heard and read a lot about London, I’ve never been there (except half a day as I was in language school in Brighton!) and I’ve seized the opportunity of London Web Summit (happening today) to fly here. I’ve managed to organize some meetings and discovered a bit the city following them. Many people have heard about the Google Campus, but I had never seen how it was looking. Here how the entrance look like: Impressive? Nope. Need to be impressive and extremely modern (as our technology parks in Switzerland we are so proud of)? Nope. Once you enter the building, you get a better sense of where you are when you’re looking to this: I think …
My take-aways from DLD Conference
The serie “Does Switzerland exist on European tech startup scene?” is now over. I was waiting for 2 additional posts, but that didn’t work for my fellow foreign bloggers. Anyway, being a bit short on time, you’ll find here next week some of my thoughts about how we could transform the startup landscape in Switzerland. In the meantime, I wanted to share with you some of my notes taken during DLD Conference last month in Münich (which I was lucky enough to be invited to – but that’s another story). One of the highlights was the closing talk by Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook, among other ones. Here are some tweetable content from his talk! Most ideas that people don’t agree with… are simply wrong! An engineer is the closest thing to a magician that exists in …
HOW TO win over your co-workers
I’ve read an interesting and funny printed article sometimes ago about how to win over your co-workers (unfortunately, I’ve not found who has written this). Here is what was in this excellent piece (I’ve not credit for this!): Make sure your desk is as messy as possible (others will read it as a sign of productivity) Always send emails at random times (22:45, 07:00) and on important public holidays Nothing good ever came from hitting “reply all” Sighing loudly and often can be used as a way to express just how much work you have The printer will work both faster and better if you yell at it Use as much jargon as possible. Phrases like “think outside of the box” and text speak can be an exceptionally effective way to communicate: at the end of the day it all boils …
Does Switzerland exist on the European tech startup scene? (Part I)
National media and politics often congratulate themselves about the success of Swiss innovation. For instance, the Global Innovation ranking index puts Switzerland at the first place worldwide, but how relevant is this index? You have to know that it is based on the number of patents regarding to the country population. Maybe it’s a good indicator of patentable innovation like in pharma, mechanics, etc. But what’s about the ICT sector? By definition, ICT code is really difficult to protect. And if yes, will cost millions to defend with not much certainty of winning, even if you were copied. But does Switzerland really exist on the European tech startup scene? To have objective opinions, I’ve asked some of my fellow international bloggers on how they see Switzerland from an outside, neutral perspective. I hope to have a serie of post coming …
HOW TO Make The Perfect Pitch (Part III/III)
This is the third and last post of the serie “How to make a perfect pitch”. If you’ve missed the first and second post, give them a look! This week, we’ll discuss more about soft skills (or Emotional Intelligence Quotient). But maybe some of you have never heard of what soft skills are, According to Wikipedia, they are behavioral competencies, which are also known as interpersonal skills, or people skills, which include proficiencies such as communication skills, conflict resolution and negotiation, personal effectiveness, creative problem solving, strategic thinking, team building, influencing skills and selling skills, to name a few. Related to your presentation, it’s the way you interact with your audience. How you speak is as important as what you’re saying and how you’re moving (be aware of your tics and try to eliminate them). In your pitch, DO: use …
HOW TO Make The Perfect Pitch (Part II/III): the 10 (+1) slides you need
This is the second post of the serie “How to make a perfect pitch”. If you’ve missed the first part last week, here it is. This week, we’ll discuss more about the Pitch structure. As you already know, you just have limited time to make the investor enthousiastic on you or your project. On average:, you just have 5-7 minutes to present your project. That’s quick so you’d rather be effective and not wasting any pitching opportunity. The first 30 seconds are crucial, as it will determine if your audience will really listen to you (or just reading their emails or play on their smartphone instead). You’ve probably already heard about Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30-rule, which is now really common: 10 slides 20 minutes (5-7 minutes presentation, 13-15 minutes Q/A) 30 minimal font size I’d like to share with you how …
HOW TO Make The Perfect Pitch (Part I/III)
Four years ago, I’ve dived into the startup world and I’ve seen a few hundreds (or more?) startup pitches since then, from early stage to mature companies. With this experience and a great presentation from the amazing Jean-Pierre Vuilleumier (who I’d like to thank for his energy at helping Swiss startups and what he taught me) in mind, I thought that some tips on how to pitch your startup could be helpful. I’ve also recently observed that the need for pitch coaching/training is really present, for first time entrepreneurs as well as for more experienced ones. I do not pretend to reinvent the art of pitching, but sincerely hope that it will help you make a greater impact… To make it digestible, I’ve decided to split the content in a blog serie that will be published on Mondays. Don’t forget …