Are you often travelling to startup conferences and lacking the connection with local entrepreneurs? Then, StartupStay is there for you! StartupStay is an accommodation online service, where you can request to stay by a fellow entrepreneur. For free. When you’re preparing a travel to a startup conference (like Dublin Web Summit, which I have the honor to attend as an official blogger), you’re always wasting time to find an available and affordable room. If you’ve found one, cool. But you’re missing something. How can you easily connect with the local startup community? StartupStay is just that: you look for an entrepreneur who would be OK to host you for free. You can browse the entrepreneur’s profiles and find the ones who are the closer from your interests or your industry. What you provide for it is up to you. But …
Get discounted tickets for 2nd Swiss Mobicamp
Like so many British folks waking up this Monday, Martin Coul the founder and energy behind the Swiss Mobicamp (read my previous post) initiative is incredibly proud of the fantastic achievement London has reached over these past few weeks in delivering what is mostly recognized as the “best Olympic games and Paralympics ever”… Even though Switzerland is now his home (for our great pleasure!), Martin wanted to celebrate this London pride. He’ll offer 10 x discounted tickets to Swiss Mobicamp (taking place in Bern on 1st November). The Olympic inspired discounts will vary each day from between 14%-29% and will only be available in limited quantities and on a first come, first served basis. This Monday was the first discount, and you could have saved 21%… Not bad! Just follow @thecoulroom or via the newsfeed on mobicamp.ch to get informed and take advantage …
Creative Mornings – Swiss chapters
Until this year, not much relevant startup’ events have been happening in Geneva in my opinion (except the yearly amazing Lift Conference). Mazala, a young entrepreneur on her way to revolutionize the bank industry, and Nelio, a web designer and entrepreneur, whom Startup Weekend participants already know, started earlier this year the local chapter of «CreativeMornings». Launched by Tina Roth Eisenberg, a swiss designer gone NYC, more known as “swissmiss”, CreativeMornings aims to gather likeminded creative people around a free breakfast. She felt the need to organize a more accessible event as usual conferences and… the success of the concept is yet widely confirmed! Started in 4 cities one year ago, CreativeMornings is now monthly available in 34 cities around the globe (in Switzerland, in Zürich and Geneva). To better serve the CreativeMornings community. Tina and her team even run …
Lean Startup Meetup in Geneva
Lean Startup principles are more and more widely accepted in the startup scene. Eric Ries, the initiator of this movement, displays the philosophy behind it: “Lean Startup isn’t about being cheap [but is about] being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.” To name the 5 key principles: Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Entrepreneurship is Management Validated Learning Innovation Accounting Build – Measure – Learn In Switzerland, not many events have been organized on this topic until recently. The first event of this kind was organized earlier this year in Zürich (“The Lean Startup Factory”) and now, things are also moving in Geneva on the initiative of Vincenzo and Doris. The 4th edition of the Lean Meetup is taking place on 13th of September 2012 at 18:30 in Geneva. Aim of the meeting will be to learn more about these …
HOW TO deal with your early stage valuation
There is a recurrent question coming to me for really early stage startup, who haven’t incorporated: how do we get investors without giving the majority of shares in my startup from day one? For people who already have gone through the process, or for experienced people, that seems easy and obvious (so you can skip it!). But it’s not. Rather than repeating again and again, I’d try here to explain how to deal with it. If you incorporate your company as a SA/AG/Ltd with CHF 100’000.- (sorry for readers outside of Switzerland – but the mechanism is universal) and you only have CHF 50’000.- in your pocket, you need the remaining amount of cash (for simplicity, let’s avoid the fact that you could indeed incorporate with this amount. Or that you can bring real goods). If someone invests 50k now …
Recruit fresh hungry talents at Start-up Day!
Shortage of start-up talents in Switzerland (and everywhere, maybe except in big startup hubs) is widely known. Fortunately, as the startup spirit is growing in Switzerland, high schools have understood this and several initiatives have been launched to help startups recruit among young graduates. In Lausanne, the students association «Forum EPFL» (for my readers outside Switzerland: EPFL = «Swiss Federal Institute of Technology») is organizing for the 3rd time the «Start-up Day» on Friday 5th of October. Entrepreneurs have the possibility to book a booth for free (yeah, they know that money is scarce in startup world!), attend a pitch training and then pitch their project to a students audience, and even buy the «CV book» of all EPFL graduates of the year (ask the organizer, they should have a start-up friendly price!). Last year, around 40 companies had a …
Grab the opportunity to dive into Berlin’s startup scene
More and more, Berlin is seen as one of the most vibrant european startup scene. And it’s true: things are moving fast there! My fellow blogger Adelina invited me to a new kind of conference – Tech Open Air Berlin Festival – taking place on August 23rd & 24th. TOA is an innovative summer festival made by the community for the community, which has leveraged the crowdfunding approach to test the support of the tech scene and get the minimal financing (they overcame it!) for the event. That’s alone is worth writing on, for me! Focus of the festival will be the networking between participants and not especially with the guys on stage (but the speakers’ panel is worth listening – from serial entrepreneurs to prominent investors). Hundreds of people from across Europe are expected and the organizers hope to …
The mobile ecosystem: get insights and learn tips and tricks!
You’re an entrepreneur, an investor, a developer or simply a guy passionate about new technologies? So get the opportunity to attend the 2nd Swiss Mobicamp, taking place on 1st November 2012 in Bern. Absolutely unique in Switzerland (and maybe also in neighbouring countries? I’d love to be aware of similar events abroad!), the organizers have prepared a serie of interesting talks, workshops, 1-to-1 meeting with industry experts (named the “Mobile Clinic”). There’s even a pitch competition (the “Dragon Den”), where 5 preselected start-ups will fight to win the CHF 5’000.- award (no cash, but some material useful advantages like ticket entrances to Mobile World Congress, etc.) in a Pecha Kucha (20 seconds per slide) mode. Renowned experts like Andreas Constantinou will give some insights on industry trends, useful tips to understand the difference of mobile OS and some ideas for the renewal of the Telecommunication companies. James Money, from GetJar (largest …