Swiss founders often look at international startup hubs like Silicon Valley or New York, or London and Berlin in Europe. And Paris if you’re looking to penetrate the French market or it’s LeWeb’s time! But who think that there are a lot of things going on in Lyon?
Lyon area is the 2nd biggest French urban area with around 3.2M inhabitants. On 1st and 2nd October, the city will welcome for the first time a big tech conference called Blend Web Mix. More than 900 entrepreneurs, designers, investors and marketers will gather to listen 80 speakers.
Successful and famous (well, most Swiss founders probably don’t know their name I guess) entrepreneurs like Renaud Visage (cofounder & CTO of Eventbrite), Thibaud Elzière (serial entrepreneur, notably Fotolia), Olivier Mathiot (cofounder of Price Minister) and many more will share their experience.
Roxanne Varza (already known on startupolic – she’s the initiator of the first European FailCon, founder of Girls in Tech UK and Paris, etc.) will also give a talk.
Martin Mignot, a London-based French VC (active at Index Ventures) will also participate to a panel regarding venture investing.
Of course, like every good conference, there’s a startup contest. 12 innovative startups will be selected to pitch a jury comprised of experienced investors. If you’ve raised less than EUR 1M, your startup is not older than 3 years and… your team is nice (“sympa”)… you have chances to be selected! Seize the opportunity to take part to the competition until 11th September at midnight (well, you have 72 hours – but that’s enough time to complete the form, even if they’ve not used f6s as I suggested in my post “Startup competition: don’t waste entrepreneur’s time!” – they didn’t read startupolic…until now ;-)!).
Even if there’s no cash for the winner, I think that as many Swiss startups as possible should apply to this competition (even if it seems to be, well, franco-French… tech conference in French, that will change us a lot!) to demonstrate that Switzerland is a powerful web and mobile country. Prove to France’s startup scene that there are world class startups here and that their investors should definitely come here more often. Let’s show #Swisspower!
This 2-days conference is organized by fellow blogger and entrepreneur Guilhem Bertholet (whose for instance behind La Cuisine du Web and Aperoentrepreneurs… among other ones) and startup ecosystem builder Julien Petit.
Come back on this post on 16th of September to potentially win a free pass for the 2 days… more info to come!
UPDATE: as promised, if you’d like to win a free ticket for this 2-days conference, here’s a quite simple way to get it. Share this post on your Facebook or twitter account and explain why you need to attend this conference. Encourage your friends or followers to share or like your update until September 18th, 20:00 CET… the one who gets the most points, get the ticket! Fill the little form here: http://goo.gl/XwKpN2
Here how to calculate your score:
- Twitter: Retweet = 3pts, Favorite = 1pt,
- Facebook: Share = 3pts / Comment = 2pts / Like = 1pt
And if you’ve not win the free ticket, everything is not lost for you! The 20 first people using the following code (STARTUPOLICBLEND) from 19th of September get a 15% discount (only available until 21st of September)!