Central Europe Accelerator

One Month Left To Apply to StartupYard

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The cutoff for applications to StartupYard 2016 is now less than a month away, on November 11th.

Over the past few months, StartupYard director Cedric Maloux and I have travelled all around Central Europe, meeting startups and entrepreneurs eager to take the next step, and accelerate their businesses. It’s been quite a ride so far, that’s taken us to 6 cities, where we’ve met scores of people with talent, energy, and great ideas.

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What Are We Looking For?

Why do we do all this work to reach out to startups? Finding a gem among hundreds of new and untested ideas is a tricky business. We never know what the next big idea is going to be. If we did, we wouldn’t be running an accelerator!

We are looking for startups who can convince us that their idea may just be the next big idea in the areas of Mobile, Data, Anaytics, and IOT.

We are looking for talented engineers, but also dedicated and tireless advocates for a new way of doing business, a new way of thinking about an old problem, or even something entirely new and untested.

Above all, we are looking for teams that we can believe in, and who are ready to use our knowledge, connections, and experience to grow on a global scale.

Demo Day

Why You Should Apply to StartupYard

You shouldn’t think of StartupYard as a menu of things you’ll get when you join.

Of course, we provide 30,000 Euros in funding, and up to 250,000 Euros in follow on financing. We also provide over 500,000 Euros in perks exclusive to members of GAN, the global accelerator network. We also provide workspace, resources, training, and our extensive business network. And who could forget the pizza? We hope you like pizza.

But we are not looking for startups that view us as a source of funding, or a stepping stone they are obligated to use. An accelerator is not a box you need to check off your startup to-do list. At least StartupYard isn’t.

We cannot do anything for a startup that it is not willing to do for itself. But what we can do, is put a startup in the best possible position to succeed. We can’t create relationships for you, but we can provide connections to an unbeatable network of mentors and investors, and the context for building relationships and building trust.

We can facilitate, encourage, and act as a safety net and a sounding board for startups that are willing to take leaps of faith and of imagination. We can push startups -and provide them with the right tools- to improve their communication abilities, refine their business models, sharpen their customer focus, and hone their pitching skills until they can speak convincingly about their ideas in their sleep.

In short, we can be there every day with startups, making sure they have no excuses for failure.

We are often asked what our relationship to our startups is. Are we investors? Are we teachers? Are we consultants? None of these descriptions is right.

We are partners in the plainest sense. We neither lead nor follow, and we don’t profit from our startups until they are successful in the real world. Our interest lies entirely in helping you to succeed, and we accompany our startups on every step toward becoming a real, thriving business.

In short, we live and die with you.

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What We Learned From Demo Day: TechStars London 2015

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StartupYard Director Cedric Maloux and I attended TechStars London’s 2015 Demo day this week, StartupYard’s first official trip to London, thanks to our own TeskaLabs, who pitched as part of an 11 team cohort.

This was actually my first experience of a Demo Day outside of StartupYard. Though I’ve seen streams of other demo days online, I’d never attended another one in person, and the experience was enlightening in several ways. Of course, the quality of pitches was extraordinary, both visually and in terms of content and polish. That was very inspiring, and a challenge for us to live up to.

We do know that TechStars has a preferred format for pitches, and that was clearly on display. Virtually all the companies pitching covered the same data points, and there were certain stock data points that were used frequently, ie: “68% of companies have X problem.” Strangely, the number 68% seemed to have been used several times, though it must have been a coincidence.

Overall though, the pitches were masterful. It is an enormous task to turn a complicated, unproven idea, and render it as something seemingly completely obvious. But that is what most of the founders managed to do.

Of course, accelerators like TechStars pioneered the Demo Day format, but it is also constantly evolving. Here’s what we learned from TechStars London 2015:

Strong Focus on B2B, Platforms, Big Data Analytics, AI

Out of 11 companies, 9 were B2B products, and 8 of those were B2B platforms of one kind of another. In fact, our own TeskaLabs was the only B2B product that wasn’t focused on building a platform.

The reasons for that are obvious. As the pitch for NomNom, a customer feedback aggregation platform, stated quite clearly, online businesses are typically suffering less and less from an absence of data about their customers. What they are increasingly lacking, is a way of using that data which is not either grossly inefficient and expensive, or overly simplistic and prone to error.

At the same time, across consumer and business technology, it has become progressively easier to interconnect various services, leveraging data from different sources in cleaner and more intuitive ways. Platforms breed more platforms, because the more people use online services, the more data they generate, and the more potential uses for that data emerge.

It’s All About Timing

This trend of platforms breeding platforms is a perfect example of what Max Kelly, the new Managing Director of TechStars London, mentioned in his opening remarks: Startups are all about timing. You can have a good idea at the right time, and a good idea at the wrong time. Now, it seems, is the time for many ideas that you could hardly brand as “new.”

I found myself talking about this with one of the developers of SorryAsaService. They use data from CRM platforms like ZenDesk, SalesForce, and other CRMs, and allow customer service reps to send personalized apologies (in the form of gifts like cakes) to customers. This is not a new idea, and so when I first heard the pitch, I wasn’t expecting to be impressed. But I was.

So much customer data now exists, and so many logistical solutions are now available, that a one-button service like this can actually scale in a meaningful way. 5-10 years ago, when ideas like this one were first circulating, the companies had often to do most of the logistical work themselves, which proved not to be scalable or ultimately very profitable. At the same time, it was more work for their clients to use the services, because they weren’t easily integrated into an existing customer service platform.

Today, a “sorry as a service” company can integrate itself into existing CRM systems, and into logistical platforms that are already operating in many regions, and they can focus on crafting an experience for the clients, rather than on the logistical and informational challenges of delivering 10,000 or more apologies a week.

One of the trends I also noticed was an increasing focus on the application of AI to different fields. A fascinating pitch by Weave.ai, for example, promised to build a platform that intelligently accesses email, calendars, slack, and Google Drive or Microsoft Office, to provide “context” to the work interactions we have on a regular basis.

SImilarly, a music platform: Ambie, aims to provide intelligent music selection for venues, shops, cafes and other spaces. While this is far from new, the company banks on being able to integrate data from the businesses into its music choices, not only optimizing the type of music based on location, weather, day, and time, but also according to the data it takes in from the location.

While it has been the age of platforms for some time now, it may finally actually be the age of AI as well. That would certainly be what the pitches at Techstars London indicated this year. We’ll see how these projects evolve in the near future.

All About the Value Proposition

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The TeskaLabs team had, we thought, the best rollup in town

Just as we focus almost maniacally on the problem that our startups are solving, and the people they are solving it for, so too is the focus at Techstars very heavily based on the value proposition. Interestingly for me, many of the pitches also included specific ROIs and profit/loss figures for existing customers. While it’s obviously a sign of the state of progress for these companies, it’s also a pleasant surprise, considering that most pitching events stay fairly far away from the actual dollar figures in terms of the money startups can save or earn their clients.

And I was pleasantly surprised that “make the world a better place,” seemed to have been banned from the event- or at least it was certainly not something that TechStars required or encouraged its startups to say. This refrain has become hackneyed in the past few years, and at this point often comes off as false or simplistic. Everyone now seems to see technology startups as a means to a better life, and now we are more often interesting in precisely how those startups will survive as businesses, rather than as just ideas.

Cheap is not A Thing

Several of the pitches at TechStars mentioned how their products might save their clients money, but these selling points were always connected with tangible, productive changes in the way companies do business and operate. It was clearly far more important that they be able to generate new business for their clients, and fulfilling experiences for their users, rather than simply being cheap, or cheaper than other solutions.

In fact, only one startup used the word “cheap,” by my count. That startup was Ambie, and the founder was comparing his service to existing corporate music subscription programs. And significantly, he stated that Ambie would allow its users to access a much broader range of content for far less than that content would cost, as a whole, if it were bought from a range of other services. So “cheap,” in this case doesn’t exactly mean “cheaper,” but rather more value for money.

All About Numbers

Cedric and I joked after the pitches that it seemed that half the startups claimed some sort of “68%” statistic. It might be a funny coincidence, or our imagination. Most of the startups used strong statistical, demographic, and financial arguments during their pitches.

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Ales Teska of TeskaLabs, with his all important numbers

And, innevitably, each company had a slide in their pitch with a big orange circle and the words “$8 Billion Market,” or some close variation of this. As predictable as it is, it’s also very important to establish the context and ambitions of a startup in its chosen market.

It seems easy to grab a supporting statistic for your business, but doing so in a way that is both genuine and relevant is not.

Many of the investors and startupers who listen to pitches know very well how subjective those figures can be. It was obvious that the pitchers had taken some care in vetting their figures, and in working out how relevant the figures really were. There were also a *lot* of figures. More than startups at StartupYard have typically used in the past few cohorts.

Our Favorite Startups

We decided to break this down into our favorite businesses, and our favorite technologies. A lot of people think that startups are all about tech ideas. While the tech has to be unique to build a truly innovative company, it’s not true that the most complicated or novel tech ideas make the best businesses. Again, this is all about timing. An idea ahead of its time can fail just as easily as a business that is behind the technological curve.

Favorite Tech

Cedric Maloux and Ondrej Bartos, of Credo Ventures, chat after the show

Cedric Maloux and Ondrej Bartos, of Credo Ventures, chat after the show

While there were a few really interesting tech ideas, especially TeskaLabs, which for objectivity reasons, we will not name as our favorite startup of the event (though of course it is), one really stuck out for us. We should note, they did have the best MMR of any company at Techstars London 2015, but we shall say no more. 

Weave.ai, which I mentioned before, gave us a view of something that I think will be central to the evolution of mobile computing in the next decade. Platforms proliferate, but our time and attention, and ability to absorb, categorize, and prioritize, never really gets any better. And the more of our lives are digital, the more like machines we are expected to behave.

What I really loved about Weave.ai, was that it acknowledge this conflict between the way technology is headed (big data, massive content, ubiquitous computing), and the way people really behave. Their solution, while it’s not guaranteed to be the final answer, is certainly a convincing argument for how business should be done in an all mobile world.

Favorite Business

Just in terms of businesses, two that we mentioned, SorryAsAService, and Ambie, stuck out to us as interesting, if not novel, business ideas. When I listen to a really polished pitch, the first thing I do is try to do is see if the pitch can convince me that a real market exists, or will exist, for the product.

If I start off with a dismissive reaction: “this is such a non-idea!” I wait to see not if the pitch can convince me it’s a new idea, but rather if it can convince me that it’s an inevitable idea. These two pitches really struck me as things that are going to happen, whether I like the ideas or not. They did this by carefully establishing their underlying value propositions, and supplying their ideas as inescapable solutions to real problems.

After viewing these pitches, my reaction was that yes, there is going to be a massive player in this market, and this company might be that player. It might not be, but I am deeply convinced that the market is real.

SentiSquare: Big Data Means Big Mistakes for Brands

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Last week, I sat down with Founder and CEO of StartupYard 2014’s SentiSquare, Josef Steinberger, to talk about how the company took 3rd place among 72 challengers at the UPC: Ignite innovation competition, and what SentiSquare has been working on since leaving the accelerator last year.

sentisquare-logo Hi Josef, how have things been going with SentiSquare since you left StartupYard in 2014?

Wow, has it been 18 months already? We have been quite busy, and we’ve signed a few really high-profile clients, including Nestle and T-Mobile in the Czech Republic.

Our most exciting recent news is that we took 3rd place in the UPC competition: Project Ignite, which is for the best tech entrepreneurs in the country. We took 100,000 CZK (about 4,000 Euro), which we plan to use on further development of the SentiSquare service.

How did you get involved with the UPC contest?

Stanislav Rejthar, our financial director, is quite well connected to business in Prague, and he found out about the competition, so we decided to enter. There were 72 projects in the 1st round, with 30 semi-finalists, and 11 finalists. Five finalists passed to finals from the Facebook voting and 6 were selected by jury. And we took third place overall.

The first place winner, this is a bit funny, but they are actually working on turning pig-dung into water and other nutrients. So we got beat by pig shit :laughs:. But we were really happy with the results, and the upside is that UPC has expressed a lot of interest in working with us going forward.

Can you talk a bit about how you can help companies like Nestle, T-Mobile, or UPC, without talking about the specifics of those clients?

Sure. What we do, as you know, is a sentiment analysis across the whole web. This means that we are able to tell our clients in good detail, what their customers are talking about, and how they feel about those topics and specific things they discuss. We get this info from social media, forums, websites, and comment sections that number in the 100s of thousands and more.

So, for example, we are able to tell a large name brand that is about to launch a marketing campaign based on a specific topic, what people are already saying about that topic, and the feelings of consumers related to that topic. And we can give this analysis in much more detail than simply: “good or bad.”

In fact, one of the reasons we start working with the brands even before the campaign starts, is that we can help them to shape the nature of the campaign to get a better response. We can tell them what their consumers are likely to respond to, and it works.

Can you give me an example of how that works?

Yes. For one client, we worked with them on launching their company blog. This was a pretty large brand. They wanted to launch their blog in the new year, attracting people who were interested in new year’s resolutions and this kind of thing.

So, the company had a list of topics that they thought people would be searching for on Google, which they could take advantage of by writing about those topics, in relation to their own products. What we found, though, was that there were a number of topics being discussed quite a lot related to new year’s resolutions, but involving topics that were not included in the campaign’s key word targets. It happened, however, that these topics were very relevant to the company, and that PPC prices for these search terms were a very good value for the price.

So we were able to identify, among the company’s core demographic, a topic that was not being served, and allowed them to have a very good search position for those terms.

We did more than just help the company understand what people liked and didn’t like, but also things that the company had no idea they were talking about at all. That was a big advantage for them and they saw the results in their search traffic and ROI for that campaign.

Senti-CTA

Click to learn more about SentiSquare

Are big brands surprised by what you tell them?

All the time! Marketers and managers like to have very clear and precise information, that they can sort of divide into yes/no decision processes. So, for example, they want a clear yes/no answer to the question: “is my campaign working?” But what we are always showing them is that these questions are more complicated than they want to make them. And in that complexity lies a lot of opportunities that are not being taking advantage of.

For example, a big brand might say that a campaign is a “success,” if people are talking more about their brand after the campaign than before. That is easier to measure also. But campaign managers can’t tell whether people are talking about the actual messaging of the campaign. They have to assume that more people talking about the brand or product means the messaging is working, but it might not be. Even if they use simple positive/negative sentiment analysis, they can’t tell why people feel positively or negatively. They can’t tell if the message is working as intended.

We can help brands determine if people are talking about the messaging that the brand is using, and this can give a much better sense of whether the campaign is a success. We can also do pre-analysis to understand whether the intended audience will be receptive to that message, and if not, to what messages they might be more receptive.

How do big brands currently determine what their campaign messages should be?

It’s mostly about intuition. Some big companies literally have someone going through thousands of customer posts on social media and forums, and trying to glean some kind of insight about what customers are interested in. So it is possible to get a subjective, intuitive sense of what is important to your customers. But it is very difficult to get an objective, provable figure to support that intuition.

On the other side, it is relatively easy to analyze the sentiment of your brand’s audience in positive/negative terms, but that doesn’t help you at all to understand what your messaging should be. Even positive/negative terms are super-subjective. They are down to culture, to context, to the type of person talking, and the person they are talking to. A human can recognize sentiment when we see it, but it is much more complicated to see sentiment in the aggregate. It is very easy to think you understand it, when you really don’t.

We are providing a kind of intuition engine. It has the reach of a large scale data tool, but it can provide the subtlety in insights of a human.

So you help companies to avoid false positives in sentiment analysis?

False positives or also completely wrong assumptions about data.

There is a really funny example we experienced recently. We were doing analysis of the wine industry. The customer had already had another company scrape a large amount of data including basic search terms, such as the word “wine” and its variants in Czech. They wanted to see what kinds of wine people were talking about in a one month period. So far so good.

Now, you can do a broad sentiment analysis based on positive or negative keywords, and give some impression of whether people have good or bad associations with certain types of wine, right? Well, not in this case. Our analysis was able to show that a huge amount of this data (about 80% actually) was totally useless. Why? Because it wasn’t about wine! It was about cars.

Cars?

Yeah, cars. The data scraping had caught a lot of information about VIN numbers (vehicle identification numbers). It had also scraped a lot of information about Vin Diesel, the actor. Wine, in Czech, is written as vino, or vin, or some variation. So without our analysis of what the subjects actually being discussed really were, the client might have made a lot of really wrong assumptions about what people feel about different wines. You think a lot of people like red wine, but they really like red cars! Or maybe they say they love wine, but they are really fans of Vin Diesel movies.

The data would be worse than useless. It would cause you to make all kinds of wrong assumptions about your audience.

But we were able to pre-process that data, and make the final data set much more valuable for analysis.

You said earlier that you can give more than a black and white look at customer sentiments? How do you do that?

There are a few ways.

One of the problems with sentiment analysis for large amounts of written text, is that there are a lot of positive and negative keywords mixed together. It doesn’t make sense just to count them up, because the actual construction of thoughts is not so binary.

So what we can do is to provide a sense of the intensity of sentiments overall. Is a customer generally happy, or generally unhappy? A customer can use a lot of negative words, but still be mostly satisfied with a product. Some people just enjoy complaining, and a brand shouldn’t count that person as an unsatisfied customer. So we can provide this shading of sentiment by intensity.

There is also aspect based sentiment analysis. This is the analysis of not just a brand as a whole, but as related to specific aspects of the brand and its products. Maybe people love a brand, but they have negative sentiments about its prices. Or the opposite can happen. Maybe they love the functionalities, but hate the color. By combining these insights, we can present a much more realistic picture of a customer than simply: like/dislike.

How are you different from other monitoring services like BrandEmbassy (also a StartupYard Alum)?

BrandEmbassy provides monitoring of keywords, which allows service representatives to see live conversations on social media and elsewhere. The big advantage for them is that they can route those conversations to the appropriate person on their team and engage directly with the customers.

What we do is the eagle eye view of all those conversations- we can tell companies what the totality of all those conversations really means. So it has a bigger effect on a company’s overall communication and branding strategies, whereas a company like BrandEmbassy helps a company to improve its small-scale interactions with individuals.

What are your plans for the near future?

A big request is for our system to be available in real time. This is something that we really want to develop more in the near term. Having the ability to see the conversation changing online at every moment, and being able to understand how people feel about things from day to day, is an important thing for big brands.

As conversations online get only more numerous and also more specific, the job of keeping up with that volume is getting unmanagable for the biggest brands. SentiSquare can provide a pulse of conversation that really provides valuable insights, even in the day to day. Brands can use SentiSquare to get an evolving list of important keywords that are related to their brands.

That list changes every day, but currently it takes a long time for that information to filter into a brand’s messaging. Given the prioritization on the topic or opinion level, brands can quickly get a gist about the actual situation The speed is important, because all the brand managers are busy people. We can make them more responsive to the conversation of today.

We want to change the way people look at sentiment analysis. Things are not black and white, positive and negative. Somebody says something is “big.” What does that mean? It’s not good or bad in all cases. Nothing in discourse is cut and dried, and all sentiments have levels of intensity.

Our clients usually want black and white answers. We have to educate our customers about the danger of viewing their brands in this way. The magic answers that big data is supposed to provide can easily be very wrong. And we can help companies identify opportunities they are ignoring, because they have been addicted to this positive/negative polarity.

StartupYard’s Viktor Fischer on Quitting Your Job, and Overcoming Fear

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Hi Viktor. You’ve had a really interesting career, co-founding Innovatrics a decade ago, and most recently becoming a junior partner with McKinsey and Company. Can you tell us your personal story as an entrepreneur?

Hi Lloyd – sure, thanks for having me.

When we founded Innovatrics in 2004, I had no clue how to build a business. We created a software development kit around a fingerprint algorithm, put it online and waited to see who would buy it. When after 2 weeks no-one replied, we started to think about who might be the customer, what were their needs, what was the right product, what was the right pricing, and how we would sell it.

Early on we copied competition (copying is good), and negotiated licensing deals with major biometrics players such as Bioscrypt and CrossMatch – to survive. Over the next several years we found our niche: high-speed AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems), defined the target customer segment. We fine-tuned the pricing and focused on the most efficient marketing & sales channels. Last year Innovatrics won Deloitte Top 50 in 2014 for its 344% revenue growth and last week was designated IT firm of the year in Slovakia. I am congratulating the team for those fantastic achievements.

After 5 years at Innovatrics, I decided to pursue an international MBA to grow my network and then entered McKinsey. Surprisingly, although McKinsey works for corporates, it follows a very entrepreneurial way of working. Projects (called “engagements”) are delivered by small teams (2 to 3 people full-time supported by experts and senior leaders), who work by quick iterations with the end product in mind (similar to “scrum methodology”). There is flat hierarchy and even junior members are encouraged to disagree with the most senior partners.

Aside from consulting, you are also an active angel investor. How do you pick your investments?

I only have 3 criteria: First, would I be a user of that product, and would I be excited to use it? This is my way of validating the value proposition.

Second, I need to know the management team, and have them be introduced by a person I trust.

Third, I need to have the knowledge I can use to help the startup. In broader terms, anything commercial, and in narrower terms, anything related to defining value proposition, validating product/market fit, modeling financial plan, raising funds, orchestrating B2B sales, or expanding internationally.

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Fischer chats with fellow StartupYard mentor Ondrej Bartos at a StartupYard event

Have you ever broken one of those rules? If so, what was the result?

Yes, sometimes an edge in 1 or 2 criteria can balance-out the 3rd criteria. For example, recently I invested in MPower Financing via Angel.co. MPower provides loans to US university students coming from ethnic minorities.

Although I would not be a user of such a product, I like the mission of the company: I believe funding should not be a barrier to education. And I know the founders really really well (both CEO and CTO are my MBA classmates).

You recently left McKinsey to open your own club/bar, and focus on startups. What motivated the move? What will your club be like?

:Laughs: how much time do you have? I can talk for hours about this.

I think we do our best job when we do something we love (call it passion). There is one way that really worked for me to find that out: Think that tomorrow is the last day of your life. Really. Then imagine:  If that was the case, what would you truly like to do today?

My answers were: A) go for a drink to a nice place with friends, and B) help startups grow. So I left the corporate job and bought an old but legendary nightclub called Meloun. The idea is to create an ultra-lounge like we all miss here in Prague. An exclusive place with great drinks and great music for a fantastic night out. It will be kind of a secret place so I cannot say more about it at this stage – sorry!

To help the startups, I am becoming more engaged with the teams, helping where necessary depending on the stage of the company, and more engaged with the local entrepreneurship community (including Startupyard).

Can you tell us the story of your favorite investment, and, if you have one, your biggest investment mistake or failure?

I don’t have a favorite investment – all my startups, those I invest in or simply advise are like children – no one is preferred.

Failure? Probably those I decided to pass on (yes, I’m thinking Gjirafa), or those where I miss the team’s engagement. There is nothing more demotivating than a non-motivated team. There are two mindsets with which a company is created: either to be a lifestyle business, or to build a company changing the world. There is nothing wrong with either of those. But it needs to be clear from the beginning to the team, the investors and the advisors.

You are an active StartupYard mentor, and you hosted a workshop with us this year. What motivates you to work with startups in your free time?

My sole motivator is to help startups avoiding mistakes I made. Whether it is in their value proposition, defining a target customer, pricing structure, international expansion, or even personal work-life-balance and facilitating discussions between shareholders. I have scars on my back in all these areas. I want to help people avoid getting a divorce, arguing with business partners or putting thousands of work hours into a feature that is not needed.

Do you believe that successful Czech entrepreneurs like yourself are giving enough back to the startup ecosystem in terms of attention, mentoring, and investment?

First of all, I am Slovak. Just kidding, I miss Czechoslovakia and I believe the countries together could again reach the 10th place in industrial production they had in 1938 – although in different industries :laughs:.

It will not happen however without the government’s support. When founding Innovatrics, we received around 150 thousand Euro from the French government to get us up and running. Although there is a risk to receiving government funds (often startups use that funding to delay product introduction to the market), there is an improvement in Government funding: the Czech government spends ~2% on GPD on R&D and Slovak government spends ~1% on R&D versus the US ~3%.

I know I am not answering your question, but I don’t know yet whether local entrepreneurs are helping enough. I know some of them invest through [prominent venture firms] Credo and Rockaway, or directly, and they mentor via Startupyard. But I don’t have a benchmark. It would be great to compare for example the amount of Czech angel and VC funding to overall angel and VC investments in the UK, and US, but I don’t think there’s a clear benchmark.

What is a piece of advice you find yourself giving over and over again to startups? What is the hardest piece of advice for startups to really listen to?

Overcome fear. Often I see startup entrepreneurs doing what is easy: sitting behind a computer developing the next feature set.

Call a prospective buyer or an expert to get early feedback. Find an expert via LinkedIn. Send the deck or a link to the demo and set-up a call. There are plenty of people out there who would help you. Doing it you have nothing to lose. Not doing it, you lose the opportunity to score your first customer or a future team member.

Sometimes it feels  the hardest part for startups is to listen. Whether the founders are really able to listen, hear, reflect and incorporate the advice is what I am looking for during interviews.

Your career has been split between The Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and recently Switzerland. How do you view the development of startup culture and investments in these different regions in recent years?

I cannot compare yet. But what I really like about the investment culture in other countries is the humility with which the investors and advisors help the entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is the shit, and our only mission is to help her succeed while increasing her self-confidence. Not the other way around (ie beat her idea and her self-confidence to death).

Are there things that bigger economies like France could learn from the startup and investing cultures in Slovakia or the Czech Republic?

I like how some of the local VCs really help the entrepreneurs think about the business during the investment process. They help to define and validate the value proposition, set up pricing, create financial model, key KPIs and develop a first 100-day plan. This process is beneficial to both parties and if I were the entrepreneur, I would embrace it fully.

Andrej Kiska recently told me in an interview that Czech (or Central European) investors are not as conservative as their reputations suggest. Do you agree with him?

I agree that the mindset is changing. That’s good. From my experience however, even as recently as the Webexpo couple of weeks ago, I noticed some investors using traction as their investment criteria (quote “For us to invest, you need to have customers. At least one.”) I think people should be the first criteria of choice and overseas that is understood.

What about StartupYard makes you keep coming back? How do you hope to have an impact on us as and our program?

This comes to my 2nd passion: helping startups grow. StartupYard is the largest local accelerator. Still however, some people do not know it. David Semerad from STRV mentioned during his talk at Webexpo that “YCombinator is like StartupYard but million times bigger”. I would like to help StartupYard bridge that gap, by making connections to  the international market stronger and by voraciously helping startups export. If we’re Czech only, we will not be successful and our startups will not be successful.

StartupYard FastLanes two Startups from Krakow

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We visited HubRaum in Krakow last week, and “FastLaned” two very interesting startups while we were there. This was the penultimate stop in our tour of 6 cities, including Pristina, Sofia, Bucharest, Prague, and next week, Warsaw.

While it was tougher to generate interest from Polish startups in StartupYard, we had expected this. StartupYard has never accelerated a Polish startup, and part of the reason is that Polish startups are a bit more spoiled for choice than their counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe.

But we encountered the same kinds of issues in Polish startups as we do all over Central Europe. Just like Romanian, Bulgarian, and Kosovan startups we’ve met, as well as our own Czech startups, communication and positioning of global tech products remains a failure point for Polish startups as well.

According to several of the mentors I talked to a HubRaum, the situation is not always helped by the fact that Polish startups are in a much bigger market than their Czech counterparts, meaning that they can avoid the problems of international competition for longer.

Accepting the Premise of the Question

One trend that I’ve noticed throughout our roadshow, and which was on particular display in Krakow, was founders’ generally being unequipped to answer doubts or hostile questions from the audience. We often call this a “non-question question,” and it usually consists of an audience member’s opinion –always hostile to the general idea or area of the startup– followed by a sort of “what do you think about that,” phrase to make it look like a legitimate question, rather than a statement.

For example, we had one pitch where a startup was working on a live-streaming social application for events. The question came like this: “Don’t you know that there are serious privacy and copyright concerns when it comes to live streaming? Don’t you worry that you’ll be sued?” This is marginally a question, but it was obvious that the person asking it was down on the idea, and wanted to point out a “fatal flaw” she had discovered. This is often the case: a doubter seizes on one issue surrounding the technology or the business, and seems to declare that therefore it will never work.

There are two ways to answer a question like this, but most startups don’t know them. First, you can accept the premise of the question, meaning that you agree that the problem does exist as described, and then talk about how and why that problem can be overcome. This is a difficult way to answer a non-question, because it acknowledges that the doubter is correct, and then takes an uphill route to show why this doesn’t matter as much as they think.

In my example above, the founder could state that while there are privacy concerns, the app would somehow have privacy protections built in, or would not be allowed to be used in such a way as to disrupt anyone’s privacy. A similar answer might be found for copyright concerns– perhaps there is a legal reason why livestreaming events is considered legally ok, or perhaps there is another solution.

Don’t Accept the Premise

The second way, which is much safer but less often practiced by startups, is to not accept the premise, and answer the question on your own terms. That answer looks like this: “this is a new area of technology, and concepts of privacy and copyright are quickly evolving. Clearly livestreaming will be an important area of innovation in the future, and we are working on the best and most responsible ways of bringing that technology to our users safely and legally.”

This is a non-answer for a non-question, but it is also generally the best answer. Just as the questioner does not know what the legal or social situation will be in a few years, neither do you. If technologists and inventors let themselves be stopped by the possibility that what they’re doing may lead to some legal wrangling in the future, then they really shouldn’t be working on new technologies at all. Disruption is exactly what it sounds like- it doesn’t go with the flow.

“Nobody Will Notice”

This is probably the worst possible answer to a non-question, but it’s one we’ve now heard at least twice from founders pitching on stage. We hear it even more in private meetings with founders. The founder accepts the premise and accepts the outcome suggested by the non-question. There is nowhere else to go, so the founder simply says that for whatever reason, nobody will notice, and everything will be fine.

Obviously this doesn’t inspire much confidence. The founder is basically saying that their technology is non-disruptive, and will never be interesting or popular enough to bother anyone. If it is a live-streaming app, it will never have a lot of fans or make a lot of money, meaning that anyone with copyright or privacy concerns won’t have much to worry about.

That’s obviously not the road you want to go down when pitching your ideas. So go with option two, and don’t accept the premise of the question in the first place.

StartupYard FastLanes 4 Companies from Bucharest

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As part of our 6 city StartupYard FastLane tour, we visited TechHub Bucharest last week, “FastLaning” 4 companies, which is more than in any other city but Prague..” StartupYard has now FastLaned 15 companies in 4 cities, with two more cities, Krakow and Warsaw, coming up.

TechHub is an international ring of startup incubators, whose mission is to help startups “start up faster.” The space they have recently occupied near the center of Bucharest is perfect for startups. It’s compact, but with a comfortable atmosphere, and plenty of space for events, meetings, and work.

Energy And Atmosphere

Just as we had encountered in Kosovo and Bulgaria in the past few weeks, there is a very positive creative energy among Bucharest’s young startup community- a sense that anything is possible, and that growth and dynamism in the tech industry is just getting started.

There was also a healthy variety to the pitches we heard, and the founders we talked with while visiting over several days. We heard pitches in e-health, gaming discovery, fintech, e-commerce, and IoT, among other domains. Each of these ideas was original, and not a local “me too” version of a popular global product. Of the entrepreneurs we talked with, most had a global focus, or at least an eye towards international markets, which showed that Romanian startups are gaining the confidence and the appetite for the world tech stage.

“Cheaper,” is not the Pitch

A pleasant surprise for me on this tour has been that “the cheaper version of X” has not been included in any of the pitches we’ve heard throughout Central and Eastern Europe. A stereotype of only a few years ago, that this region produces cheap knock-offs of popular concepts, banking on the lower costs of development and deployment to compete with international products on the local level, seems to be fading quickly.

The region is of course still cheaper to develop in and represents a strong pool of low-cost talent for western companies, but the startupers we’ve met this year are not as interested in carrying over this mentality into their startups. Instead, they’re focusing on the quality of their products, and their ability to compete head to head in the global market on innovation and creativity. There are probably still many local clones, and they have their place, but significantly, these are no longer the companies coming forward to apply for StartupYard.

It’s Still All About Communication

George Dita, of TechHub Bucharest, who has also invited StartupYard back to participate in HowToWeb’s Startup Spotlight in November, made an interesting comment while we chatted about the local startup scene. “You can see this progression from West to East,” he said: “If you start in the US, or UK, the sales and communication skills are the strongest, but as you move East, that goes away. In Eastern Europe, technical talent is incredible, but sales and marketing are missing.”

This observation has matched our experience so far, but that is in itself a great opportunity for StartupYard. We can act as a gateway for the amazing talent and the ambition of Central and Eastern European startups who lack the background, culturally and experientially, they need to compete with other global players. We see ourselves in that role even more these days, given the success of TeskaLabs, a StartupYard company that was recruited in TechStars London while still attending our program.

As we say, you can teach an engineer sales, but it’s much harder to teach a salesman how to think like an engineer. Startups in Central Europe have tech talent coming out of their ears. The only barrier to competing in the west is confidence and competence in communicating, and selling their ideas. We hope to continue replicating successes like TeskaLabs in the future.

We think it’s very important in today’s startupland to have sales and marketing as fundamental part of the team and the company from day one, but we can work with teams that need to foster that part of their business into something that really performs. They only have to get why it matters, in order to learn how to do it. That is a transition we have seen happen with startups from this region.

What we see, time and again, is entrepreneurs who can’t communicate their ideas effectively, but more and more, we see that they are aware of this, and are working hard to get better at it. That tells us that there are many exciting things coming up from Eastern Europe in the future, and we’re excited to be in the middle of the transformation.

StartupYard FastLanes 2 Startups in Sofia, Bulgaria

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This week, StartupYard director Cedric Maloux and I spent two days in Sofia, Bulgaria. This was stop number 2 on our 6 city tour of Central Europe for StartupYard FastLane, which kicked off in Prague this month. We visited Kosovo last week, and we have now FastLaned 11 companies so far. This was my second visit to the Bulgarian capital this year, and as before, I was not disappointed by the local startup scene.

From our FastLane event at Vivacom Art Hall, an exhibition and startup space which has been built in the former headquarters of Bulgarian Telekom, the former state telecom company, we selected two teams to join the StartupYard FastLane. These teams will now skip the first 2 steps of the StartupYard selection process, and they’ll have a much better chance of being among the startups that reach the final interviews with StartupYard.

StartupYard has never taken a team from Bulgaria, so we were somewhat unclear on what to expect from startups in Sofia. Chris Georgiev (@chrisGeorgiev), of Imagga and StartupBG, who organized the event and helped attract the startups we chose told us that local startups were “a little spoiled,” due to fairly good access to local programs like incubators and grants for startups.

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Still, we were very impressed with the startups that pitched us, and we noted how friendly and open the attitude of the crowd was. About 60 local startupers and entrepreneurs showed up to hear the pitches.

What Pitching is Really About

During this tour, and throughout the 2 cohorts we’ve done, we’ve noticed a pattern that helps us identify really interesting founders.

First of all, the idea that the founder is pitching really doesn’t matter much, when it comes to which founders stand out. Of course we want to hear pitches that are about tech products, but beyond that, there is no keyword or area that is more likely to make a startup interesting.

Sometimes you hear that a space, like security, is “hot,” and there are a lot of companies being funded, but really, it’s just that there are a lot of problems in that space to solve, and so there are a lot of pitches about products in that space. Some are good, many are not.

So if it’s not the idea that is most interesting, what is it? For us, it’s about the founder’s ability to communicate his or her solution to a real problem. If a founder can do that in a way that makes the solution seem obvious, even inevitable, then that is a very interesting founder indeed.

But we don’t expect founders to be born with those skills. We only expect them to be able to learn them, and grasp their importance.

That’s why during our tour, we are meeting with as many of the teams as possible before the pitching events, to give them individual training on pitching, and to watch how they react to our input. The founders who can implement simple feedback into their pitches, and improve dramatically over the course of a single day, are the types of founders we want to work with.

The results are pretty surprising. In Sofia, for example, one founder, the rare business oriented founder with a lot of experience in marketing and communications, at first approached the pitch training with some obvious confidence. He knew sales, so this was going to be easy. But as we worked through his position statement (the core of the pitch) it became clear that his sales skills weren’t translating to pitching as he expected.

What impressed us about that founder, and the reason we FastLaned his startup, was that he took that experience, and built on it, delivering a far better pitch than he had started with. What is often surprising is that after only a few hours of work, founders who were hopeless at explaining their ideas to others can become so much better at it. We might not end up taking that startup for any number of reasons, but the reason won’t be because we don’t understand his idea.

At every one of these events so far, people who have attended pitch training with us have told us how much it helped them to really understand how to communicate their ideas. Imagine what 3 months of acceleration can do.

After all, as founders, this would be their daily job in a successful company. It’s more than an exercise- it’s what they will have to do in order for the company to grow. Talking to investors, hiring new people, and signing new clients, is all about making them believe in what you’re doing. That’s all about pitching. So we look for founders that can embrace pitching, because it will be central to everything they do going forward.

This also confirms a suspicion we had last year, that we had rejected many applications that might have been very good startups indeed, simply because they weren’t yet able to relate the ideas in a clear and persuasive way. That shows that a tour like this one is probably more important than we even suspected.

This reaffirms how important pitching events can really be. We can’t tell, from a written application, if a founder has the ability to grow in this way. Some really don’t. Others surprise even themselves.

The most interesting founders, in my view, are the ones who can grasp the underlying importance of the exercise- which is to define, in as simple and complete a way as possible, what their company will do to benefit the world. It’s not about the ideas being presented, but the ability of the founders to communicate to people they don’t know; to bring themselves to the level of their audience, rather than to find an audience that is already at their level.

Moreover, developing a killer pitch is an exercise in self-examination. Do you really believe in this solution? Is your approach really as simple and as beneficial as you’re claiming? Or is it difficult to talk about because it’s not as easy as it should be? In the process of developing their pitch, founders have to address those questions over and over. Ultimately, if you can’t find some way of selling your ideas, maybe they aren’t good enough to sell yet.

A founder who is humble and self-aware, and also confident enough to address these problems head on, and solve them, is an ideal candidate for StartupYard. The idea can and will change, but the person doesn’t change as much. If they aren’t flexible and self-aware when they start, there isn’t much we can do to make them more flexible and self-aware at the end of the process. We can foster good habits, but it’s much harder to kill bad ones.

More than anything, I see the failures that we have had at StartupYard have been connected with this. The idea was good enough, but the founder wasn’t flexible enough to adapt it, and make it really great. On the flip side, our biggest successes in the last few years have been from founders who could accept change, and were not afraid to question themselves.

We talk about “passion,” quite a lot. Passion is essential. But passion doesn’t mean blind belief. It means commitment, and ultimately, the willingness to do what is necessary to succeed. Often, when we hear: “I will do whatever it takes,” what that really means is: “I will do whatever it takes, except changing my mind.” But that last part- the willingness to adapt, is really the only thing that accounts. It’s the only thing that separates most entrepreneurs from the great ones.

The opportunity to really see what passion means to these founders, on an individual basis, has made this tour worth our while so far.

StartupYard Fastlanes 2 Companies from Kosovo

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Call it tiny, but don’t underestimate the young republic of Kosovo, where StartupYard managing director Cedric Maloux and I spent two amazing days and nights last week, meeting startupers and young people who are full of energy and promise for the future. Here are a few of the takeaways:

A Beautiful Place to Visit

Set aside your assumptions about the Balkans. While Pristina, the capital, doesn’t have the hallmarks of an old European city, with ancient gardens and cathedrals, or many quaint old cafes on stony streets (streets that aren’t paved are dirt tracks), it has its own kind of weird beauty. The city is a mix of the not-so-old, and the brand new. A crazy quilt of apartment blocks, avenues, standalone restaurants, and gleaming hotels.

We were told during our visit that remittances from the Albanian diaspora are one of the main sources of capital in the country. That money is proof of Albanian and Kosovan success around the world, and a sign that Kosovars and Albanians, by and large, are committed to returning home. You can see the effect of capital returning to the country: new construction is everywhere, and restaurants and cafes have sprouted on every street. In just a few days, we met dozens of people who had been educated outside the country, run successful businesses and made money- and all had come back.

Kosovo, perhaps surprisingly, considering its history of ethnic conflict, is rated among the freest and most equal nations, particularly majority Muslim nations. Over 95% of Kosovars are counted as Muslims, and yet the country is officially secular, with freedom of religion upheld for all.

Young and Hungry

With an average wage of just 300 Euros a month (Kosovo uses the Euro, although it is not a Eurozone country or even a member of the EU), the country’s standard of living is obviously lower than in the EU. There is also a massive trade imbalance, with the country importing far more than it produces.

But that situation has been improving, with 5% growth in GDP per year between 2003 and 2011. The private sector, virtually non-existent in 1999, has grown steadily. We encountered a strong sense of optimism from the entrepreneurs we met, mostly at ICK (Innovation Center Kosovo), a non-profit business incubator which is funded by the Norwegian Embassy, among other benefactors.

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The country is also young, with the fastest rate of population growth in Europe, at 1.6%. This demographic pressure, plus a high rate of unemployment, means that many young Kosovars are experimenting with new business ideas, and looking to bring foreign capital and foreign business into the country.

A Lot to Learn

Cedric and I had lunch with Driton Hapciu, an ICK Board Member, and Renaissance man in the Kosovan tech industry. An electrical engineer by training, Hapciu was among the first to found an IT firm in Kosovo, long before the country formally existed, back in 1994. He pursued Peace Studies in Norway, and now, he says: “I’m just here to help.” He talked about the need for practical business experience and programming skills among young Kosovan engineers, who are educated heavily in math, but leave university with few real job skills.

Hapciu was also among the very first mentors to advise Mergim Cahani, in the earliest days of Gjirafa before the team joined StartupYard, and became a growing force in the Albanian and Kosovan tech scene. Every entrepreneur we met knew StartupYard because they knew Gjirafa, and most were eager to follow the search company’s example.

Small Fish Attract Big Fish

One gets the sense when talking to Kosovan entrepreneurs, that anything is still possible on the Albanian web. Basic services that Europeans and Americans take for granted have not been implemented yet. Online payment systems, e-commerce, online advertising, and marketing are in their infancy. There is not even a dominant platform for business listings in the country, and until the advent of Gjirafa, there was no online access to the country’s 100,000+ bus routes and other transport information.

I meet with a Kosovan startuper to talk about his project.

I meet with a Kosovan startuper to talk about his project.

Indeed, we were understandably skeptical when we first heard the pitch for Gjirafa, a “Seznam for the Albanian Web,” but meeting with tech entrepreneurs in Kosovo, one can see that these deficiencies also represent enormous opportunities. In what other country in Europe can a startup reasonably hope to become the gateway to the web for the next generation? That position is filled almost everywhere, by the likes of Google, Facebook, or other global players.

Their entrenchment also means that few companies seriously challenge them to keep innovating in smaller markets like Albania and Kosovo- I think this is why Google has ignored the region until now. And competition on the local level is of course good. Just ask the Czechs, who, thanks to Sezam.cz and its serious challenge to Google’s dominance, benefit from the fight to win market share with better products, faster speeds, and more alternatives. Google is rumored to spend more on development per user in the Czech market than in any other market in Europe. That’s no accident.

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Cedric Maloux gives his pitch training workshop.

With plenty of room for local growth, startups in Kosovo hope to prove that their innovations can compete on the global stage. While many of the entrepreneurs I met with during our 2 days there were eager, they were often naive about the demands of the global market. Instead of innovating around a single vertical, trying to solve a single real problem, many presented amorphous business concepts that incorporated many different solutions for a whole host of issues.

This is not surprising, given that they’re dealing with a market in which there are no dominant solutions for many common problems. How can a startup based on retail operate in a country where e-commerce has almost no penetration? And what good is an online media business if it doesn’t have an ad-platform that can support it? The temptation is to try and re-invent e-commerce and advertising in order to have a market to serve. My hope is that players like Gjirafa will be able to provide a sort of guiding light for other local startups, encouraging them to work in narrower verticals, and providing a broad basis for the growth of online business in the region.

So keep your eyes on Kosovo.

Photos thanks to Innovation Center Kosovo (ICK)

StartupYard FastLanes 7 Companies From Prague

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Last night,  7 startup teams pitched StartupYard in front of an audience of about 70 visitors at Node5.

An Intro From Cedric Maloux

The event kicked off with an introduction from Managing Director Cedric Maloux, who told entrepreneurs in the audience: “If you have an amazing idea for a startup… kill it!”

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He went on to say that only great ideas which refuse to die and never go away, are the ones entrepreneurs should choose to work on. If you can’t find a reason why your startup idea won’t work, and neither can your friends or anyone else you consult, then it might be something that will succeed.

Cedric introduced the StartupYard program, and talked about our application process, which we share with a syndicate of 5 accelerators in CeedTech.

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FireSide Chat with TeskaLabs

Ales Teska, Co-Founder and CEO of TeskaLabs, sat down with me to talk about moving his startup to London and attending TechStars, as well as raising 337K this year.

He discussed the differences between the two programs, and urged B2B businesses to base their technical operations in Prague, but considering also doing business, particularly sales, in London. He pointed to the openness in the UK business landscape to startups, and the speed of dealmaking in the city, where, he said, you can do in a week what would take a month in Prague.

Cedric introduces Ales Teska

Cedric introduces Ales Teska

At the same time, Teska noted that the StartupYard program was the perfect preparation for TeskaLabs’ move to London, and that his team would not have been prepared for the harsher TechStars environment without having attended StartupYard first.

He described TechStars as a higher pressure, “sink or swim” environment. Whereas at StartupYard, our team is here to make sure startups are making good choices, and have all the information and guidance they need, TechStars leaves teams to fail or succeed on their own- only keeping them aware of their progress.

At the same time, TechStars has a more intensive mentoring period, involving up to 7 or 8 meetings a day with mentors, nearly twice what Startups experience in Prague.

He also described the feeling of “mentor whiplash,” that his team has experienced since leaving StartupYard. Mentor whiplash, he said, is the feeling of being advised to do completely contradictory things by equally smart and persuasive mentors. “When a mentor states their opinion, it’s as a fact,” he said, “it can be very difficult to deal with all of these conflicting ‘facts.'”

The Pitches

7 startup teams pitched us last night, and we were impressed with all of them. With little prior experience, and not much time to prepare, all 7 entrepreneurs who pitch to us impressed us with their poise, and their enthusiasm.

So, without much hesitation, we agreed to accept all of the teams from the event into StartupYard Fastlane. They will proceed past the first few rounds of evaluation, and will have a chance to present their startups to our full selection committee, a mix of StartupYard stakeholders and advisors.

Here is a collection of photos from the pitching portion of the event:

What’s Next?

StartupYard will host FastLane events in 6 more cities: Budapest, Sofia, Pristina, Bucharest, Warsaw, and Krakow. If you’d like to pitch us in one of those cities, sign up using the form below, and we look forward to meeting you!

Sign Up to Pitch at a StartupYard FastLane Event
 

Update! StartupYard FastLane: Pitch Us in one of 6 Cities in September

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The time has come! Today, we kick off our 6 city tour of Central European capitals, visiting incubators and workspaces in the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, and Poland.

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Sign Up to Pitch at a StartupYard FastLane Event
 

Startups in these countries will have the unique opportunity to pitch StartupYard’s team in person, and jump ahead to the final rounds of selection for StartupYard 2016, kicking off in January.

After applications close November 1st, StartupYard will select up to 10 teams to join us at StartupYard 2016, where they will receive 30,000+ Euros in investment, and over 500,000 Euros in perks, as part of an intensive, 3 month mentorship based program with dozens of workshops, and meetings with scores of mentors. Our program has accelerated 35 startups since 2011.

StartupYard, Fastlane 2016

StartupYard is expecting hundreds of individual startup applications from about a dozen countries for our 2016 cohort. We work hard to make the application process as fair as possible, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a perfect process.

Through a written application, much less one of hundreds like it, it’s very difficult to judge the passion, excitement, intelligence, and flexibility of an unknown startuper.

StartupYard is forced every year to relegate the vast majority of applications we receive to the dustbin, usually without ever meeting or really getting to know the applicants. We have to make very difficult decisions about hundreds of startups, based on very little information.

We probably miss out on amazing startups every year, because we don’t have time to get to know them all.

And that’s a shame. We don’t believe that a startup’s success in our program and in growing globally is necessarily connected with their ability to make themselves sound good on paper.

The decision to accept a startup into our program can have a massive impact on their future, but paper applications can’t communicate passion, people skills, poise, and responsiveness to feedback. These are things we only learn about the relatively tiny number of startups we interview in our final selection rounds.

We owe the startup communities in the countries where we recruit a fair shot at getting our attention. So we’re coming to you.

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Pitch StartupYard in Person: In any of 6 Cities

There will be 7 events, all in the month of September.

  • Prague, Czech Republic, September 2nd at Node5
  • Pristina, Kosovo, September 17th, at Innovation Center Kosovo
  • Sofia, Bulgaria, September 22nd  at VivaCom
  • Bucharest, Romania, September 24th with HowToWeb
  • Krakow, Poland September 29th at HubRaum
  • Warsaw, Poland, October 14th at Reaktor

How to Sign Up

Startups interested in pitching us at any of these events should sign up using the form below. Once we have verified that you meet the basic requirements to pitch us (that you are in our field, and other details), we will share your info with our local partners, and choose which teams to invite to pitch.

Sign Up to Pitch at a StartupYard FastLane Event

Even if you are not invited to pitch on-stage, this does not mean that you can’t meet us and pitch us in person. Some startups just don’t sound good on paper. That’s ok! We want to meet you, and we still want you to pitch us.

We’ll be in each city for at least a full day, providing time for you to do just that. The StartupYard team will host open hours in each of the venues we visit to give startups a chance to meet with us in person.

How it Works

StartupYard will visit 6 cities and 6 tech hubs such as incubators and workspaces (plus hold one event in our own city of Prague), where we will make ourselves available for a full day of mentoring, pitch training, and finally listening to the pitches of any local startups who are interested in joining our program and getting funded in 2016.

Local startups can choose to meet with us for mentoring and introductions, or come to pitch their startups in person, and talk to us afterwards. We will be providing constructive, experienced based feedback, in cooperation with our local partners in each city. These are not competitions, and there is no grand prize. However, they serve as an opportunity to grab our attention, as well as the attention of local influencers and investors who will also attend these events,

Those teams that impress us during this series of events will be invited to move directly from an initial application to StartupYard, directly to our final selection rounds, bypassing hundreds of other applicants in the process.

This is your chance to show us who you are.

Sign Up to Pitch at a StartupYard FastLane Event