Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg was held today in the Southern Sweden together with Öresund Entrepreneurship Academy. The region is growing and has an active ecosystem of entrepreneurship and startups, suiting well the Seedcamp initative. The event gathered 20 excited startups and over 50 mentors from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia and England.
The day was kicked off with five minute pitches by the teams, and included buzz words such as cloud computing, crowdsourcing and smartphone applications. The pitches were overall above the average, but as Tommy Ahlers, a mentor from ZYB, reflected, the early stage startups preferably need to focus on the concept rather than trying to present a business plan.
The pitches that got the best response from the audience:
- Nudge, a SMS reminder service for patients to take their medicine in time, had the best execution in presentation.
- Whynot, an Estonian startup offering a twitter-like dating service using SMS, presented the most passionate pitch and brought in the most laughs.
The Panel
A panel discussion was held after the lunch with six industry heavy weigths Martin Gren (Axis), Thomas Weilby Knudsen (NorthCap Partners), Hampus Jakobsson (TAT), Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp), Jørgen Thorball (XOventure), and Daniel Blomquist (Creandum).
“If you can’t do a hockey stick in Excel, you can’t do a hockey stick in real life” – Thomas Weilby Knudsen
The panel delivered some great insights in selecting board members, choosing a venture capitalist and focusing on the metrics, a very valuable advice to a startup. Anders Fredriksson, one of this years mentors and the winner of Seedcamp 2007 has written a good post on metrics.
The Winners
The Seedcamp Helsingborg was “a friendly” competition but doesn’t quarantee a direct qualification for the third Seedcamp Week held in London this fall. The three happy winners, all from Sweden, were presented right after the four hours of mentoring sessions:
Kvittar team: Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, Måns Adler, Anna Oscarsson
Kvittar.se – A digital solution for all your receipts. The team includes founders from both the Pirate Bay and Bambuser.
Myfi.net – A cheap, high speed and unlimited mobile broadband in all inner city areas.
Peerialism, Advanced P2P technology that utilises networks resources more efficiently.
The Mini Seedcamp Helsingborg was very well organized and the Wifi worked flawlessly. The startups and mentors we talked to found the mentoring sessions both useful and a good experience.
Big heads up for the guys from The SHIP, Öresund Entrepreneurship Academy and the Seedcamp Team for a great event! See you next year!
WinWinBooks
Voddler
Arcusys Oy
“If you can’t do a hockey stick in Excel, you can’t use Excel” would’ve been more accurate.
I was one of the mentors at Mini-Seedcamp, and I want to echo Paula’s thoughts, this was a great event. I blogged about my after event thoughts at http://bit.ly/q4sKt
P.S. The Excel quote above from the founder of Axis was a joke to liven up the VC panel.
@Tomppa: LOL :) @Jussi: Good to meet you and thanks for sharing your thoughts on the mentoring sessions and all the brainstorming and knowledge sharing that took place in there! As you described, everybody seemed to be all warn out but smiling afterwards. Thanks also for pointing out the joke in the hockey stick comment :)
Definitely another good Seedcamp event. Every team had their problems and challenges. Hopefully they were all able to take something positive from that and to now work towards a better foundation. However, the quality was good, so it’s just a matter of work and making the right choices.
As Kristoffer and Jussi have already noted this was another excellent Seedcamp event. Quality of companies was on average rather high. As the companies were mostly very early stage it was common for many to still be seeking what it is exactly that they should focus on. As such they probably found the Seedcamp experience useful – at least we did last year. Too bad though that there was five Finnish mentors, but zero Finnish companies. Where are the internationally focused early stage Finnish startups? We’ll never match the Swedes this way! ;-)
Some further thoughts on Seedcamp Helsingborg: http://bit.ly/3gx5g