"LeWeb is about entrepreneurship. It's about being international. It's about inspiration. It's about the best of the best."

Loic Le Meur

I'd like to add:

"LeWeb is about pay-it-forward culture"

While the official LeWeb theme was SOLOMO, Social, Local, Mobile, I felt this year was particularly about the entrepreneurial stories, the successes and failures that thrive the change. Steve Blank explains the pay-it-forward culture best: "We're all in this together."

Daniel Ek, CEO and Co-founder of Spotify

 
I was truly glad that Daniel Ek, CEO and Co-founder of Spotify, made it to LeWeb this year, and together with Loic shared the importance of pay-it-forward culture. All success feeds each other and no startup cluster, hub or ecosystem won't grow, nor bloom, without sharing those successes. I think the European, and specifically Nordic startup ecosystem needs to hear it explicitly from today's change makers.

In the spirit of pay-it-forward culture, I've gathered learnings from LeWeb startup founders, finishing with Mr. Karl Lagerfeld himself, also a high school drop-out, and probably the most entrepreneurial and curious soul at LeWeb this year.

I'll start with Daniel's most important learnings:

• Execution is everything. No offense to innovation, but 95% of success lies in execution. 
• People are everything. Period.
• Focus. Learn how not to do everything.
• Please watch the entire interview with more great insights from Daniel.

Flickr CC by JournalDesVitrines.com

You know it's not just another Internet conference when you have Mr. Fashion himself, THE Karl Lagerfeld, opening up for the 72 hours non stop Geraldine and Loic Le Meur LeWeb extravaganza. The program this year is so packed with the latest goodies in SOLOMO it makes it almost hard to breathe.  

I'm so glad Dennis Crowley of Foursquare is back now 15 Million members strong, Daniel Ek, Co-Founder & CEO of Spotify will share few facts on the music industry, and I really look forward having Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures coming over and talk to Sean Parker, General Partner, Founders Fund, who just raised another $625M fund.

Don't miss Phil Libin CEO of Evernote, an awesome entrepreneur story, and one of the great companies in Sequoia portfolio.

Since you need to stay on top of social media metrics and trends, you can't miss Jeremiah Owyang, of Altimeter Group deliver “State of Social Business” And did I mention I'm super excited to hear what Ben Parr has to say.

LeWeb - The Ultimate Exercise In Networking With No Excuses

You know the D-day is getting closer when the "xx likes you" mails keep hitting your Inbox. For every year the Team LeWeb is walking the extra mile to make it easier to meet. So even this year. There's no need to sigh and dig into the plus 3 000 attendee list, just hit over to Presdo Match, whosatleweb.com and hotatleweb.com and start booking! It's what you make out of it, so make sure to make the most of it.

Is your startup looking to meet early stage investors, even less excuse: I've laid up the ground work for you. Here's few you'd like to meet:

• Atlas Venture with Fred Destin
• Wellington Partners with Christian Thaler-Wolski, Daniel Waterhouse and Eric Archambeau 
• DFJ Esprit with Scott Sage 
• Dave McClure, 500 Startups
• Earlybird Ventures with Jason Whitmire and Maximilian Claussen 
• Point Nine Capital with Christoph Janz 
• M8 Capital with Joe Nile
• Index Ventures with Danny Rimer, Martin Mignot, Shardul Shah 
• Balderton with Charlotte Anne Swerling, Bernard Liautaud, Roberto Bonanzinga, Harry Briggs
• Accel Partners 
• Atomico
• Charles River Ventures 
• Jeff Clavier
• Shervin Pishevar
• Ventech with Claire Houry
• From Nordics you'll find Northzone, Creandum with Fredrik Cassel and SEED Capital with Rasmus Bjerngaard, Jakob Ekkelund, Niels Vejrup Carlsen and Jakob Ekkelund

Startup Competition - The Sixteen Ones

23minutes.to from Iceland is the only startup representing Nordics and Baltics on the16 startups strong competition, but you'll have a chance to "get your hands on" few more from the region during the three days:
Finland: Zeighed, Wantlet, Foodie.fm
Sweden: Spotify, Reamill, Burt, Tripbirds, 46 Elks
Denmark: Podio, Evertale, Influads

It's All About Storytelling - How To Crush It On Stage

LeWeb is all about connecting people and sharing success stories - now is your time to shine.

Stay calm and tell a story; Great piece of advice by Waze, one of the last year's winners who just raised $55M in total in funding. I've also put together pitch advice and superb example of how another one of last year's winners Super Marmite crushed it on stage.

LeWeb - Study In Hustle

It's really hard to be an entrepreneur if you don't know how to hustle. Big conferences are the perfect occasion to show your skills. "Adopt an entrepreneur" was a new initiative by Silicon Valley Bank and Lepe Partners to pay LeWeb tickets for 20 entrepreneurs. Watch one of my favourite submission by Gabriel Hubert of Teleportd, Realtime Photo search engine and Seedcamp company, hustle his way to LeWeb. "If there's a will, there's a way." 

Alexander Ljung of SoundCloud On Why LeWeb Matters

Being consistent. Being resilient. Being brilliant.

It took Alexander three years to land the main stage at LeWeb.
Year one: Meet 25 VCs in two days, amongst them current investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures.
Year two: Hustle the conference demoing SoundCloud's then new Record button capturing industry voices.
This year Alexander will take the main stage on Friday 10th and talk about the journey of SoundCloud. Don't miss.

If You Still Can't Make Your Sorry Ass Over

Thanks to Ustream, there will be 3 (!) different live streams reporting every second of the action. When not hanging on the live stream, you'll find the latest buzz on social photo sharing apps Instagram, EyeEm and Teleportd.

DID I MENTION HUSTLE?

DID I MENTION TELL A STORY?

DID I MENTION BE A PERSON AND BE AMAZING?

Good. See You In Paris!

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"Being obsessed with your product and customers should be number one focus area for CEOs"

Quote by Brad Feld via Sravish Sridhar of Kinvey at #SVBCEO

Foursquare running on its third year, with $70 Million in fresh venture funding, 3400 % growth rate last year, passing 10 Million members, a BILLION check-ins, and 500 000 merchants on board, it's fair to say there's a lot going on for CEO Dennis Crowley and his team. These are also the times when it's ever important to stay focused on the company's long term vision, as close to the product and its customers. Here's a great example of how Foursquare keeps focusing, growing and delivering:

For a couple of weeks ago I had a Twitter discussion with my friends about why Foursquare has totally changed my travel and places discovery, and become my number one travel, hotel and restaurant discovery guide. With new list function it's also easy to put together list of ones favorite places or a wish list. Ps. For those wishing to explore Barcelona Scott Sage style, save the list

Leading to an improved search functionality request:

Having Dennis bouncing back within seconds asking for example:

Followed by my 140 character feature request:

With no time wasted, the request was forwarded to Foursquare Product Development team.

How's that for creating user engagement and improving your product and user experience? Here's the entire feature request conversation:

Dennis + Foursquare + LEWEB 2011 = TRUE

Wish to learn how to create true engagement in SOLOMO (Social Local Mobile) services? Dennis Crowley will repeat his much appreciated last year's visit to LeWeb in Paris, and here's why you should join to listen him share his insights with Loic on the LeWeb Opening Day December 7th: 

Those who know me and follow me, know that I speak very strongly for the "Opt-In" Internet. With Foursquare you don't even have to get into the discussion about good and bad creepiness. It has by so far never broken my trust, or forced me be more public about my location, but instead keeps incentivizing and engaging me with the service, thus making me share more tips, as my location. I so wish more of the companies being started today would stop obeying the rules of false engagement using Opt-out, basically forcing me to like and share to be able to even sign up for a service! It's like no one anymore dares to trust that its service can create demand and true engagement.

While waiting to unlock your LeWeb11 Foursquare batch, read my takeaways from previous LeWeb and watch LeWeb 2010 interview with Dennis Crowley.

Find out more About Me. Ways to make sure You don't miss anything: Subscribe to my Feed, follow my Swedish Startups Twitter list, Startup Advice, connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Or just drop me a line.

Flickr CC: natashalcd

"How well does our website and app communicate our vision?" 

I was recently asked the question while giving feedback to up and coming mobile social sharing service. We had already talked a couple of hours about the service, so I had gotten a clear picture what the founders' vision was.

I paused and finally answered:

"It's like a jigsaw puzzle: You have all the pieces, but they are assembled in the wrong order, so you can't see the complete motive of the puzzle, i.e. your vision."

This is fairly common, especially in the early phase of a product. You've probably heard "Can't see the forest for the trees": You want too much, too early, and become feature rich. It's easier and more fun, especially being a geek, to build more features than think about the bigger picture, nail the one thing and follow your long term vision. It also takes time to crystalise your vision.

That is also why there is so many recurring startup advice out there to remind you to

• Focus!
• Do one thing well 
• Start by serving one niche well 
• Find the one thing, the heart and soul of the product 
• Don't add, but remove features 
• Stay away from the feature wars 

When the dance floor is filled with other pretty and smart boys and girls, it's easy to get anxious, get caught up in feature wars, and lose the sight of ones vision. Don't. Instead, keep refining and aligning your core functionality with your long term vision. (Why I love Foursquare so much)

Remember, there's almost nothing as appealing and contagious as self confidence and clear vision. Mixed with large portion of humility and humbleness.

Don't Make Me Think!

Being feature rich only ends up confusing the user and buries the message and the value or your service. When the service lacks natural flow it makes a user think. An intuitive service makes a user excited and incentivized. Keep in mind that an average user only engages with between six to seven websites and services on daily bases. There's no place of being confusing.

Tips On The Way To Make Your Product Communicate Your Vision

"You gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to technology". Steve Jobs

Whenever in doubt, these five minutes will pull you back and keep you on track.

"That's what sold me. One slide." Fred Wilson

Getting your one line pitch right is really, really, really hard. It also boils down to being able to communicate your vision in one slide. It's part of the journey, and it might take few years to crystalise it. Ask SoundCloud.

"Sound" from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

"Sharing your vision is the most important thing a founder can do." Alexa Andrzejewski

Alexa Andrzejewski, CEO & Co-Founder of Foodspotting shares her learnings on how by sharing your vision, you can avoid many common mistakes startups make:

One more thing: Watch TechStars show on Bloomberg TV!

Six extraordinary great episodes, that capture the early phase of building a product and refining how to communicate your vision.

Find out more About Me. Ways to make sure You don't miss anything: Subscribe to my Feed, follow my Swedish Startups Twitter list, Startup Advice, connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Or just drop me a line.

In the midst of the hottest July my Inbox was greeted with an invitation to join a panel to discuss seed stage investing at European Pirate Summit in Cologne, Germany. It was one those things that sounded just bit too crazy enough project not to be part of (read: outdoor "art wasteland" venue close to a highly trafficked railway), and the energy and excitement by the organizers was contagious. Besides, whatever it is Philipp Moehring is cooking, it has to be good. Philipp gets things done on the European startups scene, paying attention to details and making sure not just startups are growing - there's always time for the Seedcamp office plants.

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Seed Investors - Intros, Connections And Ze Moneyz

Photo credit Tine Thygesen

With surprisingly few goods trains passing during our panel, Philipp, Christian Thaler Wolski of Wellington Partners, Florian Meissner of EyeEm, and myself, unpacked few insights on seed investing. Given that each of us represent different roles in the startup ecosystem, the experiences and advice shared were immensely consistent, summed up below. 

Value Beyond The Check

Besides from that your seed investors should stay out of the way and not wear you down with excessive reporting or board meetings, most value should come from:

• Help your team to focus, not add to the priority list.
• Help in hiring. The early hires are the most important ones.
• Help with connections and next funding round.

Read the rest of this post »

David Cohen, founder and CEO of TechStars, recently summarized his past six years learnings on mentorship at TechStars in his Mentor Manifesto. At times when at least Europe is experiencing a growth of accelerators based on mentor driven model, call it a bubble or not, I'd like to stress particularly one piece of advice by David: 

"Clearly commit to mentor or do not. Either is fine."

As to quote Fred Destin:

"Mentoring is difficult to do. It takes a lot of frontal cortex activity, and there's some dangerous mentoring."

Earlier this June I spent couple of great days visiting Boston investor and startup scene including Angel Bootcamp (read my in-depth post on advice on angel investing) and TechStars Boston and its Demo Day. (I also got to visit Cambridge Innovation Centre and Webinno pitch night. Thanks Ziad Sultan of Marginize for kindly hosting me!)

One of the great sessions I looked forward to at Angel Bootcamp was the highly insightful Preaching Words of Wisdom: the Art of Mentoring, panel moderated by BostonVC David Skok with Katie Rae, Sean Lindsay and Roy Rodenstein. All mentors at TechStars Boston, Katie being the MD of TechStars Boston. To quote David Skok: "We only got to the first slide!" after 40 minutes of great discussions and knowledge sharing.

Having actively mentored European top talent at Seedcamp over a year now, as being part of Springboard mentoring team, my experiences align both with Fred, David, as the advice shared by the panel. Here are my key takeaways.

Key Takeaways Trom The Panel Art of Mentoring

Much of the advice and learnings discussed on the panel is echoed on David's Mentor Manifesto, strange would be otherwise :)

"It's your company". Good mentors don't tell what to do. Listen to entrepreneurs perspective before telling your own. As entrepreneur, you know your everyday business best. Listen and digest the advice given.

FOCUS: As mentor, don't add new priorities on the list, but help reset existing priorities and focus.

"Why are you doing what you're doing?" Help entrepreneurs ask the right questions and dig deeper into what motivates them. Figure out how the decision making process works to be able to give better advice.

Mentoring is a human interaction. You can't form authentic relationship if you're not able to have honest conversation. Sign up for relationship that can evolve.

Mixing the role of mentor and investor by David Skok
As investor, be very clear when mentoring that you're not wearing an investor hat. As entrepreneur, you shouldn't feel that you have to take the advice because it comes from an investor.

He also emphasized the single first most important help you as investor can provide: Help hire right people. Adding talent is hard and crucial, thus it's important to understand what talent the core team is lacking.

Have early on discussion with entrepreneurs on how the fundraising works.

Advice to mentors participating in accelerator programmes:

• All mentors should know who the others are ( I find this being one of the most important things when mentoring in groups.) 
• Don't get into group thing when giving advice! This will only hurt entrepreneur.

Advice to entrepreneurs:

• "Give me the opportunity to say no!". Many entrepreneurs don't understand how to maximize mentors. Don't be afraid to ask help - it might be easy problem to help out with. (Reverse: It's still your company, don't expect mentors to make your decisions or run your company.)

• Don't give equity to advisors before you have dated and they have given recurring value added advice! (Equity carrying advisory roles: 0,1 - 2% equity of the company) Note: You never ask for an advisory role, they are being offered by entrepreneurs!

TechStars Boston Demo Day

"Amazing event, a celebration of entrepreneurship, teamwork, and just plain passion and hustle":

 I can only agree with Bill Warner's emotional tribute to Katie Rae.

While sitting on the front row listening to the teams, it stroke me how all the advice and learnings from the past day's panel on mentoring literally came to life on stage at Demo Day. Rarely have I seen such engaged, focused, yet relaxed teams delivering pitches in sharp and joyous way. Team after team took the stage clear on message and with inspiring self confidence. This is not to confuse with the art of pitching: pretty words and polished metrics without profound teams and business understanding are nothing but shiny objects on stage.

And it wasn't just the teams that were proud. Every single mentor who got on stage to introduce a team was all smiling, all excited, and all acting like the proudest of parents. E.g. proud Fred Destin of Atlas Venture went on to announce its investment on the team Kinvey (BaaS, mobile backend as a service) right on stage, making the team Kinvey all happy faces. 

Happy BadaaS Campers: Kinvey team with Fred Destin

And the announcements kept coming during the day. All in all the companies raised $4 Million in funding at Demo Day. It was great to watch the investors lining up for the teams and listening to teams responding.

Hardi Meybaum of GrabCad "We're fully subscribed"

Scott Kirsner of Boston Globe has the complete recap of all the teams and Ryan Kim of GigaOM has great rundown of health startups at Demo Day.

On Mentoring, Accelerators, State Initiatives and Building Startup Ecosystem

I strongly encourage everyone who is already involved in the startup community, or has the itch to join and participate in the ecosystem, to watch following 15 minutes of a panel discussion at #AccelerateMTL in Montreal, CA, on accelerators (Seedcamp, Y Combinator, 500 Startups), building an ecosystem, state funding and dangerous mentoring: "Oh, I've seen this before, this is how you need to run your business": Fred Destin. Trust me, it's a good one despite four white males in the panel :)

I have personally participated in mentoring groups where advice has started with "You must...". With limited time on your hands to actually try to help the entrepreneur, these sessions become a death race, when at the same trying to help the entrepreneurs, as protect them by subtly mentoring the mentor to refocus the discussion. Phew! 

Listen to Chris Albinson of Panorama Capital, Chris Arsenault of iNovia Capital, Robert Simon of Ariva Capital, Fred Destin of Atlas Venture moderated by Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer of Real Ventures.

 

See You At Seedcamp!

I'm off to mentor my second Seedcamp Week in London starting tomorrow. Can't wait.

Find out more About Me. Ways to make sure You don't miss anything: Subscribe to my Feed, follow my Swedish Startups Twitter list, Startup Advice, connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Or just drop me a line.

I'll be heading to Ljubljana for my ninth(!) Seedcamp, eighth as mentor, to meet the brightest and the hottest startups from the region, not just for the lovely view above (thanks Jakob for the picture!). I'm also all set to check out how Barcamps are run in Ljubljana, and if Prezis are accepted, which I've heard they are, I'll be throwing in 20 minutes on Social PR for Startups. I've also confirmed that my travelling friend Mike Butcher from TechCrunch Europe will be in town to see how you're all doing.

Four home teams among the 20 selected ones from in total 11 countries are all gearing up to wow us, Fred Destin is to wow us with his brand new Prezi during his Masterclass, taking us through a company's whole lifecycle from creation to launch to scale, and the Mayor of Ljubljana himself is ready to wow us with drinks at the City Hall. 

Ljubljana is also a home of my two favourite startups whose name starts with the letter V, namely Vox.io and Visionect :) My lovely hosts at Vox.io, changing the world of telephony, have promised me a surprise on top of all the VIP perks, and I'm super excited to finally place an order on Visionect's "Geoffrey", today looking even more handsome. 

Flickr CC Steve.Wilde

There're still plenty of sleepless hours before the show starts, what better than to recap pitching advice to make your story shine, and watch Fred's previous presentation from Seedcamp Berlin last year.

Any questions on angel funding, launch and go-to-market strategies, or how to make your product more social, just head my way!  Would you wonder about Nordic e-commerce startups scene - that's just fine, too :)

Those who know me well, know that I'm especially keen to find out if the rumors on the regions splendid wines are true.

Ljubljana, I'm ready to get wowed by you.

Flickr (CC) Brian Solis. www.briansolis.com.

Find out more About Me. Ways to make sure You don't miss anything: Subscribe to my Feed, follow my Swedish Startups Twitter list, Startup Advice, connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Facebook. Or just drop me a line.