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.
Sean Parker, Founders Fund, and Shervin Pishevar, Menlo Ventures
One of the biggest failures: Hiring wrong people. As young and naive entrepreneur it's easy to get impressed by and end up hiring crazy people.
Which naturally leads to: People are great asset class. I also urge you to read Naval Ravikant touching the same concern both Sean and Shervin share: The downside of all smart kids starting their own startups instead of working together and building kick ass teams.
Success and failure amnesia: Despite the successes and failures, keep going, keep building and creating value to people. As Sean put it, with every new venture some things get easier, but one has to be paranoid. Building company is hard.
Timing: Don't build product 10 years ahead of your time (Bill Gross learnings: Survive until the market is ready)
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.comand 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:
From Nordics you'll find Northzone, Creandumwith Fredrik Cassel and SEED Capital with Rasmus Bjerngaard, Jakob Ekkelund, Niels Vejrup Carlsen and Jakob Ekkelund
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 be3 (!) 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, EyeEmandTeleportd. DID I MENTION HUSTLE?
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:
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 LeWeband watch LeWeb 2010 interview with Dennis Crowley.
Highlighting 16 of the over 400 applicants, this year's LeWebStartup Competition, was located at the Eiffel Dock building, a perfect setup to hang out with the startups. Own lunch and café area, lounge chairs by the startup demo booths, and the startup competition stage just behind the curtain, made it easy for ideas and money to mate. And it never got too crowded nor loud. Win-Win.
Startup Focus on Making Business Social
The three finalists chosen to pitch on the LeWeb main stage also represented the overall "trend" - social. Social content curation (Paper.li), Social driving assistance (Waze), Social home cooking (Super Marmite) and Social car sharing community (Deways), winner of the special audience award.
Only two of the 16 startups launched on stage. Nuji, one of this year's Seedcamp winners, launched their Social recommendation service to discover and share products you love, whereas Badgeville, a Social rewards and analytics platform officially kickstarted its European business for its two months old Palo Alto service.
Timeless Art of Pitching - The Dos And Don'ts Watching the startups getting their five minutes on the spotlight to dazzle the judges and audience, I made notes on few definitive don'ts that judges really shouldn't have, but repeatedly kept asking for:
Passion and honest intention is close to impossible to copy or fake. Practically, everyone can throw a conference, but very few understand the meaning of creating Win-Win. Geraldine and Loic Le Meur do. I thank You for that. LeWeb itself is a true startup story, created to build ecosystem and highlight startups. Like any other startup, it has been praised and bashed along the way, but with consistency, passion, hard work (watch the beginning of this and you'll get the picture), and strong vision, it's made its way to the top now having numbers to back it up. In six years LeWeb has grown from 250 attendees from 15 countries to nearly 3 000 from 60 countries. Overnight successes, anyone? Or better yet, a hype?
People do keep coming back for a reason, and flying in all the way from Japan, happy as ever, for 20 minutes on stage. But, for all you sceptics and non believers, LeWeb offered you to stay at home, lay back and join the 250 000 online viewers, and keep you updated with the approx. 60 000 tweets sent this year. Yes, #leweb also hit number one worldwide trending topic the first day on Twitter. And for your convenience, you can also catch up all LeWeb content on HD.
My partner in crime in Paris this year, Henriette Weber, summarizes the whole experience as Epic. Passion and honest intention shines through and is required to build a viable ecosystem (The official blogger backchannel speaks clearly on the commitment). It's also what Dennis Crowley of Foursquare talked about, with both Loic and Leo Laporte agreeing on:
"To contribute back to the ecosystem is what makes it work"
I'm really excited to be returning my second time to LeWeb, only this year as official blogger. Thank You Geraldine and Loicfor invitation, and all the fine people for recommending me!
Does Your Business Stand On Solid Platform
If the last year's conference about real-time web with 2 500 participants and 300 journalists from 50 countries could be summarized as the Manisfestation of Connectiveness, this year's themePlatformsmakes a perfect segway. To discuss and figure out the future of Mobile, Browser, Desktop, Tablets, TV, and Social Networks as a platform, will undoubtebly require another 8 000 cups of Nespresso! Join us!
On December 8th and 9th, Geraldine and Loic Le Meur are taking LeWeb back to the popular Les Docks with yet another great lineup of speakers. Here are few teasers:
2 300 participants from 46 countries carried 2 937 devices with them, of which 1 008 were iPhones, sent 665 Gb data and the the two day conference resulted in total 200 000 live views on Ustream. (No wonder we managed to kill 8 000 cups of Nespresso!)
Figures state the obvious: People do love to meet offline - and share their experiences online. And since the urge to share is now enabled in real-time by various communication technologies and platforms available, industries stand in front of the firehoses of information without knowing what to do with it - and most of all, how to monetize this engagement and information. 2 300 people around the world came to LeWeb to try to figure that out, together. Personally I fell in love with Mobile Roadie, who together with awesome Ustream delivered the coolest iPhone application so far: the offical LeWeb app. How can you not be totally blown away by the fact that you simultaniously in your hand can watch the perfect stream of what you're actually experiencing live? Besides that everything is also available archived the minute after the live stream is over. And moreover, all the attendees easily available, all the conversations and buzz going on, on top of the push notifications of changes in the schedule. In other words, the perfect tool to connect people around common interests and events! See Michael Schneider's, CEO Mobile Roadie, LeWeb demo. (Sean Percival, Mobile Roadie, The History of The Real Time Web)
LeWeb certainly didn't lack greatspeeches, but I would like to summarise the core essence of what's going on around us on the real-time web with following quotes:
"Every device is becoming interactive",Axel Schmiegelow, sevenload "Connectivity is a commodity", Jonathan Benassaya, Deezer "Social graph optimization is the new SEO", Seth Stenberg, Meebo "We're banking revenue ($6 billion) because we're connecting with customers", Richard Binhammer, Dell "People like to interact with their own content!", Justin Kan, justin.tvWhat everybody seemed to agree on across the roundtable discussions was that connectiveness adds customer value, and that there's no way but to go with the flow and experiment the best one can.
