greek start-up are here
April 27th, 2009 — english, meetings
Following the second meeting on the Amazon Web Services I’m posting the material from the presentation here. You can watch the details in the video or skim through the slides alone.
At this point we’d like to thank Simone for joining us in this session. Much of this material is already published in various places, but getting to watch it and ask questions interactively is a much more gratifying experience.
April 15th, 2009 — conferences, english, publicity
It is my great pleasure to announce that the author of this post will have the honor and privilege to present the humble story of Open Coffee Greece, in an event entitled “Bridging the Gap - High Tech Entrepreneurship in Greece and Synergies With Silicon Valley“.
If the title is appealing to you, let me also state that the event takes place within the Stanford University Campus (Room 101, Packard Bld, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, 350 Serra Mall, map) on Saturday, May 2 and it is organized by the great guys behind the Hellenic Association at Stanford, in collaboration with the Corallia Clusters Initiative, Hellenic Semiconductor Industry Association, TANEO and Silicon Valley High Tech Professionals.
The full schedule goes like this:
Keynote: L. Stavropoulos, Special Secretary for Competitiveness, Ministry of Development
Speakers:
- Prof. V. Makios, Managing Director, Corallia High Tech Clusters Initiatives
- Prof. N. Haritakis, CEO, TANEO (New Economy Development Fund)
- Dr. N. Zervas, Member of the Board of HSIA (Hellenic Semiconductor Industry Association), CEO at Alma Technologies S.A.
- Dr. Y. Koutsoyannopoulos, CEO at Helic, Inc.
- G. Tziralis, Principal Organiser, OpenCoffee Greece
- G. Papadopoulos, CEO, Attica Ventures
- A. Stavropoulos, Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Panel: Visibility, Networking and Collaboration to drive innovation and growth in Greece
The event fundamentally targets at presenting the current entrepreneurship status in Greece, in an audience interested in exploring and taking advantage of potential complementarities and synergies.
In this context and under the fairest of auspices, the plan is to present the greek Open Coffee story so far, next to the traction reached and promise of the local start-up community, while trying to shape out the shortest path to maximizing this latent potential. Your ideas on enhancing the content are welcome.
April 8th, 2009 — english, minutes
moviepeak is a company providing satellite telecommunication services since 2003. Their track record includes bringing the Greek national channels via satellite TV to US and their current product is none other than video on demand via satellite. They did a soft launch in February 2009 and they aim to center the service around the user (as they should). The point is for the customer to have immediate access to the content and only pay for what they actually watch - there are to be no added extra costs. The way it works there are constantly 200 films received in the customer’s hardware along with a summary, film details and a trailer at no cost. It has all the familiar DVD functionalities and a relatively easy to use interface (which also comes in Greek) - although my first impression was that the initial setup might not be straightforward. The films are auto-updated via satellite - every week 10 old films leave while 10 new arrive. Their prices vary from 3 to 1 euro depending on popularity while the cost of the hardware is approx. 200 euros. The film arrives in 1′ or so when authorised via the local ISP or a customer sent SMS and is available for 24 hrs. Moviepeak has agreements with most major studios (e.g. Warner, UIP etc) and as such their niche is blockbusters exclusively: they package all ‘current’ films of major studios also taking into account the Greek market. Other than the obvious B2C revenue stream they allow for separate B2B deals available for hotels and other similar businesses.
Total Eclipse is one of the few if not the only casual games company in Greece. They have managed to secure funding from RealArcade and their niche is casual gamers. The casual gamer profile means basically people of ages 35+ and mostly women (74%) - based on international statistics. Casual gaming is a cross platform industry including PCs, Macs but also the Wii and the iPhone and of course social networks. The current pricing of casual games is approx. 20 euros while such productions cost more than 100.000 USD to make.
Total Eclipse started of as a two-brothers company back in 2004 when the market was still relatively easier to enter. Now times are harder and only 1 out of 4 games is accepted in distribution portals. Their company has released four games so far, two of which were self-funded and the other 2 were funded by RealArcade. I particularly liked their goal of embedding the company’s identity on every game as a means to make their brand known and recognisable. Their latest release, Clockwork Man launched 2 weeks ago and we were proud to hear the exclusive announcement that in all likelihood a sequel is coming up. They make basically PC based games although they aim to release for Macs and the iPhone soon. RealArcade handles all the publishing and delivering of their games to a large number of portals where they are showcased to a significant audience. All of the development happens in Greece (Thessaloniki) with some freelancing from Hungary and USA. Currently, and with the clockwork man’s success behind them they are looking for more staff (developers, graphic artists and others) so if you always wanted to work making games visit their site and make them a call.
TANEO is an organisation aiming to fund companies and Nikos Haritakis, its CEO spoke about their latest activity: they help organise the 10th VC Forum coming up in 16-17 June. This is a two day event in which the first day Greek investors and businessmen talk about the market while the second day investores have private discussions on particular business plans submitted by entrepreneurs looking to be funded. Currently TANEO controls 150 million euros of state-related funds which have been matched by another 150 million of private funds. Although so far they have aimed for relatively mature companies (business models of magnitudes 300-500K euros) they plan to put aside approx 20M euros for startups similar to those that can come out of OpenCoffee. There is no lower limit in investments - just an upper limit of 2.5M per year. Their criteria of investment are rather subjective as ‘venture capital is not objective’ and ‘if we like the idea, we like the people’. Other than that they are more interested in small cycle investments which would ensure going through the funding process with an entrepreneur completely rather than investing in longer duration projects. So it’s as simple as that if you want your idea to get funded they are a straightforward option: just give them a call and arrange a meeting with them.
upstream is a mobile marketing company which has been around since 2001 and has actually been funded by TANEO managed to be making a 40m euros turnover this year. They have offices around the world and their main products are related to SMS services, mobile interaction with radio and TV and so on. They are an early player in this particular market and they have managed to secure as customers some major mobile network operators abroad. An element of their strategy worth considering is that they succeeded in making a marketing vehicle out of bundling together gaming, gambling and promotion in a single platform: their mobile products. Although their idea could in principle be easily reproduced as admitted by their CEO, the company’s expertise, connections and current funding allow them to stay ahead of any competition that may try to arise - either in Greece where they started from or abroad.
February 8th, 2009 — english, minutes
Last Tuesday the 19th iteration of OpenCoffee took place in yet another venue - we believe we are converging to our natural habitat though. Lots of networking between familiar and new faces and in between our select speakers.
megaventory.com is an online service which handles inventory. It’s “a web tool where anyone being a business or an individual can manage and control the availability of an entity being a product or a service and make this information available to others” - gotta love the concise mission statement. The idea is a side project of the previous company the founder, Kostis Mamassis, was a member of: there, they wanted to keep track and minimise their stock in order to cut costs. Megaventory is basically a platform that can handle multiple users and storage points set to capitalise on the notion that inventory keeping is supposedly the next big thing in web and the fact that an inventory can take many shapes and appear in many markets - from your fridge stock to the availability of hotel services.
In the initial stages input in megaventory.com was done using the mothership company’s customers and was manual (if it did happen at all) and the initial feedback very negative. But they pressed on - they being a freelance vb.net/sql server developer plus the founder for all the rest. And so far they have 50 paid visits (coming from AdWords) plus 50 non-paid per day. All their ‘customers’ are in their free version with premium and unlimited paid versions available in which the number of items, users and inventory points increases.
They aim for the approx. 8M customers in the USA, EU and CAN market where the hard-to-believe competition is a single other startup. That does not include of course large packages and companies offering offline elaborate solutions (we’re talking simplified versions of ERP and CRM here basically). megaventory.com aims for the small customers and companies - e.g. one-man companies and startups will find it useful as they can’t afford technically and cost-wise current ERP solutions.
Ioannis Methodios, the VP of KEMEL (Greek Volunteer Managers) started off his speech with a short bio covering his early days as a consultant. ΚΕΜΕL is an organisation with former CEOs of major Greek companies as members who are interested in giving back some of their wisdom and experience to the entrepreneurial community. In particular, they are offering free business, marketing, legal, banking consulting as possible aids for any startup- so if any OpenCoffee people are hesitant about taking the step they now have one more way of coping and asking for help. KEMEL is considering offering their time in the shape of support via telephone, email or even workshops. It’s a 100% free effort and will quite possibly provide a means to access the network of professionals in KEMEL’s disposal. So, if anyone is interested for more information either stay tuned for more information, contact us to bring you in touch or - why not? - contact them straight away.
Sun, our sponsors for the night came on next with their important announcement: Sun Startup Essentials is launching in Greece! This means Sun is offering a wide range of services and products free or at a very reduced price for small companies - read startups in our case. It’s really fortunate - and we’re really interested to see what will come out of the move - for the large players in the market to do their bit to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship. So what does Sun offer? The list is long: Sun hardware and software (for Solaris, Linux, Windows), free tools, community support, free help with technical support - a full portfolio of services, software and platforms. The offered servers are starting at 750$ and there’s 70% off at storage, while hosting goes at 40$/month. The only requirements to be eligible is to have a company (a verified online presence and a legal entity) that has been around for less than 6 years and has a maximum of 150 employees - that probably covers most of the OpenCoffee community. Sun claims it’s a 5-minute process to sign up and 2-5 working days for them to clear the application formalities - you will then be one of the 6000 ventures that have already joined the scheme worldwide. Sun closed off by also announcing the opensource conference they organise for the 11th March.
Speaking of events we were happy to have Konstantina Zoehrer with us who announced the much-awaited second iteration of Mediacamp: it’s coming up 14-15 march!
Also, one of the most important figures in the internet, Tim Berners-Lee will be coming to Greece for the 3-day academic Webscience conference at Foundation of the Hellenic World (FHW) which will cover various internet-related subjects adopting the usual method of presentations, papers and posters. OpenCoffee people can take the option of registering for the Tim Berners-Lee talk at 25 euros.
The story of emarket.gr (formerly fleamarket.gr) is an interesting one as it goes back to 2000 when it was founded and it’s about the best localised e-bay option Greece has. It’s showing a rapid growth as Greeks after all start to feel more confident with online purchases - it reached an impressive 130K+ members and an impressive equal amount of unique visits. They employ 11 staff and handle 5-7K transactions a month resulting from 3.5M pageviews/month and an average time spent on the site of 15minutes. Their business model is currently based on the free submissions it receives and on the 2% commission it receives from sales of 100 euros/month gross. In addition to this revenue stream they have affiliations with eshop.gr, banks and other entities while of course they also display ad banners. Given that everything was free up to 2006 and some revenue streams are still only now coming online, emarket.gr’s course is indicative of the uphill struggle Greek startups had to give to succeed - perhaps it’s easier nowadays though. It’s also important to note that the website was developed on own funds during the first 5 rough years when the internet penetration was small and the potential customers few - while at the same time 2 offers for acquisition were turned down. Their goals for 2009 is to expand their market, visitors and members while continuing to offer excellent customer service (2 1/2 full-time people are currently on it). Prospects to cooperate with ebay or expand in other nearby markets are probably slim due to their current small-ish size.
Contrary to emarket.gr, iSteam is the iPhone app that reached 1M people in one week in the App Store and has become the first app in 40 countries at some point. When they turned their free app to a paid one, Kostas Eleftheriou, Vasilis Samolis and Vasilis Rappos (24, 22 and 22 respectively) grossed 60K sales - not bad for something that had only started in October 2008. As the App Store is already overwhelmed by good things and basically games - developed even by large companies, it’s hard to get awareness for an app, so they wanted something viral. iSteam was the result of two weeks of brainstorming and 150 rejected ideas: they had to minimise the required workhours and maximise the viral effect - and of course to get by the Apple screening. It had to be simple, require one hand to be used and to be possible to play with non-continuously. Once conceived it took them 7 days to make and as soon as it was out the competition was quickly an issue so they they decided to go free to fight it. 600K downloads later they went paid for 1$ - and went to no 27 in the world-wide list of paid apps. That meant 50K revenue in less than a month for 3 people - not bad for a project that requires no infrastructure (Apple handles it), no previous experience with that technology and “just” lots of work after submitting the app to keep the it popular and mentioned in the various points of interest online. The iSteam team plan to start developing other ideas and iPhone apps by keeping it small and simple - we wish them all the best although something tells me that as the market matures it’ll be much harder to gain visibility among the many apps that will be submitted.
That’s all for now - see you all next month…
January 13th, 2009 — VC, english, start-up
10 days ago we held an open meetup with Tassos Argyros in Athens downtown, he appeared to be more than sound and confident on moving from great to tremendous success for the company he co-founded.
Today exactly that kind of news broke out (official blog post is here): Aster Data raised a $12M second round of funding (right in the middle of recession), making them $22M in total since they started a couple of years ago. With investors like Sequoia Capital, Cambrian and JAFCO Ventures, already serving customers like MySpace, Akamai and Microstrategy, while standing on the shoulders of open source software and state-of-the-art academic research, we do believe that Aster Data and its 50 employees (core management (update: and development) team located in the Valley, the majority being developers in India, next to a capable sales team spread over the US, with Europe following soon) are on their way to become the next default solution to the omnipresent problem of handling big databases.
So, you’d better get prepared to receive that good or even better news about Aster Data in the near future, till then big congratulations to Tassos and the team for the raise!
January 13th, 2009 — VC, english, minutes, start-up
Although somewhat outdated here’s a brief run-down of the startups that presented in Open Coffee Athens XVIII. Be sure to check out doxaras‘ view too and the conversation that follows.
Presencespace was presented by Giannis Georgiads and is a startup providing an online, ‘nearline’ (that’s almost online) and offline customer support platform to businesses. Their service is open source and open standards and features among other things secure encrypted chat, multiple chats per operator, canned responses and geolocation capabilities. Pretty standard but important stuff. Integration with a website at the moment takes place manually or with certain plugins - but from what I could gather the process is straightforward. So far its main customers are mainly e-shops, hotels and tech support sites usually with 1-3 people working the application. Current licenses go for 5 euros per operator per month and presencespace already has about 50 clients - which amounts to a nice monthly income but not much more - for now. Needless to say, all customers are from abroad.
lostinmarket is an idea that grew gradually and eventually became a company for Dimitris Kourouvakalis and Fotis Zantzas. It’s a comparison of four types of products from the Greek market: banking, mobile, broadband and automobile. They aim to save their broad audience time, money and provide reliable information. Their customers are basically all the possible consumers that want to research the market before they buy. That’s an advantage in terms of the sheer numbers they can reach but also a disadvantage since it is hard to categorise customers into target groups. Still, they aim to make the experience personal (personalised like Amazon perhaps?) and create a platform for user-generated content (the comments and ranking Web 2.0 startups tend to offer).
The next stages of expansion of lostinmarket.gr will include insurance and travel-related projects - probably a good idea to avoid putting all the proverbial eggs in one basket. And although a comparison marketplace for insurance products will be both helpful and original, the market of travel is quite saturated (albeit by mediocre attempts generally speaking). And as for the fun bit of where the money will come from… it’s a 3-tier process. The idea is that the firms offering the products will pay lostinmarket.gr in order to have access a. to the traffic of people ready to buy (which I suppose has a premium compared to regular traffic) b. data mining results from the browsing habits of lostinmarket.gr visitors (probably the most important asset if used well) and c. the ubiquitous ads. It’s also interesting to note that the information on their website is updated both manually and automatically every week - which as was accurately pointed out in the Q&A that process may not scale when the products compared increase. Not so accurate however was the argument that ‘if companies will be paying a website to display their information won’t that make that website not independent and as such unreliable?’ Fortunately for lostinmarket.gr that has been answered - by none other than Google. Without reliability and transparency they will lose all customers rapidly and go out of business - and the internet market/culture identifies such ‘cheating’ startups very fast. On the other hand, the audience rewards honesty - so that won’t be a problem for lostinmarket.gr. Getting to a critical mass (both of products to compare, visitors and business they strike deals with) in the Greek market might be more of an issue though.
Aristos Doxiadis from Notos Associates was a much expected talk that started by outlining the VC situation in Greece - which is mostly what abroad is called private equity (and translates in virtually no seed financing). Before 1999 only a few tech investments were made from Commercial Capital where AD was working (and I guess that’s understable given the dark ages Greece was at tech-wise then). In Notos Associates (2000-2009), around 500 projects have been reviewed and only 15 were invested in - out of which only 1 a startup - which serves only to confirm what we already know. The reasons why ‘VCs’ in Greece don’t invest in early stage is that there needs to be a lot of decent companies to choose from so that at least one will succeed to pay off the rest who fail. And apparently the VC mentality is that Greek startups are inadequate both in numbers and quality. Furthermore, Greek projects are usually focused on the Greek market and as such unlikely to go huge - and have considerable earnings - as the domestic market is rather small. According to AD most Greek startups copy foreign models and the teams are just not good enough to provide a minimum of confidence to the investor. And of course, having an exit strategy is very hard in Greece as there are a few if any options for an investment that has underperformed to be sold to another funding body or to somehow return its money.
Another subject AD touched upon was the common mistakes startuppers make. Anyone who’s watched the community abroad and watched his Google Reader unread items soar to the hundreds, will have stumbled upon similar blog posts and won’t be surprised by the wisdom AD shared. So just to repeat, a great idea is unimportant the execution is what matters, it’s not about the founder’s brilliance, it’s about the team’s completeness and chemistry and finally it’s not about the wonderful, potentially hot-selling product but the actual users or customers the company has. Pretty obvious stuff (although remembering them when starting up is another matter of course). By the way, that’s another advantage web startups have - apart from the relatively low threshold of entry: information is so abundant that you don’t necessarily need a mentor - although personal contact with one is obviously not the same as reading a blog.
AD also pointed out that in order to have a decent chance before knocking at a VC’s door you basically need to already have immediate profits, a good hold on users (whether its 100.000 or one good license) and a comparative advantage - otherwise, just bootstrap it. This perhaps illustrates what some other people on our side of the funding fence have said: if a startup has reached these milestones then no VC money is needed. Personally, I’d say that no seed money is needed once there. To get there though you do need seed capital (a few tens of thousands) and once there you need expansion capital (a few hundred thousand euros) - spread over a period of years of course. And we should not forget AD’s offer to start a workshop - a great chance for startups to rack his and other experienced professionals’ brains. Sign up here!
Following A. Doxiadis’ talk Tasos Flambouras VP of the Darkfall MMORPG spoke about another much expected arrival - if we are to judge by the huge inflow of traffic from the game’s forum. So, this is for you too people. Darkfall is where all heads are turned towards especially now that big names like Warhammer Online and Age of Conan have launched:a 30-programmers’ project 6 years in the making born from a collaboration with a Norwegian company with Germany based servers that even managed to invert some of the brain drain and return Greek professionals back home in order to create a game that started from the premise of fulfilling users’ needs, working backwards and offering what existing games didn’t. So far about 300,000 people have been beta-testing it and 10.000 simultaneous users can play over each one of the hundreds of servers.
Darkfall has secured collaboration for publishing in Europe with audiovisual.gr (I’m very curious to see how well that company will do their job on the scale that’s anticipated). The price to play will be along the usual lines (10-11 euros/month) and Darkfall will be available in 22/01 both in Europe and the US. It’s important to mention that they’re not going head to head against giants like World of Warcraft - instead their niche seems to be players that appreciate non-linearity and freedom of actions (for example that could mean WoW users that want to be able to do their thing and are constrained by that game’s mechanics). Darkfall was very lucky to not only be able to find sponsors when they were beginning but also to be able to pick and choose who would fund them. Due to its size (and age) comparisons with current Greek startups are difficult but nonetheless a company we hope becomes a showcase for what Greek talent can achieve.
Speaking of which, Fanis Rigas of kariera.gr was our last speaker to describe how a small site which began in 1997 with 0 funds was 10 years later bought from careerbuilder.com for an undisclosed sum - but we can imagine many digits in it. kariera.gr was funded by an incubator-like body named iven in 2003 which was subsequently shut down due to lack of deal flow (!) and following that kariera.gr was bought by careerbuilder in 2007. Before the 2003 funding all their revenue came from a single customer. There are 48 people working in it in Greece and a few people abroad while they make a good 4 million euros in turnover.
So what were Rigas’ lessons from this experience? Firstly, failure is considered an evil thing in Greece and something that you should avoid by all means. This is literally hardwired in our mentality - but also in our laws which allegedly do not allow us to start again if we go bankrupt. Secondly, for a startup to succeed it needs to have a clear mission statement that can identify it among its competition and guide it along the way. It’s also very important to be very clear about how you will make money (what are you selling, to whom and why they will buy it). I guess that’s a no-brainer - what’s really hard to achieve is to honestly convince yourself (the funders will be easy then) with real data and case studies that the revenue model you have in mind actually works. Once there, get together the best team you can and create the accompanying culture to keep them in your company. And of course, since the road is long and you don’t know when success will drop by (or what it will look like) you need to commit to the end if you believe in your idea.
A couple more interesting tidbits were that FR actually hopes that more players appear in the jobs market - so that it can actually broaden up and generate more revenue for everyone but also what a huge lesson it was to see how things are done right by careerbuilder who acquired them. Being able to realise and also to admit these is I guess one of the characteristics you don’t see that often - and which may make the difference between success and failure.
(all images kind courtesy of johnkarak)
Update: a few of the participants follow…
