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Start-up Weekend Athens, less than two days to go (updated)

November 20, 2008 No Comments

So, are you ready for the big challenge? Setting up a team and turning an idea into a start-up, over the weekend? No, this is not a catch phrase, more than 150 people have already signed up to Startup Weekend Athens and will do just this, starting on Friday at 4.30pm.

The event, to be hosted at the Microsoft Innovation Center at Leoforos Vasilissis Sofias 103, is almost sold out and let me share with you that the only ‘promo’ used was an announcement in our event and a follow-up blog post; so you know who to expect and the enthusiasm and passion for tech start-ups your coworkers will bring up with.

geeks working around the table on their start-up

Alexandros Pagidas (the so-called greek ‘Philosopher 2.0’) and Andrew Hyde (founder of Startup Weekends around the globe) are flying from the States to organize the event and bring the SUW magic into Athens, so that the only thing you need to do is just show up, or you’d better start preparing from now on.

Let me give you a few tips:

bring your own laptop, you’ll also be provided with a chair, desk and wifi, I bet we won’t need anything else
you are not there only to meet up with other people, you are there to build and launch an app over the weekend (and the best way to get to know people better is coworking with others)
start thinking on applicable ideas from now on and, remember, next to a web app you also need a revenue model
don’t fix your team before the event, on friday evening you will pitch your idea to everyone and probably many interesting people will show up wanting to work with you; I bet that one of the best things out of the weekend is getting the chance to work together with people you haven’t worked with before
I’m sure that the event will be both fun and tough, but, in any case, you’d better not let the chance go by and go create something really cool and useful, things may turn out to be much better than expected (20.000 euro included)
MS being the event’s host does not mean that you need to develop on MS technologies (you may say that exactly the opposite is true, if you like :)

Andrew Hyde, the mind & soul behind each SUW — Andrew Hyde, the mind and soul behind each SUW

~~The preliminary program goes like this:~~

(update) The updated program is:

Friday November 21st

4.30 p.m. doors open at Microsoft Innovation Center at Leoforos Vasilissis Sofias 103, Athens (map)
5 p.m. The event officially begins. The organizers and hosts say a few words and then people are encouraged to meet one another, exchange ideas, form teams and think about what would be interesting to build.
7 p.m. Pitches start. In other words, this is the stage where if you have an idea you pitch it to the teams that are beginning to form.
8 p.m. Teams have formed and ideas have been chosen and they begin to break off for further discussion. So if we end up with 10 teams this means 10 startups would be created.
9 p.m. Teams have hopefully solidified their concept and have created an elevator pitch, even a simple one at the moment would do.
10 p.m. Teams continue their discussions and attempt to paper-prototype their applications

There will be light dinner (finger food) available.

Saturday 22nd of November

9 a.m. Doors open. People assemble; each team starts working on development.
10 a.m. By now it would be a good idea to have your site paper prototyped out, working title, all your technical plans made out. Start the process of getting your servers live, buying domain names, and creating user flows.
11 a.m. up to 2 p.m. Special Guests offering technical assistance start dropping in. The guests are: Constantinos Leftheris, Software Engineer from Allweb; Stavros Menegos, Technical Director from Entersoft; George Reklitis, Applications Development Consultant from Microsoft Hellas.
12 p.m. Lunch
3 p.m. up to 6 p.m. More coding, business plan development and Special Guests offering Business and PR advice start dropping in. The guests offering Business advice are going to be: Nikolaos Mylonopoulos, Associate Dean of Innovation & Technology, Associate Professor of Innovation Systems from Athens Laboratory of Business Administration (ALBA); Giorgos Papagiannakis, PhD Candidate, , Department of Management Science and Technology, Researcher Officer, Laboratory of Strategy and Entrepreneurship from Athens University of Economics & Business (AUEB); Lefteris Kioses, Science and Technology, Research Officer, ELTRUN e-Business Research Center from AUEB; Iordanis Papadopoulos, Principal from ARCHIMEDES Center for Innovation and Creation. The guests offering PR advice are going to be: Agapi Palieraki, PR Supervisor from Politics; Konstantina Logotheti, Public Relations & Citizenship Specialist from Microsoft Hellas.
6 p.m. Pitches from the teams and additional special guest drop-ins. These guests are generally experts in particular fields (Business Development experts, Technical Assistance etc.) that will help startup teams develop a better product. The guest list will be announced when finalized.
8 p.m. Dinner
9 p.m. Gut check on the product; basic prototype building; group get-together for refreshment or dinner and to talk about the products everybody is working on.

Sunday 23rd of November

9 a.m. Doors open, and work starts again.
10 a.m. Teams should be able to have a live splash page up with an email capture and simple blog.
12 p.m. Projects are being developed, more special guests start dropping in. This time we’ll have Venture Capitalists, Investment Managers and Lawyers offering their expertise. The guests are going to be: Antigoni Lymperopoulou, Investment Manager from TANEO – New Economy Development Fund; Eleni Kolofotia, Investment Manager from TANEO – New Economy Development Fund; Demetrios Seferis, CEO from GloCal Systems Management/GIVE -TANEO; Chris Velissaris, CFO from GloCal Systems Management/GIVE -TANEO; Natasha Arvanitie, Investment Manager from GloCal Systems Management/GIVE -TANEO; Ari Vihersaari, CDO from GloCal Systems Management/GIVE -TANEO; Pavlos Georgiadis, Technical/Investment Analyst from GloCal Systems Management/GIVE -TANEO; Iordanis Papadopoulos, Principal from ARCHIMEDES Center for Innovation and Creation; Grace Katsoulis, Lawyer from Ballas Pelekanos & Associates.
1 p.m. Lunch
6 p.m. Sink or swim time for those looking for a weekend launch.
8 p.m. Dinner
9 p.m. Presentations from each company; what worked, what didn’t, what could go better. Wrap up and move out.

So, bring on your very own passion, creativity and ideas and let’s rock all together, let’s build some great apps and make Startup Weekend Athens -why being modest- the most successful one so far!

minutes

OpenCoffee Athens XVI: the minutes

November 7, 2008 2 Comments

Last Tuesday, November 4th, another OpenCoffee meeting took place in Athens, our 16th iteration. This time the conditions were somewhat different than usual: posher place – a hotel, better infrastructure and acoustics, actual service, seats for everyone and a very encouraging turnout of more than 200 people. While we’re getting ready to improve everything (from the venue style to the capacity constraints) and move the event hopefully one last time where we think it rightfully belongs both conceptually and in terms of its actual requirements, here’s what happened last Tuesday.

First up was Stratos Provatopoulos, representing Foinikas and a team of students from the Athens Technical University behind it. Foinikas is a so-called green startup aiming to make recycling easier and more popular in Greece by removing all the hassle involved in participating in it. Their main functionality is to set up a central point where they will collect items for recycling from individuals or companies and award points to them. Consequently, these points can then be exchanged in their website for gifts from Foinikas sponsors who want to make their corporate profile and brand a bit more greener. That way a motive is created for everyone to participate in recycling. The Foinikas business model is initially based in state and local government subsidies especially set up for recycling initiatives.

George Salias-Faseas from Google Hellas — George Saliaris-Faseas of Google Hellas

George Saliaris-Faseas, country manager of Google Hellas was next to give an overview of his career and the lessons picked up. GSF started off as a fruit importer (!) before moving on to YellowNetRoad a company providing other companies with a hot product at those days before the dot com bust: internet strategy (which soon transformed into internet marketing). The consulting service was very successful – apparently turning down 3 offers even before revenue has been made (which says something about the era). Eventually the company was sold and then re-bought 4 years later only to be resold to Ogilvy. And as is customary in these type of careers (and talks) a number of lessons were learned. According to GSF:

People are the most important capital – that’s why you should hire people that are smarter than you are.
It’s crucial to focus on one thing only when starting
You need to measure what you are doing
People in startup companies usually do what pleases them – instead of what needs to be done. Do everything somehow – e.g. hire contractors.

And a talk by the country manager of Google would not be complete if he hadn’t unveiled their secret plans for the country. They would be:

they aim to foster internet growth in Greece
AdWords and Adsense need to be promoted as useful tools for companies
product localisation needs to be improved
their goal is to tap on the huge potential of the Greek long tail and in particular the approximately 350K SMEs

Sadly, in case you were wondering, there are no plans to create a development centre in Greece for at least the next year and neither is it a good idea to pitch your startup to Google through Google Hellas at the moment. You will need to wait for a year and maybe then Google will consider buying you. At a lower price most probably.

And although Google seems an unlikely funder there is someone who even in (or perhaps because of) the times of crisis actually wants to invest. Ms Natasa Arvaniti, investment manager of newly founded fund GIVE presented their project. GIVE (Glocal Investment Ventures Enterprises) is a fund co-created by TANEO and GloCal Systems Management which aims to invest several million euros in promising SMEs and startups – they begin by offering 20K to the best startup that will come out of Athens Startup Weekend. That should make attending SUW an even more exciting prospect! In addition to GIVE, Archimedes, a Center for Innovation and Creativity was presented which seems to have similar goals as OpenCoffee – the blending and networking of professionals. Since it’s creation in 2003 it has been mostly involved with the fields of olive oil and renewable energy sources though and it has ran seminars, summer schools etc.

Panayiotis Vryonis talking about e-go travel

After all the success and optimistic talks it was time to stress the darker side of starting up with Panayiotis Vryonis who talked about the secrets of his failed company. He started e-go travel (which was actually what yassou.net changed to due to legal reasons) with a friend at the spare space of a warehouse: their startup was about finding accommodation for tourists. They hired 2 people and got going: among other things they got one of the first blogs set up, implemented support for mobiles/palm-pilots, one of the employees was visiting hotels and rooms to let to gather information, they got in touch with telcos, VC’s, a media portal and after approx. 30K spent the project was gradually abandoned… probably a bit too early according to VP. Some of his lessons from the whole experience include:

burning money in the wrong type of investment (e.g. a leased line back then)
they focused on raising money instead of making it work and be attractive
they misunderstood the speed of large competitive companies and acted too fast to try and catch up with them
overall the experience was equivalent to an MBA course – and probably a great addition to one’s CV
pretty soon you realise the importance of paying people with your own money

But, whatever decisions you take during your startup you need to have calculated ahead of time how much money and time you will be spending/investing.

And finally it was the turn of another startup albeit from someone who is an amateur in his field only in terms of the medium he will be using. Stellios Kouloglou presented his new project TVXS – something that he had thought of and was already implementing during his last year of working for the national TV channel. It had already become pretty obvious that his work was under pressure from ‘high up’ so when push came to shove he had to ‘leave’. He then took up the only option left for someone to cover the need for news and entertainment outside the stifling TV environment that leaves no room for innovation and fresh ideas: he went online. In just two days after the tvxs.gr launch, they had approx. 7000 unique hits and 1500 registered users, which if anything is an indicator of the upcoming success.

SK is inviting anyone to submit their videos under Creative Commons license be they of citizen journalism content or even of regular shows – tvxs.gr will not only be about the reporting productions his team will be undertaking on a regular basis but will include shows like ‘blogger of the week’, ‘recipes of the g-700’. Advertisements will be the main revenue for the site while some content providers for digital TV have asked for his channel to be included in their packages. For the time being they plan to experiment with using their own servers and promotion method – instead of using sites like youtube.com and blip.tv.

Many thanks to JKarakatsanis for the pictures.

english, presentations

Dharmesh Shah on start-ups

November 6, 2008 1 Comment

I really enjoyed the one hour I ‘wasted’ earlier today by watching a passionate and very much insightful talk of Dharmesh Shah on —well, you can imagine— start-ups and entrepreneurship. So, let me share this with you, while I’d love to hear your comments. Some of the most catchy quotes follow hereafter, while the video, originally found in this great blog, is also embedded below.

Ideas are irrelevant; your baby is ugly
Liquidity events are underrated
The true EV of raising VC
Why VC syndication is like price collusion
Write a blog, not a business plan
Change early, change often
Pick a price, any price
The power of the wallet economy
SaaS: COGS in the machinery
Premature optimization: Bad for business, not just software
Barriers to entry are not built in a day

business-ideas, presentations, VC

RIP: Good old times

October 16, 2008 4 Comments

Below we have slides presenting two very different viewpoints on the recent perceived crisis and subsequent second .com bust. We find them extremely insightful

Sequoia on the first pack is one of the largest technology funds in the world. They generally push for extreme development of a business and have huge successes under their belt, such as Google, Yahoo! and countless others.

The Whiner Jerkins is actually a fake. I’d like to point out that there exists no Whiner Jerkins. I know that everyone’s talking about it as if it were real but it’s not. It’s a deck of slides made by a Matt Maroon, which is actually very insightful and self-sarcastic.

All Hands Meeting, by Whiner Jerkins, link in Scribd

All Hands Meeting, by Whiner Jerkins, link in Docstoc

Personally I just feel vindicated over the countless arguments I’ve had on how popular Hulu would become and how fragile Seesmic’s business model is. Let us also keep in mind that while Youtube was snatched for an obscene amount of money from Google, it was never profitable, and one can argue that it will never be.

That does not go to say that these companies haven’t successfully transformed our perception of the web, or that they didn’t innovate. Just that business success ended up being an entirely different matter.

english, meetings, minutes

Open Coffee Athens XV: the minutes

October 14, 2008 No Comments

Open Coffee Athens XV – photo by nsyll

E. Politakis gave the first presentation on their startup MobileFX which is all about mobile and proximity marketing and digital signage. Their clients include an impressive list of names like Pepsi, Village Roadshow, Pizza Hut, NatWest etc and they have a definite global scope in their business. Examples of their services include Bluetooth modules in advertising stands contacting mobiles of passer-bys to offer opt-in advertising, gaming apps for mobiles, mobile ticketing (purchasing of tickets online, use of scanned tags and airline check in) and various other services sold to advertising companies (which are then in turn offered to their clients). Overall, in two short years of existence, MobileFX seems to have established a strong presence in their niche market using collaborations with foreign clients.

M. Rizos was next on the stage with an outline of the new media campaign by MTV.gr. Their Online program is the internet counterpart of their On Air (the actual TV channel) and their On The Ground (concerts and events) presence. It included MTV Search, an effort to find VJs for the channel by urging the community to upload their own videos, a site for voting for the MTV playlist, TV schedule info, music charts, events and media galleries and other mainly informational content – instead of more entertainment oriented material. These early projects showed however that the Greek audience MTV.gr is aimed at is both eager to generate content (the MTV search campaign resulted in 1567 submitted videos out of which 385 were from the dedicated MTV Search microsite) but still rather immature in terms of tech-savviness. This negative result combined with the facts that the online ad market in Greece is not an easy one to survive and that legal downloading of content has gotten off to a bad start in the country overall make an online marketing campaign and ad hoc digital advertising projects rather difficult to be successful. However, MR was clear that they would be supporting strictly legal content and the local music business industry with the integration of digital content in MTV’s platforms (internet and mobile). MTV will also develop projects that include user-generated content as well as a special project with Microsoft’s MSN Messenger.

Next up was Kyriakos Mitsotakis, with his role as former CEO of the first Greek VC fund which had been set up approximately 8 years ago using National Bank of Greece monies in order to stimulate startup growth. His speech (video) centered around the question why there were not many startups in Greece and he outlined a number of reasons. Firstly, cash flow for that sector is rather low and there isn’t any significant VC activity in the country – even though last year some such funds were created. Secondly, he mentioned the usual suspects of bureaucracy, the assumed lack of meritocracy in the field and the associated issue of most young Greeks aiming for the attractive but unambitious civil service. He also talked about another culprit – which often goes unmentioned – that Greece had until recently one of the strictest bankrupting processes. This has improved but there’s room for making it even better.

And finally, in stark contrast with the previous speaker’s conclusions, Jason Calacanis came on stage for what was probably one of the best talks in OpenCoffee Greece (video). Overall, he shared his wisdom regarding entrepreneurship both based on his personal ventures but also from processing over 250 business pitches for Techcrunch50. He compared Greece with Israel that has half our population but managed to get 7 companies in the final 50 of the Techcrunch competition and urged everyone here to get started as he believes that the internet is only about a third in its growth cycle – and there’s plenty of opportunity for a business to use it as a platform. This is a result of the current situation where in order to startup there is no permission required, no need to secure VC capital and no subsidy of other kind is necessary: we are at the age of the 0-cost startup and there’s no excuse any more. The only cost is our time and energy. (Which by the way means that every idea will be tried – even the craziest ones.)

So what will differentiate the entrepreneurs from the non-entrepreneurs will be simply that the former will actually start. The rest won’t because of the natural hesitation we all have caused by our fear of failure. The next 10 years or so however present an opportunity as the market will be on a ‘down’ mode meaning it will be a good time to enter, develop market share, hire good professionals, find cheap office space etc. And given that no Greeks have succeeded in really breaking it to the global market JC said that we should not view each other as a competitor, instead we should all cooperate for our common benefit.

For the end of this summary that definitely fails to inspire as much as the actual talk did – I’ve saved a few of the more or less obvious insights that came up during the Q&A that followed the talk.

We shouldn’t worry about the establishment and the older generation – they don’t really have power
Technology is where the real power lies.
Women are good at understanding and developing insights regarding the market. There is a trend according to JC that despite the current lack of women in the startup community now, this will soon change.
Silicon Valley does have the advantage of lots of experience and VCs (i.e. funding) being easily available – but that does not mean we should move there!
We shouldn’t be ashamed when we fail – the precursor of success if failure. That’s a change in our mentality we have to achieve in Greece (but also more broadly speaking in Europe).

conferences, english, start-up

Athens Startup Weekend – The call

October 11, 2008 9 Comments

This is a cross-post of Alexandros Pagidas from Startup Weekend Athens. Open Coffee Greece is a proud local supporter of the event, we’ll literally gonna create a bunch of start-ups over the weekend, go get your ticket!

Hello everyone,

At last, Startup Weekend is here. Some of you might remember me from an earlier Open Coffee two summers ago in Bacaro downtown Athens, when I was asked to speak about my experiences living in the vibrant tech community that exists in San Francisco and, of course, the Silicon Valley. I remember in that talk wanting to transmit some of that magic of infinite possibility one feels when living and working in that part of the world. Today, I am happy to announce that from the 21st to the 23rd of November 2008, you have the opportunity to feel some of that magic too, right here in Athens.

Having participated in a previous Startup Weekend myself (in San Francisco), I can personally attest that it is by far the most exciting tech event I have ever been to – and I have been to a lot of them the past two years. In Startup Weekend, you don’t just talk about startups – you build them. Either with the new friends you’re going to make at the place it’s being held or by bringing some of your existing friends with you, the purpose is to work together and focus all your creativity and talent to create your own startup – in the next 54 hours!

It is possible. It has been done in the past in numerous cities throughout the world, and it can happen right here in Athens this November. With the generous help of Microsoft Hellas, in their brand new Innovation Center in downtown Athens, we can do it. To help you create your startup, Andrew Hyde, the founder of Startup Weekend, and I will be flying from the United States to Athens to facilitate the event.

The tickets are free. Please don’t abuse that privilege because space is limited. Booking a spot and not showing up takes away the opportunity from someone, a friend or fellow member of your own tech community, participating in your place. That’s bad startup karma. However, if you’re sure you will make it, don’t delay. Get your ticket here.

We look forward in meeting you and helping you create your startup!

Yours,

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