Sketches of #Seedcamp

Seedcamp is always fantastic. This years Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana, however, was more fantastic than ever. Some of the highlights from my point of view:

Fred Destins “Startup lifecycle” talk was #epic. It was totally worth participating in Seedcamp for the teams just to hear that talk. Nice of Fred to post it online – unfortunately though the Prezi doesn’t come close to hearing it delivered live by Fred.

Fred was also the author of probably the two most memorable tweets of the event: “tip: dont talk to your slides, they’re unlikely to fund you” and “Gosh if I was gay I’d take a few of these founders home”

Mike Butchers hilariously delivered tour de force stand up comedy presentation of how to talk and how not to talk to the press. Being close to the stage meant I got my ear yelled to by Mike but luckily my ear and I are still both ok.

On day 2, BarCamp (a first for me) was also full of interesting and exciting presentations, including  Gregor Cuzak making everyone’s head spin with references to Godel, Zenon, Socrates, Aristotle and chaos theory. Predictably Twitter comments on this ranged from “bullshit” to “fantastic” – which is great imho when you’re doing a presentation.

Everything was as well organised as it could possibly be for such an inherently semi-chaotic event.

Seedcamp, however, is not about VC’s sage advice, as wise as it may be, or entertaining PR points from Mike and Paula Marttila, who was also super great at BarCamp. Seedcamp is about the startup projects and the teams running them.

Mentoring sessions underway, @finderly in front, @kumutu in the back

And in this area, this year was totally awesome. I was floored to hear that more than 100 teams had applied for the event! It used to be 30-40 in previous years. That fact alone shows just how strongly the startup community is evolving, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe where most of the applications and participating teams were from, but also Europe-wide and globally. In an amazing statement of commitment and dedication, the Janes brothers came to Ljubljana to present groupM8 all the way from Down Under in Australia. “Did you come to Ljubljana just for this event?” – I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to ask them. “Yes”. Wow. Needless to say I was really happy to see a strong set of Croatian startups amongst those presenting – won’t call out any favors though, at least not in this blog post…

So, commenting on the experience with several of the other mentors, I’d say we all definitely agreed on one thing: the quality of the presenting projects is rising visibly from year to year, and particularly this year as compared to 2010.

So many, many thanks again to all the organizers, including the core Seedcamp team and the gracious local hosts.

And big, big congratulations to all the teams who presented. We’re all holding our breath (hopefully not for too long!) to hear who the winners will be, but regardless of that everyone who made it into the final 20 was a winner!

P.S. If someone missed my previous post, here’s a captioned gallery of the goings-on.