A garage full of great ideas
06/05/10 15:38 Filed in:
Startups
Pawn Promotion visited Aalto Venture Garage Demo Day - May 5, 2010, Espoo, Finland
We’ve been following ycombinator with great interest since its very start in Boston, and always wanted something similar nearby. In “COPYING YCOMBINATOR - A Framework for developing Seed Accelerator Programmes”, Jed D. Christiansen explains why this is hard to copy. Still, why not try? Take the good parts in this, let it inspire you – and then just do it.
In Espoo, they’ve done it – and it looks very promising. The demos this Wednesday ranged from basic ideas to hardware research – some with good business models, some with more idealistic ideas of improving the life for many if not all. Our interest is primarily in cloud based startups and there were a few, and they got our votes. Some like Videolla and Hipui are cloud users, some like MySites make their own cloud services. We expect to see more of this, very soon.
So, if you have time – go to Helsinki and Espoo to see some new interesting startups and ways to support these!
Link
Note: all presenters got a few minutes to pitch, and quite some % was spent on getting their laptops connected… At start this looked like a bad idea, but thinking again, it was not: this is the real situation they will meet when trying to conquer the world. Some should read the advice from Guy K: “How to be a demo god” (I saw that they had the ‘Reality Check’ in their book shelf – as well as ‘Founders at work’ – of course). Our advice is to pick the least interesting meetings first and practice on these, but that only applies if you have any choice.