Arhiva: 2013

Inventures.eu is starting an interesting series about startups in Romania, a series that shows promise, especially since at least 2 articles already mentioned MavenHut :D

Mircea Goia, from Romanian Startups, talks a little bit about, obviously, startups in Romania here.

As of today, RomanianStartups.com amasses 139 startups, 286 founders, 24 events and 2 accelerators/incubators. It’s a far cry from about 15-20 startups, which I managed to find in 2007 and not all of the actual startups in Romania are in this newly built database.

Bogdan Iordache, the founder of How To Web, talks about “riding a speeding bullet” when it comes to the changes in the startups ecosystem in Romania in the last 4-5 years.

As the number of stakeholders of the new innovation economy grows, more communities emerge. TechHub Bucharest, Startup Hub Timisoara, Cluj Hub and many others provide not only resident and hot desks, but also a reason for the local communities to meet, interact and exchange knowledge, and putting entrepreneurs, investors, R&D centers, product companies, developers and product experts together.

And while this ecosystem matures, growth is happening exponentially. This is just the begining of a great ride, fast as a speeding bullet.

Follow inventures.eu for the rest of the articles :)

Photo from RevistaBiz

Today I’ve been invited to talk to “Zilele Biz”, an event about business and innovation. I talked about the importance of being present offline, as well as online.

Here is the presentation, below, with some advice, at the end, on how to prepare for events you go to outside of your country. Since I rarely use a lot of words in my public presentation, I’ve modified it a little bit, but it might still not make too much sense without the story :) Sorry for that :D

I would advise you, though, to look at least at the last 4-5 slides, on how to prepare an event. It might make all the difference.

Going Offline while doing Business Online from Bobby Voicu

Oh, and an image with me talking on the stage, taken from Roxana, below:

During the weekend I’ve found a really interesting case study on SaaS. The source: the guys at GrooveHQ. I’ve already put two of the articles on the Facebook page for this blog (I Am A Startup Founder, go and hit like to get links to great articles I find online), but I thought they deserve to be on the blog, also.

The list of articles is here (about 9 of them).

You should read all the articles, they are really well written and have a lot of learnings to extract. My favorites are:

– How We Got 1,000+ Subscribers from a Single Blog Post in 24 Hours
– 5 Early Wins That Got Our SaaS Startup 1,000 Beta Users
– 7 Lessons We Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in Under a Year

I started to play games when I was 6, in 1984. Of course, the games were played on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum of one of my best friends. It was his father’s computer, brought with difficulty from UK into communist Romania. We’ve broken it from playing Match Day and Fist, so I don’t think his father ever really liked me :D

Anyway, during those times I got addicted to story driven games and this addiction continued through the 90s and PCs and it is still in place today.

Recently (as in 2-3 years ago) I’ve discovered GOG.com or Good Old Games on its full name: the site where classic games go to have a second life.

Among the games I have bought and wait to play are: Planescape: Torment, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Vampire: Masquerade Redemption, Alpha Centauri, Syndicate Plus, some great games that still have a lot of potential to replay over and over.

Since I have a Mac I thought that I couldn’t play the games, but there are some compatible Mac games. It doesn’t matter, though, since I play all the games in Parallels, on a Windows 7 install :D Because most of them are not graphics heavy, playing them in a virtual environment is actually possible without losing performance.

So, when you have a time and you feel melancholic towards the times you played games with your friends in the school’s lab, go to GOG.com. There are games for 2-3$ and most of them are up to $10.

P.S.: yes, it’s the second Sunday in a row when I don’t recommend a game. That’s because I am playing HOMM3 and I thought that it doesn’t need any presentation.

640 startups invested in. Google, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, AirBNB and Dropbox among the investments.

This is Ron Conway, one of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley.

The interview below is part of the Y Combinator 2012 Startup School. You can see all the interviews on their YouTube channel, including some of the 2013 ones.

This is just a rant. You’ve been warned!

The thing I hate most about not being in the States is the time difference.

Since MavenHut has a global target and most of the users we have are on the American continent, I need to talk to people there all the time. And that means that I have calls at 8pm, the earliest. Or, at 2am, sometimes.

This means I get home and all I want to do is get a hot bath and sleep.

Just a 11:44pm rant, on a Friday night :))

Photo: caucasian man stressed by jet lag with time zone clock background from Shutterstock

Being aggressive doesn’t really sound good. After all, who wants to deal with an aggressive person?

Well, when it comes to connections and intros, be as aggressive as you can. One thing I’ve learned in the last two years is that nobody will talk to you unless you talk to them. Nobody will come to you to make you feel better when you stay alone, in the corner. You need to do that on your own.

When you go to events make a list of people you want to meet there and go and get introduced to them. If nobody is there to introduce you then just go to that person and say: Hi, I am, I do an interesting thing with my startup. I want to tell you more about it, is it ok if I send you an email? All of this should take you one minute the most.

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT try to take all that person’s time.

Do not pitch that person then and there, since he/she will probably forget almost everything about you in the next 5 minutes. I see so many times people that just forget to leave and let that person breathe or meet other people, I am always amazed at how clueless some are. Don’t be that person.

Also, be aggressive with getting introduced via email. If you want to get to know someone, use your network (physical or on Linkedin) and find out who can introduce you to the person you want. Then ask for an introduction. And so on.

It’s better to be known as the annoying one than not being known at all.

Photo source: Beautiful sport karate kids from Shutterstock

While we were in Startup Bootcamp one of the things we heard was to get introduced to investors, not to cold call them or cold email or anything similar.

One of the reasons this should happen is because a lot of investors consider that a good, committed entrepreneur should find a way to get introduced to them. Even more, getting an introduction means that you already convinced someone, hopefully a good connection to your target investor, that you are worth his time.

What all of this means is that you need to grow your network: talk to people around you, get introduced, find people that have similar interests with you aso.

One thing I found to help a great deal with network is to speak in public if you have the chance. Find subjects that you are really good at and talk about them: programming, business, it doesn’t matter. Even if you think that people already know what you know, even if you think it is really basic, you would be really surprised to find out how many people don’t actually know what you do or don’t see things as you do.

Getting an investment is not easy, as I always said on this blog and as people that’ve done it also say. Take any shortcut possible.

Photo: Collage of a large group of people faces from Shutterstock

My co-founder, Cristi, had a great presentation today at Venture Connect on things he learned while raising money. Since the list is quite similar to what I would say (we raised together, after all), albeit with different spots for specific things, I thought it would be interesting to put it on my blog and present each point during the next 2-3 weeks :)

#10 Time – it takes longer than expected
#9 Network – use your network (or grow one if you don’t have it)
#8 Aggressive – be agressive in contacting people
#7 Numbers – investors know numbers, so be prepared to explain yours
#6 Explain – explain what you do
#5 Follow-up – always follow up
#4 Diplomacy – pointing mistakes to investors is not really smart
#3 Angels – get ex-executives in VC backed businesses as angels
#2 ABC – always be careful: do your Due Dilligence on the people you meet
#1 Love – avoid investors that fall in love with your strategy, plans aso.

10 secrets I wish I knew before I starting raising capital from Cristi Badea

Talking to a lot of my entrepreneur friends I came to a conclusion: no matter how much you want, raising money is gonna take a lot more time than you initially expect.

When we first raised money, last year, we expected to have the money in the bank in the first 3 months. It took about 9, actually and, looking back and better understanding the entire process I can say that we were quite lucky.

Can you do anything to fasten things up? Yeah, up to a point: you can have all the financial and legal documents of the company place and this makes everything go faster. Other than that, though, it really isn’t up to you. Sometimes, not even up to the investors, but to the lawyers. So breathe deep and have patience :)

I know that most of the people say the same thing and that most of the people actually looking for investment think it’s a lot of BS. Well, it’s not.

Photo source: businessman hand pointing to investment concept on Shutterstock