Wow. Thursday July 14 2011 was the day in Ljubljana. At IBM Innovation Center's brand new headquarters in Ljubljana's tallest building, Mini Seedcamp brought together the best of the best: 20 amazing teams with online products that will change your lives, supported by a crowd of superb mentors that shared a collective experience in startup-building, angel support and investment capital management, to offer the best of advice in succeeding to the region's blasting startups.
The region, by the way, is big. With startups from Bucharest to London and from Tallinn to even Perth, Australia, Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana 2011 had a global crew. Most teams, however, were from the Southeast Europe (SEE) region, and no wonder: according to Seedcamp founder and partner @ceduardo, 1/3 of Seedcamp's worldwide investments are in startups from this very region.
The day's highlights? Next to amazing ideas, like business analytics for farmers, cloud collaboration for coding and high-precision physical work-out stats, the most valuable input came from enaging mentors. Get out there. You only live your twenties once. Don't get too much capital before you know what you want to do. Be prepared to pivot. Get out on the global stage and plan your way to success, down to the smallest of deatils.
My fav startup of the day is local Slovenian Oust.me, taking your geolocation experience to real gaming and bringing back Foursquare's long-lost social gaming feature. Sign up for the private beta on the site, cause these guys will be rocking your phone's GPS feature really soon.
Why Ljubljana, a quiet, fairy-tale European capital of less than 300K inhabitants? In the eternal comparison to Sillicon Valley, most agree that Eastern Europe is the one place on the continent where comparable drive and zeal for success can be found. In the words of @fdestin, the coolest startup evangelist and VC I've ever met, who came all the way from Boston for MS Ljubljana, local startups don't have the laid-back attitude of their West European counterparts. Building tools than will change the world and proving to the world that even in countries most people worldwide wouldn't be able to point on a map, great stuff is made by 20-somethings that pursue their dreams.
Stay tuned here at SocialEast.eu for detailed insights into Mini Seedcamp's key players and most notable ideas. In the meantime, if you're (still) in Ljubljana, make sure you head out to Barcamp Ljubljana tonight, for a live roundup of yesterday's startups and mentoring sessions, and meet the amazing crews yourself. Last thing I heard was that tickets are sold out, but you can contact @yougo for some extra available seats.
