Jof Arnold Co-founder, Gymfu.com
Jof Arnold is a self-professed “geektech adventurer” based in London. His latest project is GymFu.com – an iPhone startup focused on using motion-tracking and gaming to improve people’s health. He also runs web and iPhone dev agency BrainBakery.com with GymFu co-founder Benjie Gillam. His move into web startups in 2007 marked a shift from a hitherto mechanically-minded career which featured nuclear robots, lasers, androids, motorsport, kit cars, russian spacecraft and fuel injection systems.

A big thanks for making Geek ‘n Rolla a memorable event also needs to go to Enamel, a new indie band that stepped in at the last minute to add somespice to our after-party at Cafe de Paris. Although they describe themselves at being influenced by The Police, David Bowie and Duran Duran, personally I’d describe them as “more accessible Franz Ferdinand”.

Tim Dickinson (Vocals), Leo Dawkins (Guitar), Leon Barron (Keyboard), Chris Hill (Bass) and Chris Egglestone (Drums) also went to the trouble of getting a video made of the GeeknRolla evening, so here it is for your enjoyment:

A link for downloads of tunes and videos are all on their MySpace page at Myspace.com/enamel1. The band can be contacted via chris[@]chrisegglestone.co.uk. Follow them on Twitter at EnamelTheBand.

Enamel has two gigs next week..

Wednesday – 29 Apr The Wilmington Arms, Angel. London
Saturday – 2 May 333 motherbar , Old Street . London

Joe Drumgoole, CTO and co-founder of PutPlace, (@jdrumgoole) has now uploading the slides from his ’speed speech’ at Geek ‘n Rolla, title “Launching your Startup on a cloud computing infrastructure”. The main take-away? Watch the per transaction costs in cloud computing.

Benjamin Ellis wrote on Business Tech Feed:

This Tuesday’s TechCrunch Geek n Rolla event included a presentation by Joe Drumgoole, “get of of my cloud.” It probably steered between too technical for non-tech folks and not technical enough for the techies. Launching a start up on a cloud infrastructure makes good economic sense – it’s a success-based cost model. The same holds true for start up projects inside of larger businesses…. However, Joe advised some caution, per transaction costs can kill you (this is ironic given that the concept of “Free” – so popular with the Web 2.0 world – is based on infinitely low transaction costs)… In summary cloud computing is a great adjunct, but don’t get rid of your main servers just yet. Be ready to deploy to any other grid at speed, so that you have a recovery plan. Also, watch those transaction costs.

Video:

William Reeve, serial entrepreneur and Angel investor, spoke at Geek ‘n Rolla on “Bootstrapping, Scaling and Cashflow”. Since then I’ve had many people tell me how great his speech was. So he has kindly supplied his slides from the speech. (We are working on getting all audio from the day as well).

Due to a technical fault at the time TechCrunch Europe wasn’t able to live blog his speech, but we now have the video:

Here’s a selection from just a couple of blog posts about his talk:

Redcatco

* More cash doesn’t mean more customers. It is how you use it.
* Boot strap with cash – cashflow beats money.
* Think about your burn rate. How much cash you are consuming each month controls your future.
* Look for performance based spend.
* Pick the metrics that matter, and manage tightly against them – if your key metrics slide has 50 things on it, you need to re-think it!
* Choose your partners well to manage your cash flow.
* Can you afford success? If your costs are ahead of revenues, do some creative thinking.

Steve Parks (A selection from a more detailed post)

Started as 3 different businesses – Lovefilm, Screen Select and Video Island – all with the same idea. Lovefilm launched first, about a year later the other two launched. Lovefilm had raised £1m from angels, Video Island was venture backed with large funding of approx £9m-ish, Screen Select raised £2m via angels. But then all raised substantial money and went for aggressive growth. Businesses later merged.

Bootstrapping
In the early days of these businesses the boot-strapping companies beat the business that had most cash, but in later development the venture backed business was able to accelerate more rapidly. Screen Select had a cash burn of half (at £98k) of video island, but had more growth. The biggest difference was in hiring approach. Video island hired ‘ahead of the curve’ spending lots to get experienced talent. Screen Select looked for new emerging talent – which was cheaper. Video Island had outsourced to grow faster at significant expense, but then had to work hard to fix and adapt it. Screen Select had built everything themselves with a team of 3, which gave them a stronger platform – and that’s now the one used by all the merged businesses.

Cashflow
You have to pay for acquisition, approx £20 per customer. You then have to send them DVD’s which cost you, so you’re about £60 down. Then you get monthly revenues for membership, and customers breakeven after 9 months. It took William about 3 years to really understand the reality – which was better. You typically give a 2 week free trial, which costs, you send them DVDs – but you don’t have to pay yet – you can use credit terms – so the customer actually pays before you have costs. So the cashflow is better than expected – and the customers actually provide you with funding!

How to scale
Culture is critical, communication is important. keep business simple – focus, focus, focus. Scaling beats revenue and profit – important beats urgent.

A wrap-up post collating lots of feedback and thoughts by people who attended Geek’ n Rolla is coming. But one of the most hotly debated issues since the conference on Tuesday has been the panel about Women in Tech, specifically tech startups. Here’s who was on the panel and the original title:

11.50am
Panel: Just a girl – Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups

Moderator: Cate Sevilla, BitchBuzz
Panellists:
Leisa Reichelt, User experience consultant
Sophie Cox, Worldeka.com
Paul Walsh, OpenSoho (startups networking event) & Entrepreneur
Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, Huddle.net
Nacera Benfedda, Director of Product, Viadeo

First some background about why I put this panel together: A long time ago I was a journalist covering the media industry. That business sector was (and is) full of women, probably even over 50%. It is full of smart women contributing to a vibrant industry. I then moved on to writing about new media. In the mid-1990s, admittedly, there were more men than women generally, as it was a more male/geeky environment then. That changed and I would say that the “new media” sector is pretty balanced these days. But over the last few years I have headed profoundly into the tech space and I have been puzzled at the dearth of women involved. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to be honest, and from time to time it pops up in conversations on and off-line. Plus, I think it’s something tech startups should address, not because they are inherently sexist – far from it I would say – but there are huge advantages to be had from tapping into this relatively untapped talent. And sometimes male-led tech startups don’t really *think*. For instance, they will get the cheapest office they can find in the most dangerous part of town and then wonder why they can’t attract any female candidates for that job opening…

So I felt we needed to discuss it. After consulting with lots of people and consulting with the chair, Cate Sevilla, we decided to put the debate slap bang in the middle of a fairly mainstream event for tech companies – GeeknRolla. We could have put it on as a standalone event. But we figured that would just be alienating the subject even further. It needed to be debated by men and women, broadly.

In hindsight we should have balanced the panel with more than one man – and the irony that a bad sore throat cut down our only guy was not exactly invisible. (Paul Walsh was unable to join the panel due to a bout of viral tonsillitis. And yes I replaced him with a banana, hey it was a little joke).

However, we soldiered on. I felt I couldn’t join the panel as I was running the whole day already. So I figured I’d let the panel kick things off their own way. Half way through it became clear that we did need a male voice. Milo Yiannopoulos, a tech blogger with The Daily Telegraph seemed keen, so he volunteered. It wasn’t a bad idea because frankly he provided a fairly opposite-end-of-the-spectrum point of view (to put it mildly).

At that point the audience got fired up and we had some great debate and great questions. Our live blog kicked off a debate. And the next day Yiannopoulos blogged his views again (see below)

Since then, a war of words has kicked off about the whole subject. Frankly, I’m not sure how productive this war is going to be, and Cate and I were keen to find SOLUTIONS to this issue, not just more mud-throwing. But I hope out of this debate that tech companies and startups really do start to *think* about whether they could behave in a more female-friendly way. After all, there are many sound business reasons for doing so. So I’m going to encourage you to get involved in the debate and please go read the posts from these commentators and form you own view, whether you agree with me that that this is an “issue” or not.

Here is our transcript of the debate covered by TechCrunch Europe writer Basheera Khan. Here is a selection of just some of the posts so far:

Telegraph: “Men perform better in many technology jobs. Must we apologise for that? (32 comments)”

As Joshua March pointed out yesterday, since most start-ups are founded by developers, and most developers are men, it’s natural that a lot of the CEOs on the scene are male. But the tech scene is much bigger than the startups themselves: there’s an entire ecosystem of VCs, PRs and journalists. Many of these jobs are done by girls. As Paul Walsh puts it: “The women who want to work in technology are working in technology.”

Manufactured anger over the lack of women in tech (22 comments)

It’s my opinion, which I’ll articulate tomorrow, that the books of males vs females doesn’t need to be balanced in favour of more females. Why? Well, because there are plenty of females in tech and those that aren’t, don’t want to be. Ok, so there might be a small percent who would like to be in tech, but don’t make it. But can’t the same be said for any industry?

Computer Weekly:

Ciara Byrne makes a good comment underneath Yiannopoulos’s blog, saying, “Working in an environment where you are always the only woman (apart from the secretary) does get wearing and you always feel like an outsider to some degree. While positive discrimination is not the answer, creating an environment which is more female-friendly would help.”

That is the point women are trying to make – they’re not anti-men, and they’re not calling for special treatment, they’re just trying to describe their own experiences and think about how they could help more women get involved in the sector. It’s obvious that there are plenty of excellent female technicians and IT managers around: the problem is that they make up just 15% of the industry, and there should be more. The caveman proponents of “men good, women bad” arguments are getting increasingly lonely as more and more men decide mixed teams are more successful, but there’s still a long way to go.

James Higgs

[Milo's] argument boils down to “men and women are different, men are better at tech, deal with it”. This is bullshit. Here’s why.

Milo seems to think that technology is a pure meritocracy, and that we can therefore say that because there are fewer women in tech we can draw the conclusion that women are not as good at it as men. But this argument doesn’t fly.

While women are under-represented, there are also comparatively few people from ethnic minorities in programming jobs in the UK. However there are quite a lot of people from ethnic minorities working in more lowly (i.e. less well paid) technology jobs like first line support and so on.

Are we therefore to draw the conclusion that white people are genetically best suited to be programmers? Of course not.

It’s not that long since we debated whether “allowing” women into the Vienna Philharmonic would change the orchestra’s distinctive sound (it didn’t), or whether women were capable of running a marathon (they are). These barriers have been torn down and exposed for the simple sexism they were. The same needs to happen in the tech industry, and the sooner it happens, the better.

Andy Skipper

The first panel discussion at today’s inaugural Geek’n’Rolla conference (organised by TechCrunch Europe) stirred a mite more controversy than the tech industry is used to at that type of event, and rightly so: the subject was of the imbalance of gender presence in the world of tech startups.

The panel discussing the point was formed entirely of one gender, which is never conducive of completely unbiased debate where the subject is gender equality, although the choice of replacement for Paul Walsh (out with viral tonsilitis, poor cherub) was provocative to the point of comic parody of right-wing journalists at large (being a journalist for the Telegraph, and largely apathetic to the lack of gender balance in the industry). He did raise a few laughs, intentionally or otherwise, but on the whole I don’t think his presence added to the discussion at all, and was a distraction from discussion of what I believe is the core of the problem: inherited social stigma and media reluctance to portray work in the tech world as anything other than rooms full of bespectacled virgins, socially inept, unhygienic, and, almost invariably, male.

This is not a world where the blossoming teenage girl, about to choose her career path, and, perhaps more importantly, her future social sphere, is likely to base her aspirations. The media needs to change first, and we can help them do that; in fact, the seeds were sown in the late 90s by the likes of Martha Lane Fox – they were just never followed through.

The issue is not going to be solved by forcing technology on girls at school, or by blaming the culture. The media needs to buy into girls as geeks, as unhygienic as the guys. So how do we make that happen?

Broadstuff

I was tied up in the morning so only arrived in time for a fairly interesting (in all senses of the word) panel on Women in Tech. The issue of “why there are fewer women in Tech than men” crops up perennially and usually circles round with no conclusion. No change this time, but the ante was upped by the Daily Telegraph’s Milo Yiannopolous taking the contrarian, un-PC, (and inaccurate in my experience) “its natural that men are better at some things and its OK”. Gets you fired from Harvard but got Milo mild admonitions and (according to him anyway) lots of private support.

Ah well…..I go back to Janet Parkinson’s work last autumn in Berlin which showed that there are more women on-web than men, controlling more spend, and they use the quite Web differently – so anyone who designs applications for what women want has probably got a competitive advantage that most (male built) sites will never understand. I recall Wired’s Ben Hammersley going hammer and tongs at her in Berlin when all she had done was assembled a basic fact base of these things (see the link above) , so there is clearly something deeply visceral in some men about admitting all this stuff, which Milo clearly tapped.

Hudde / Zuzanna

When Mike Butcher of TechCrunch asked me to participate in a panel on ‘Balancing Tech Culture’ at the Geek n’ Rolla , I thought I’d better find something to talk about. Enter ‘Getting women in start-ups’ research survey targeted at the tech and start-up industry. The results were predictable. They usually are on a 200 person sample. I am setting your expectations – it was not a scientific piece of research.

Women are the minority in the UK start-ups. 33 per cent said they had none or only one female colleague on staff, and 65 per cent admitted women were underrepresented in their firms. Worryingly, the majority of women in start-ups are in the low impact positions such as office management and manning the reception. Only one-third were employed in software or tech development.

Our panel tried to get to the bottom of why this number is so low and how we could fix it. It was a heated debate (you can see the transcript here), led by Cate Sevilla of BitchBuzz with Sophie Cox of Worldeka, Leisa Reichelt of Disambiguity and Nacera Benfedda of Viadeo, with a brief appearance from Milo Yiannopoulos of The Daily Telegraph.

The answer: one hour is not enough to sort this out. There was no general consensus. We agreed that there may be several reasons behind the current situation including gender inequality, culture, lack of female role models and female VCs.

Personally, and that’s possibly because I spent five years doing sociological research on similar subjects, I believe it’s a cultural issue. It’s true, tech is a women-friendly industry – we are liberal and offer flexible working hours. Yet, I don’t see young girls queuing up to be the next Gina Bianchini. Can we have ‘balance in tech’? Sure, perhaps in 50 years, just when we are hitting the equal numbers of men and women in the government. Once again, it will all come down to education.

Silicon Stilettos / Wendy Tan White

How do we get more women in tech? As many people have said it comes down to exposure, education and changing media portrayal. If you believed an industry was ‘unsexy’, ‘geeky’ and male dominated. Why would you aspire to working there as a young woman…. At school, I had an extremely enthusiastic maths/IT teacher, she really encouraged me to study computer science at uni rather than natural sciences or something deemed traditional for girls to study. Perhaps it was the one good thing about being at a girls grammar school, we all believed there was nothing we shouldn’t or couldn’t do. My friends at school still thought I was a little crazy wanting to study computer science, ‘Isn’t it dull?’… I’ve worked in manufacturing, finance and tech businesses and I’ve personally found the tech industry the most supportive. I’ve been equally supported by men and women and I love the fast pace, appetite for change and can do attitude of it’s communities.

BitchBuzz / Cate

“…There are also men out there – many of whom I met yesterday – that do acknowledge that this is a problem, and are willing to speak up about it. I have to tell you, being in a room filled with geeky men who were even acknowledging that, hell yes, we do need more women in tech was fucking amazing. I hit some sort of Geek-Guy-Tech-High. Having guys take the microphone and stand up for women in tech had me so blissed out I didn’t even know what to do with myself. And, the fact that Mike Butcher would even organize and have a panel of this nature at a major start-up TechCrunch event says a lot in itself. (Huge fucking high-five to Mike and TechCrunch Europe!)

At the end of the day, I’m thankful that Paul Walsh and then Milo Yiannopoulos agreed to be on this panel, and that they both took the time to blog about it. I mean, your views on women in tech are heinous and are exactly why things in tech for women suck sometimes – but at least you get people talking about it. We had a room full of people talking about getting more women in tech start-ups. People were debating about it on Twitter. The blogosphere has boomed with pieces about our panel and about women in technology.

This is a great step. Even if we can’t all agree – the conversation is what’s important. It’s putting the spotlight on these issues, whether you even think it’s an *issue* or not.

We’re getting coverage, we’re getting people thinking about it, and that is exactly what needs to happen.

Huge thank you from BitchBuzz to Milo, all our panellists, Mike Butcher, Petra Johanssen, Rassami Hok Ljungberg and the entire TechCrunch Europe team.

Picture: (CC) Benjamin Ellis – benjaminellis.org

In the two days since Geek ‘n Rolla (the first ever day-long conference from TechCrunch Europe) ended I’ve had some great feedback from you all about how it went. And I’m afraid to say that I’ve been hard pressed to find much criticism of the event. The feedback, in real life and on Twitter (see #gknr) has been roughly 99% positive (no, really!) even if I do say so myself. So, given that you can comment anonymously on this blog post, feel free to re-balance the views, if you really do have any feedback on how we can improve next year. And I’m still collating all the Tweets and blog posts for a more comprehensive wrap-up. (Picture: (CC) Benjamin Ellis – benjaminellis.org).

But, in the main I think everybody got something out of the day. Although I was concerned to make sure things would go well, I was, however, not too surprised, since I really didn’t have much to do with it. I simply did what I think all conferences should do: research the industry, take soundings from key people, invite clever people to speak and then select the most appropriate presentations. I was merely the ringmaster. Our speakers and panelists did all the heavy lifting, and for that I am hugely grateful. OK, I might have had something to do with the event in that I am a fairly rigid time-keeper, I like to keep things moving and, frankly, I like everyone to have fun. After-all, why shouldn’t conferences be fun? They are full of smart, witty people. But I also had a little fun myself- adding a musical flavour to the event – and generally getting people to network furiously, creating a mini-Silicon Valley style event in the heart of London.

Did it help that we priced it extremely competitively (£75 for ‘early bird’, £95 full price)? I think it did. Suddenly my friends from a startup in Krakow could afford to come and network with their London compatriots. I loved that.

The original idea behind Geek ‘n Rolla was for (deep breath) tech startups to talk to other startups about the experience of being a startup. What had they learned? What would they do differently? How did they survive? How did they hire people? All of these issues are too often assumed, and for some reason startups are all expected to learn these things themselves or by some mystical osmosis. I wanted to puncture that assumption and by finding speakers who were the bluntest, frankest people I know – some of whom, like William Reeve, I had to coax out of a five year conference avoidance, or like Jof Arnold who has never presented his findings about being a mobile startup before. And, well, it looked like it worked.

So for now, I want to thank all our speakers and panelists, sponsors (the very supportive Viadeo, Bootlaw, UKTI, NESTA, School for Startups, Park Lane Champagne), TechFluffTV for their video, Rassami, Petra and Bash (my awesome team) and you the delegates for making the day and the night a real Geek ‘n Rolla experience.

I leave you with me making a fool of myself at the After-party. But I just love rocking out…

Here is the Ustream video from the day. Huge thanks to Hermione Way (@HermioneWay) and the TechFluffTV (@techfluffTV) team, including Josh March (@JoshuaMarch).

Alternative link here GeeknRolla

Live TV : Ustream

Live Blog: Think through the business model early on – startups often make the mistake that this means tinkering with a spreadsheet for months.

There are lots of ways to sell valuable services – find the ‘best fit’ for your company and your customers. How and what are they willing to pay for the services?

It’s all about the details – the devil is in the details and the execution. Talk to other startups, do your homework. Try to learn from each other, share your experiences to help your fellow startups along.

It’s starting to get pretty noisy in the online world, so don’t rely solely on advertising; rates are falling so you have to pedal twice as fast to go the same distance. If you are going to advertise, look beyond ad words into lead generation, affiliate programmes, blend complementary business models. Example: Zoombu looking at a lead gen model, Zemanta using Amazon affiliate.

Freemium – there are more and more startups looking at this model. But you have to be extremely careful about deploying, because it’s about the numbers. Fred Wilson writes great posts about this. There has to be enough of a feature set in your product to allow you to charge a premium for truly advanced features, and balance this out against your internal resource requirements so that the premium sales actually make you some money.Eg. Basekit, Box.net, Zemanta.

Marketplaces – if you build a great marketplace, they will come – myBuilder has done a fantastic job of building a marketplace that connects homeowners with builders; myBuilder gets a share of the completed rate.

Virtual goods are relevant to specific markets, such as gaming and virtual worlds such Second Life and Habbo Hotel.

Reshma’s a believer in the concept of graduated business models – citing the example of myBuilder going from percentage of transaction to subscription to advertising/lead-generation. Amazon went from ecommerce to hosting to affiliate advertising.
BIO: Reshma Sohoni runs Seedcamp on a day-to-day basis as its CEO. She joined Seedcamp from the Venture team at 3i. Prior to 3i, Reshma spent over 3 years at Vodafone in their Commercial Strategy team, working across the Europe and Japan footprints in marketing strategy and pricing functions. Reshma started her career in the US in investment banking (Broadview) and venture capital (Softbank).

Video:

Bankrobber – To VC or not to VC? That Is The Question

Fred Destin, Atlas Ventures
Fred Destin joined Atlas in 2004 and is a Partner in the technology group. He focuses on software and technology-enabled services and digital media infrastructure and applications. He previously co-managed OM Technology Investments, an IP Services and FinTech focused fund backed by Allianz/Dresdner. He served on the board of a number of companies including SGI-spinoff Kasenna, Xerox PARC-spinoff Inxight, Capital IQ (acquired by S&P) and Rainfinity (acquired by EMC). Previously he was a Venture Manager with Speed Ventures, a seed stage fund backed by Permira and Soros Partners. He was also an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs and has further experience with Zurich Capital Markets and J.P. Morgan. Fred authors a widely read blog at www.freddestin.com, commenting on European innovation and the digital media space. He currently serves on the boards of Atlas portfolio companies Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, NTRglobal, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever and Zoopla. He also serves on the board of Seedcamp, which provides mentoring and seed funding to European start-ups. Fred holds a Masters in Financial Engineering from the University of Brussels (Solvay). He is on the Boards of: Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever, Zoopla

Fred describes himself as being on the dark side of the force – way to get the geeks on side. Here follow’s Fred’s frankly excellent advice for European entrepreneurs looking for VCs.

Remember, VCs are human too! When you go to a networking event, don’t drop your business card straight away – have a chat, build a relationship. Once I see you’re a credible person, you’re intellectually a joy to deal with, that’s the first step.

The second step is, how to get a meeting? Statistically the chances of getting to the finish line are not high, but it doesn’t matter; I do this job because I like entrepreneurs, and I like helping businesses achieve their goals.

The realistic view of my priorities as a VC is the following: my family, my partners in the firm, my existing companies, my personal brand, managing my deal flow – that business priority at number 5 often comes in at number 1, because we’re obsessive about what we do. Every week we reassess what’s in the pipeline – generally about 30 deals a week.

The objective of the first pitch is not to tell me everyting about the business, it’s to impart to me the core elements that would excite me about the business within about 40 minutes. Get me hooked. It’s like show business – you’re setting a stage and you need to turn the story into an exciting story.

When I meet a company, within 3 minutes you know whether you like them, within 5 minutes you know wehther you want to fund them. In other words, I will have an urge to give you money. But because I’m a good VC, I’ll rationalise this urge asking questions that I know I’ll need when I’m selling the business to my partners.

Beware of pitch decay. What I need from you is the 4 or 5 bullet points that explain why this is a good opportunity.

Europeans are very bad at following up on pitches and meetings. It’s a sales job, and you have to keep yourself up in the mindshare of the VC. Even a short 15-minute call is sufficient – it helps get me comfortable with the startup you’re trying to sell.

At some point the tables turn and you start to feel that we’re hungry and hooked, we want your business. We’re going to start shooting questions back to you for more detail. And I find that people are very unprepared to answer what I think are just basic questions. I find that people haven’t done the work thinking about the next steps and so they start scrambling a bit.

You need to focus on the right things – the saying that ideas are cheap and execuition is king is really true.

If we fast forward to the partnership presentation – we don’t need 5 people and the banker in the room. People pay relatively little attention to this – arrive 15 minutes early, make sure your technology is working, and your pitch is prepared with the investor in mind.

Until you have money in the bank, you’re creating risk. Deals fall through, timing is everything, get the money while you can, you never know what’s going to happen. Be paranoid while you’re in the process about managing it well.

Afterwards, managing the relationship. We want to be partners, building a business is long and painful, it consumes your life. The key is that you have to think your VC is nothing more than a financing opportunity at heart – it’s the best tool that the market invented to fund startups, but it is still just a tool – they’re not going to build your business for you.

In a way, entrepreneurs and VCs share in a suspension of disbelief – we wouldn’t do what we do otherwise. But you need the emotional maturity to know when it’s time for the company to evolve, and when there is a need for founders to bring in the talent and manage their way down from the CEO position.

Questions from the floor:

Q. How do European entrepreneurs compare in aggressiveness with those from elsewhere?

A. Israelis, Chinese and Indians, West Coast Americans – these are all more aggressive than European entrepreneurs.

Q. How comfortable are you with single-person companies?

A. Extremely uncomfortable. The hardest hurdle is starting the company, then finding people to share the vision and work for free, and then to find funding. The perception that people have of their own value to the business is always out of whack. Companies work as a collective organism.

Send me an Angel – Funding and How to Handle Angels

Nick says: Finding an angel is like finding an invisible man – they don’t tend to broadcast their presence but they network to find likely opportunities, and they also know each other. They’ll group together by region so they can do larger investments as well. There are plenty of companies out there who say they can get you into networks, and will charge you a percentage fee of any money you raise – which can mean a 10% hit to your funds before you even spend anything. Steer clear of anyone who promises an instant solution of raising money – get out there and go to the events. Blog, get on Twitter, do whatever else you need to do for people to find you.

Key things to remember:

• Build a plan of how to find your angel
• Get on with your angel
• Valuation is what you make it
• Get a good lawyer

BIO: Nick Halstead is the CEO & Founder favorit Ltd, which runs http://fav.or.it, http://www.tweetmeme.com and http://www.feedbroker.net. Fav.or.it at launch generated a frenzy of tech-media coverage for its approach to bringing a more mainstream view of the social web to consumers and to businesses. Nick has been in development for over 15 years running multi-million budget projects for some of the biggest development studios in the UK. An active participant in the London Tech scene who likes to evangelise the use of Twitter, data portability and the use of the social web for businesses.

American Idiot – Launching Your Startup In the US – when you’re actually in Scotland

LesleyEccles, co-founder of  Hubdub, a news prediction game drops the 411 on how to successfully launch a startup in a region  you don’t actually live in.

The site launched in November last year and got about 500k web users, mentioned across about 100 media outlets, considered to be quite a successful launch. By way of introduction, the company is based in Edinburgh, its founders are Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English… and 70% of the audience is US-based. Why did they choose to launch in the US? Echoing a point Inma Martinez made earlier, Lesley says, if you want some of the pie, make sure it’s a big one. They focused on the US and only the US (again, very similar to Leisa Reichelt’s point about picking your audience when designing your user experience).

Lesley’s advice:

• Use conferences to launch your product, hire a PR agency. It was very expensive, Hubdub spent about a third of their seed money on the launch – but it worked. They travelled once a month or so to keep in touch with customers and advisors, and to meet potential investors.
• Advisors – choose advisors in the region you’re launching. Work out who can add value, and find people who are helpful – when people offer, they genuinely mean it so take them up on it — but don’t abuse it.
• Network, network, network.
• Be nice to your users – citing Paul Graham from Y Combinator who says people are so used to having poor service that you’ll stand out from your competition just by being nice.
• Identify your superusers – these are the people spending more time on your site than you are. Hubdub identified their superusers and then hired from among them. There are also a few people who work for free as moderators, because they love the product so much. They’ll evangelise for you, offer advice and Hubdub uses them as a sounding panel. They try to meet as many of their superusers in person when the opportunity arises.
• Sweat the small stuff – like, getting a US phone number. People are much more likely to trust you if they recognise your dialling code!
• Steep yourself in the culture – calls it the Indian call centre mentality. They watch US tv shows, sports games, game shows, etc. Be careful of humour, most times it just does not travel well.

Ian Hogarth, co-founder and CEO of music startup Songkick.com reckons the best way for a startup to focus on what they do best is to find third party tech tools to do the non-core heavy lifting. To this end, he’s started a wiki collection of startup tools, contributed by Songkick, Playfire, TinyCoupon, Habit Industries, Poll Everywhere, GroupSpaces and Huddle.

“One of the most important lessons we learned is the importance of focus – that’s what you should do but how you do it is the hard part. That’s where tools come in.”

Ian’s advice: Talk to other startups and advisors to try to find the right tools for your business. Investors can help by getting you face-time with the ops directors of the startups you want to emulate. Twitter helps too as does Facebook.

He also announced the creatiion of the amazing Startup Tools Wiki

Leisa Reichelt, freelance user experience consultant, talking about what startups most often get wrong about UX and what they should do about it.

Step 1: Find your audience.
It’s amazing how few startups actually know who their audience is. There is no such thing as ‘the general public.

Copyright @Basti

Step 2: Know your audience
This is the step that a lot of companies just seem to ignore. Once you know who your audience is, invite some of them over for a beta testing focus group where you watch them use your app/product, and talk to them. Ask them questions about it – can you tell what it’s for? What can you do with it? How do you do it? You’ll end up with so much info you won’t know what to with it all. A product like AdobeConnect will allow for screensharing so you can be there as a virtual participant if you can’t meet your beta testers face to face.

Step 3 – Design for your audience
Consider using personas – make up an imaginary person based on the research you’ve done, include them in the design process when you’re deciding how the product’s going to work and what it’s going to do – instead of asking broad and useless questions, you can frame it in the context of your persona. Much more useful! Hire the best designer you can find as soon as you can – get them to design the styleguide that’s then used across the application/product.

Step 4. Think big and small
UX made up of a layer cake of processes; proposition, concept, structure, information, interaction.

Video:

UPDATE:
Leisa has now posted her slides and a detailed explanation behind her presentation: GeeknRolla – You Can’t NOT Afford Good User Experience

Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups

A panel discussion featuring

Cate Sevilla, founding editor at BitchBuzz
Sophie Cox, co-founder of Worldeka.com
Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, head of marketing communications at Huddle.net
Leisa Reichelt, User experience consultant at Disambiguity
Nacera Benfedda, director of product, Viadeo

Video:

LIVE BLOG: Cate asks, does the game need changing? Is it possible that the reason we see less women than men at tech conferences because there are simply fewer women who want to be in tech?

Sophie: It’s more systemic than just wondering about just this tech conference – we need to look at education, and marketing, disseminating information. We have more women at Geeknrolla than you usually see at events, though it’s not 50/50, shows that it is to do with how conferences are sold/pitched.

Zuzanna: Did some research, asked a few hundred people in tech. It comes down to one thing – choice. Women don’t get involved because they simply don’t want to. Hardly anyone blames education – but there’s more to the choice. It always comes down to the ultimate choice – do I want a career or do I want a family? Tech startups often require very long working days, can I balance it all? When it comes to hiring/recruitment, you come up against the existing stereotypes of men being more aggressive, then there’s the issue of the old boys’ hiring network, and they’re hiring in their image. Which is why there are always more men than women in the industry.

Sophie: It’s ironic, because that data doesn’t reflect the liberal, inclusive values of the tech startup scene. It’s not as aggressive as the City, there’s the benefit of the flexibility; Worldeka’s chief developer (a man) goes home early to eat dinner with his kids and put them to bed before carrying on work.

Cate asks what’s driven Sophie to work in a tech startup.

Sophie: Love risk, hate working for other people.

Zuz: If men could get pregnant and share the burden of child-bearing with women, we’d instantly see more women in tech, business, government, etc.

Leisa: It’s a problem of identification and definition. Cites the example of PRs who even though they work mainly in technology PR, still wouldn’t go to an event that was plugged as tech – because they see themselves as being in the PR industry.

Sophie: Girls in schools often say they don’t want to go into tech because they want to do something more creative — that’s bad PR for the tech industry because there’s so much creativity involved in creating software. “There’s something really fucking sexy about it.”

Nacera: Women don’t say they’re ‘computer scientists’, they say they’re in computing. Men immediately identify themselves as computer scientists. The main problem is a lack of knowledge about the tech sector. The challenge for everyone here today is to talk more about the tech startup scene.
[At this point Daily Telegraph blogger Milo Yiannopoulos takes it upon himself to fill the absent Paul Walsh's shoes.]

Milo: Finds this discussion patronising to women. There are reasons which have nothing to do with prejudice why women are not more involved in the tech scene. Do we need to change the game? Good god, no! We shouldn’t be apologising for having fewer women in a sector in which men naturally perform better (did he just say that?). We need a serious, systematic study that looks at the actual reason why women are not in tech, rather than tiptoeing around each other with anecdotal evidence.

Sophie: The research you’re describing would be more about the difference between men and women, rather than the reason that there are fewer women into the tech sector.

Comment from the floor: Setting up a tech company is the same as setting up any business – Leisa made a very important point: if you don’t count yourself as being in teh tech sector, how are you going to be visible? Many men in tech startups don’t have a tech background – they have strategy and leadership.

Leisa to Milo: I think you’re implying that the reason there are more men in tech demonstrates that they’re the best people for the job. What about people who are as talented but can’t make the same commitment because of family commitments?

Milo: It’s not fair to suggest that men don’t make sacrifices when they choose to work 20-hour days.

Comment from the floor: From The Next Web – there are more women than men starting up companies in the UK and the US; the difference is that women are not going after high growth industry and don’t get the VC funds that the tech scene does.

Comment from the floor: We did some research that shows there are more women on social networks, but the coding is done by men.  Wonder how the product would change if we had more women coding – would it make the product more useful to a female audience?

Sophie: On the issue of positive discrimination: I don’t think anyone wants fewer men starting up tech companies, it’s more about a cultural shift – how do we make it more obvious to other women that the tech startup scene is a cool place to be?

Comment from the floor: A woman in tech with two kids chooses to be in this industry because it’s more accepting and more flexible. It’s about explaining to younger women that it’s an interesting industry, and about women believing they can raise money, etc – I think women often hold themselves back more than men do.

Comment from the floor: A father with a son and daughter who both have good maths skills is concerned; the environment around his 9 year old daughter isn’t supportive of her natural abilities; her school is good but still doesn’t actively encourage achievement in the more masculine perceived subjects.

Comment from the floor: Hermione Way says tech still has a very uncool stigma in schools; we need to show girls what cool/fun/exciting things can be achieved when you work in this industry.

Comment from the floor: An Indian man says the IT sector has boomed there, but you wouldn’t be having this discussion there today. The teams are generally always 50/50 split, thanks to education placing a strong focus on sciences.

Comment from the floor: Startups seems to be hiring more women in the round 2 stage of hiring. It’s a real testosterone-fuelled team that gets the companies up and then when more balance is required, that’s when women are hired.

Comment from the floor: Bindi Karia from Microsoft reckons its down to the women in the tech startup industry actively mentoring the younger generation.

Comment from the floor: We’re in the tech startup scene, we’re disruptive, we make the rules – so why don’t we just do it? Why don’t we just hire more women?

Hardly anyone knows how to spell it, fewer people still know how to do it. But thanks to Joe Stepniewski, co-founder of Skimlinks, you too can learn the secrets of the dark arts of monetisation.

Basically, stick to affiliate marketing rather than advertising; Joe showed some stats demonstrating CPM return slowdown; its dropped consistently over the last few quarters and doesn’t guarantee conversion because it can be poorly targeted. If you have to advertise, do it directly; try to arrange monthly advertising tenancies with targeted sponsors; look for themed sponsorship opportunities with brands/companies you’re passionate about so that you can really get behind them.

Affiliate marketing is your friend; there are low barriers to entry, it’s quick to get going, it works with lower traffic volumes and it’s a level playing field; smaller sites get exactly the same deals as larger sites. Joe showed stats indicating affiliate marketing has experience 13% growth this year vs. 9% overall online ad growth.

[Video]:

Text links are the favourite form of monetisation because they convert the best and avoid the need for ad space. They allow for more creativity and tighter integration, and can make great use of tools such as voucher codes and APIs.

Social media platforms and user-generated content are also good, they convert very well. So well that in the US the Federal Trade Commission requires that testimonials driving word-of-mouth marketing have got to be provably real.

Affiliate links to retailers from forums and blogs can return up to 10% conversion rate; Twitter and IM even more, but you need to be very considerate of users; disclose, disclose, disclose. Joe’s kindly offered to send the presentation to anyone who asks. shared his slides below.

Andy McLoughlin, CEO at Huddle talks really fast about hiring a team of peers – illustrating the point with a slide full of pictures of Piers Morgan. Oh, the trauma.

Other than that, this is great advice. When recruiting people, meeting the perfect candidate is like falling in love. You’ve got to be able to imagine yourself spending all day, every day with that person. He also suggests that when you’re hiring, make it a peer review exercise, so in effect, everyone hires everyone else.

Eat together regularly (like the guys at Fog Creek Software do). Andy’s reasoning here is that if you make your company like a family, your staff are less likely to fsck you over. (He has a nice family, apparently.)

[Video]:

He also suggests providing games in a break-out space for ‘axe sharpening’ – this is an excellent point, not enough companies pay sufficient respect to the notion of problemsolving without having to look at a computer screen.

pic copyright @gitfinger

Inma Martinez at Stradbroke Advisors is one of the world’s leading digital media strategists, described by FORTUNE and TIME as one of Europe’s top talents in Human Factors and Social Engagement through technology.

Her advice for European startups: move to the US. The US market is where the ripple effect of the internet takes place. It can be hard, but you should still try, despite sticking out in your strange clothes and your funny accent – look at @loic (French founder of Seesmic), she says. “Ride it and own it”.

Inma’s advice to startups:

• When they form a company, most people tend to form it with friends, but that’s the wrong approach – go out with the cool people for beers if you must, but we’re here to make money so bring the right people on board.
• Don’t spend ages in R&D, creating bigger IP — get busy selling product!
• Respect the suits. Startups need suits; they can fight the boardroom fights. Work with them, learn from them, and they’ll be there to fight your corner when you need them to, while you’re free to focus on your product.

Here is the Ustream video from the day. Huge thanks to Hermione Way (@HermioneWay) and the TechFluffTV (@techfluffTV) team, including Josh March (@JoshuaMarch).

Alternative link here GeeknRolla

Live TV : Ustream

EARLIER POST: Here you’ll find the live video stream from Geek’n Rolla, a day-long conference created by TechCrunch Europe for European early stage tech startups old and new to share real, hard-core knowledge about their experiences. Here is our agenda and speaker line-up.

Geek’n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Not only will we be having a great day of content for startups, we are planning the mother of all evening networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris, kindly sponsored by Winston & Strawn’s Bootlaw. Doug Richard’s School for Startups is our Strategic Event Partner. Speaker gifts and competition prizes are donated by Park Lane Champagne.

OUR SPONSORS

Viadeo – Lead sponsor

(Peter Crosby, Wayne Gibbins, Nacera Benfedda attending)
Founded in June 2004, Viadeo quickly established itself as the place to be for professional networking in Europe and beyond. Since then, with more than 7 million members (as of January 2009). Follow them on Twitter @viadeo. Viadeo is essential for those who want to:

• Increase their business opportunities (to discover new clients, staff and business partners)
• Enhance their visibility and their online reputation
• Manage and develop their network of professional contacts

Viadeo’s members consist of business owners, entrepreneurs and managers from a diverse range of businesses both start-up and well established. Each day Viadeo attracts more than 10,000 new members; 40,000 new connections are made and over one million profiles are viewed. Based in Paris (head office), Viadeo also has offices and teams in the UK (London), Spain (Madrid and Barcelona), Italy (Milan), China (Beijing), India (New Delhi) and Mexico (Mexico City). The company employs 200 staff worldwide. www.viadeo.com

UKTI – Pitch! Sponsor

(Bal Kaur is attending)
UK Trade & Investment is the government organisation that helps UK-based companies succeed in the global economy. We also help overseas companies bring their high quality investment to the UK’s dynamic economy – acknowledged as Europe’s best place from which to succeed in global business. UK Trade & Investment offers expertise and contacts through its extensive network of specialists in the UK, and in British embassies and other diplomatic offices around the world. We provide companies with the tools they require to be competitive on the world stage. For further information please visit www.uktradeinvest.gov.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7215 8000.

NESTA – co-sponsor

(Libby Kinsey & Andrew Small are attending)
NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Its mission is to transform the UK’s capacity for innovation. NESTA Investments has the largest portfolios of early-stage businesses in the country and is a leading authority on how to grow new ideas. We have strict investment criteria, and work with companies that have high potential for growth, are at seed or start-up stage, and have the potential to attract syndicated support. When we do invest, we aim to maximise our investment by assigning mentors, part-time managers or specialist support. We also stimulate imaginative solutions to pressing social issues and shape policy to help the UK meet its national innovation challenges. www.nesta.org.uk

Bootlaw – Party sponsor

(”Barry & Danvers” attending)
Bootlaw is a free boot camp for emerging technology, internet and digital businesses and the professionals working in them who want to learn more about the legal issues they face. Its brought to you by Barry Vitou and Danvers Baillieu the friendly lawyers at Winston & Strawn in London. For more information go to www.bootlaw.com

School for Startups – Strategic Event Partner

(Doug Richard and Luke Brynley-Jones attending)
Geek’n Rolla is also supported by School for Startups. The inspiration of serial entrepreneur and angel investor Doug Richard, School for Startups is the UK’s leading provider of business training for entrepreneurs. Anyone attending Geek’n Rolla may claim a 5% discount on all current School for Startups events – currently 2 in London and 2 in Scotland. Simply go to www.schoolforstartups.co.uk quoting the discount code TECHCRUNCH to qualify for this discount.

PLC – Speaker gifts and competition prizes

“Park Lane Champagne: bringing the ability to source single bottles of champagne, personalised as you like, through their new online site at www.parklanechampagne.co.uk. Check it out and if you like what you see, do blog about it and tell the World”.

Agenda: Geek’nRolla – Tech Startups Rock!

London – April 21, 2009

Geek’nRolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Geek’n Rolla is also supported by our strategic partner, School for Startups. And not only will we be having a great day of fantastic content for tech startups, we are planning the mother of all evening networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris kindly sponsored by Winston & Strawn’s Bootlaw.

*PLEASE NOTE – WE CANNOT GUARANTEE THE WI-FI WILL STAY WORKING. PLEASE BRING A 3G DONGLE FOR YOUR LAPTOP*

OFFICIAL HASHTAG FOR THE DAY: gknr

Venue:
RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects)
66, Portland Place
London
W1B 1AD
Nearest Tube: Regents Park, Great Portland Street and Oxford Circus
Map

10.00 Registration – Coffee and Tea

10.18 Opening Remarks

10.20 Europe, The Final Countdown – The Good, the Bad and the SuperBad

Inma Martinez Stradbroke Advisors
Inma Martinez is one of the world’s leading digital media strategists, described by FORTUNE and TIME as one of Europe’s top talents in Human Factors and Social Engagement through technology. Switching a career in the financial markets at Goldman Sachs and The Institute for Infrastructure Finance, she joined Cable & Wireless in the mid-1990s to form their New Technologies Advisory, specifically focused on the Internet and IP services. Co-founder in 1999 of Escape Velocity, a 3i-funded AI software company in the early days of mobile services and selected by Lehman Brothers as one of the Top 20 Software startups to watch, her work delivering transformational technologies to clients has continued to-date. Leading other technology companies in the UK and Finland, her client work moved towards Executive Advisory and in 2006 she founded Stradbroke Advisors, a digital media and fund raising consultancy working with Venture Capital firms (3i, Index Ventures), large corporations (NOKIA Finland, Blyk, BBC, MTV Networks, HP, IBM) as well as Web 2.0 startups and film and TV production companies. She is also an Advisor to the EU Technology Commission. Working across a wide variety of projects, she considers herlself fortunate and honoured to have been directly involved in the emergence of many of today’s digital technologies (Web 2.0, Mobile, Wifi, Blogs) and to work with some of the best talents in the medium. Her work as industry advisor has also continued, being voted Best Contributor to the Formation of Digital Media Strategy at the 2001 European Leadership Forum, a Fortune 500 CEO and EU Governors summit, and being ranked in 2005 by Red Herring amongst the top 40 most influential women in technology. She speaks and writes in the media about investing in innovation, nurturing leadership, creating closer relationships between companies and their clients via digital environments and transforming “Life-As-We- Know-It” thanks to technology.

10.35 The Masterplan – How to Hire a Team of Peers

Andy McLoughlin, CEO Huddle
Defying his mother’s advice that ‘the internet will never take off’, Andy began tinkering with the web in the mid-nineties before starting his career at Fibernet Group plc as the company’s European webmaster in 2001. In 2003 Andy helped found KnowledgeCenter, a knowledge management consultancy focused on the London insurance market. During his time at the company he provided web content and knowledge management consultancy to a number of prominent global clients including QBE, Benfield, Catlin, Arthur J Gallagher and Montpelier Re. With more than 10 years of industry experience, Andy is an expert in field of online collaboration and is heavily involved in the London start-up community. Andy holds a degree in Economics from the University of Sheffield, but has always regretted not studying something more practical like Computer Science. In his spare time he enjoys fencing and skiing (both rather badly) but excels at sitting in sunny beer gardens discussing films, music and cool stuff he recently saw online.

10.50 Hey you, get off of my cloud – Launching your startup on a cloud computing infrastructure
Joe Drumgoole, CTO and Founder PutPlace.com
Joe Drumgoole is a a software industry veteran of 20 years standing who has been using Amazon’s cloud computing environment since it launched in 2006. He has a track record of technology achievement in Irish software companies including CR2, Cape Clear, LeCayla and PutPlace.com. He is a regular speaker at conferences.

11.05 Paper Planes – Monetising your startup from the word go with advertising and affiliates”

Joe Stepniewski, co-founder Skimlinks
Joe Stepniewski is the co-founder of Skimlinks, a service that helps publishers monetise their content via affiliate marketing, through converting outbound links into affiliate links on-the-fly – a simplified process that aggregates together over 16 affiliate networks. Working with a diverse range of web publishers, Joe has experience helping add affiliate marketing to their revenue strategy, and done in an ethical manner. Joe’s background, and passion, is internet marketing: his previous business buys/sells established content and affiliate websites, hence specialised in refining, driving traffic to and monetizing sites through SEO, PPC and decent site design. Joe is a recent twitter-holic and spends far too much time being a geek.

11.20 What’s the frequency Kenneth? – The trials of a mobile apps startup

Jof ArnoldCEO Gymfu.com
Jof Arnold is a self-professed “geektech adventurer” based in London. His latest project is GymFu.com – an iPhone startup focused on using motion-tracking and gaming to improve people’s health. He also runs web and iPhone dev agency BrainBakery.com with GymFu co-founder Benjie Gillam. His move into web startups in 2007 marked a shift from a hitherto mechanically-minded career which featured nuclear robots, lasers, androids, motorsport, kit cars, russian spacecraft and fuel injection systems.

11.35 Hey now, what you doing? – Usability / UX / Call it what you like: What startups most often get wrong and what they should do about it

Leisa Reichelt, User experience Disambiguity
Leisa is a London-based freelance User Experience Consultant who works with companies large and small to gather insight from users and apply findings to design. With a background in Information Architecture she eventually decided that being user centred was more than just thinking about users whilst designing, and now incorporates design research into almost every project for a diverse portfolio of clients ranging from large scale public sector to some of the UKs most recent startups. Leisa is a regular conference speaker and blogs at Disambiguity.com and her regular soap box topics include Agile UX, Collaboration, Ambient Intimacy and Ambient Sociability, and Designing with Communities.

11.50 Panel: Just a girl – Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups

Moderator:

Cate Sevilla BitchBuzz
Panel Moderator: Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups
Cate Sevilla is the Founding Editor of BitchBuzz.com, and is a freelance writer and professional blogger. Cate is a former editor for Shiny Media and has written for numerous websites such as Yahoo! Personals and T3.com, and has appeared on various TV and radio programs. Specializing in tech, pop culture, and women’s interest, Cate is incredibly passionate about getting more women involved in technology, social media and the web.

Panelists:

Leisa Reichelt, Freelance user experience consultant (see above)

Sophie Cox Worldeka.com
Sophie Cox studied International Development and Politics at the University of East Anglia’s award winning Global Economics Department before joining Omnicom Media Group’s International Business Development and Marketing team. Starting the day after she graduated Sophie was soon working on multi million and billion dollar pitches such as Unilever, Phillips, Pepsi and J&J. Other key aspect of Sophie’s position at Omnicom were developing new business strategies, particularly utilizing digital media and rolling out Omnicom’s new brand PHD. Sophie set up Worldeka with her brother Charlie in 2008. Worldeka is a collaborative platform for social change aimed at charities NGO’s, activists and policy makers, which went into beta January 20th 2009. Their intention is to create a positive technological empowered environment to help people unite and change the world.

Paul Walsh, OpenSoho (startups networking event) & Entrepreneur Paulfwalsh.com
Paul has been Chair BIMA since 2006, after serving the previous year as a member of the Executive. Paul is the Founder and CEO of Segala, an expert in content classification and Web based standards compliance certification. Prior to Segala, Paul was an executive at Eqos, a pioneer in the development of Web technologies for the B2B retail industry. Paul was one of the first to join AOL as a small startup in the mid 90’s. He was a key member of the team developing AOL’s UK presence and assisted with the launch of other AOL European territories. Paul has international experience within the Telecommunications Industry and has consulted for companies such as Vodafone, O2, Orange, CMG and ADC Metrica. Paul is an advisor to the British Council, helping it to build and improve a digital pioneer programme with Hong Kong and a 3 year entrepreneurial related project with India. He is non-Executive Director at Newspepper.com and a mentor to the CEO of 3 Dynamics; a Hong Kong based games companies.

Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson Huddle.net
Zuzanna is Head of Marketing Communications at Huddle.net. Zuzanna also founded Silicon Stilettos, an over-cocktails meet-up for women in technology, start-ups, media and social media. A published yet failed sociologist, Zuzanna’s background is marketing, brand communications and PR. Having abandoned academia, Zuzanna spent the next seven years at Rainier creating and executing PR and marcomms programmes for more than 50 various companies in networking, software, hardware, electronics and engineering. She worked with ntl:Telewest Business, Texas Instruments DLP, Hyundai ImageQuest, Wind River, Wacom, NextiraOne and Phoenix Systems. In late 2005, Zuzanna, along with her colleague Gareth Davies, founded Custard PR, a sister agency of Rainier, specialising in digital media, mobile, personal technology and gaming. She blogs on her personal blog – GirlAboutWeb.com. When not in front of her computer, Zuzanna spends time climbing and rounding-up cattle on the US ranches. Zuzanna holds MA in Sociology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and MSc in Public Relations from the Stirling University. She also spent some time drinking Guinness on the University College Dublin campus. Zuzanna speaks Polish, some French, Russian, German and Spanish.

Nacera Benfedda, Director of Product Viadeo
Since graduating from HEC in 1997 Nacera has spent the last 10 years in marketing & product design leadership. Notably she has been VP Marketing at Monster, VP Development for the Marrakesh Film Festival, and COO at rich media specialists, Webcastory. She joined Viadeo in 2008 as Chief Product Officer and is leading the global rollout of the Viadeo 2009 redesign. Her specialisms include useability & ergonomics, web architecture, and whole product design. Nacera has a real life too… belonging to a theatre company, and enjoying flamenco, cinema, photography & travel.

12.35 LUNCH and Networking

13.35 Get on your boots – Bootstrapping, Scaling and Cashflow

William Reeve, Entrepreneur and Investor
In 2003, William co-founded LOVEFiLM.com, Europe’s leading online DVD rental subscription service, where he remained as COO until early 2008. In 1997, William founded Fletcher Research, which he successfully sold to Forrester Research, where William then spent 3 years as European Group Director. Prior to that, William spent 2 years at McKinsey & Co as a management consultant. William holds a first class Masters degree from Oxford University.

13.50 American Idiot – Launching Your Startup In the US – when you’re actually in Scotland

Lesley EcclesCo-founder, Hubdub
With over 8 years experiences of sales and marketing for technology companies, Lesley co-founded Hubdub.com, the News Prediction game in November 2007. Prior to Hubdub, she worked as a business consultant in the CRM space and in sales & marketing for technology services companies. She has an MA in Modern Languages from St Andrews.

14.05 We don’t need no education – Geek Tools, A Primer

Ian Hogarth, Co-founder, CEO Songkick.com
Ian got a master’s in machine learning at Cambridge and loves dystopian robot takeover narratives. Seven years ago, Ian realized being a choirboy came with no street cred, so he started DJing hip-hop, funk, drum & bass, and grime. Ian quit his job at Bain & Company, Singapore to start Songkick.

14.20 Panel: Have Love, Will Travel – How to be a startup that wins, excites and keeps users

Moderator: Mike Butcher, Editor TechCrunch Europe

Panelists:

Nic Brisbourne DFJ Esprit (Venture capital)

Nic has been in venture capital since 2000. In that time he has worked in London, Europe and Silicon Valley. His main areas of focus have been software and media. Prior to DFJ Esprit he was with Reuters Venture Capital. Nic’s investment experience includes buy.at (sold to AOL for $125m) and UltraDNS (acquired by Neustar – NYSE NSR). He currently manages DFJ Esprit’s investments in Zeus, WAYN and Tribold. Prior to joining Reuters Nic worked for Operis, a software and services start-up, and Cap Gemini. Nic also authors a blog commenting on the European technology and venture capital markets at www.theequitykicker.com

Wendy White , CEO Moonfruit
Wendy is an entrepreneur, technologist, designer and mother. Currently Marketing Director of Moonfruit and Gandi Group (www.gandi.net), a leading European, ethical domain name registrar and virtual hosting provider. Her first degree in Computer Science from Imperial College led her to a successful career in IT and finance. She was part of start-up team which set up www.egg.com, one of the world’s first Internet banks She founded www.moonfruit.com in 1999, a DIY website building toolkit, for building beautiful sites simply, as CEO raising significant venture capital from Macromedia and LVMH. Moonfruit was sold to Gandi Group in 2005. Wendy was also part of the team who set-up www.zopa.com in 2004, the first European peer to peer lending website and as part of the ‘Gandi Supports’ programme, provides hosting and advice to acclaimed citizen journalist site www.demotix.com. Wendy also has an MA in Future Textiles from Central St. Martins and is a smart textile designer for fun.

Keiran O’Neil CEO Playfire.com
Kieran is the 21 year old CEO of Playfire, the London-based startup that is changing the way gamers socialise online. Backed by worldclass investors such as Michael Birch (founder of Bebo) and Chris Deering (former CEO of PlayStation), Playfire has over 100K gamers using the service. Prior to starting Playfire, he co-founded PSU.com, the game reviews site ready by over 1.5 million gamers per month, and HolyLemon.com, the video sharing site he started when he was 15 and sold to a US plc for $1.25m.

Ryan CarsonFuture of Web Apps / Carsonified
Ryan is an entrepreneur and web advocate who has built two successful web applications; DropSend and Amigo. He also runs web events and workshops, worldwide, that inspire web designers and developers to build their own web applications. For more info on Ryan, please head over to RyanCarson.com.

15.05 COFFEE BREAK

15.25 Send me an Angel – Funding and How to Handle Angels

Nick Halstead CEO Favorit
Send me an Angel – Funding and how to handle Angels
Nick Halstead is the CEO & Founder favorit Ltd, which runs http://fav.or.it, http://www.tweetmeme.com and http://www.feedbroker.net. Fav.or.it at launch generated a frenzy of tech-media coverage for its approach to bringing a more mainstream view of the social web to consumers and to businesses. Nick has been in development for over 15 years running multi-million budget projects for some of the biggest development studios in the UK. An active participant in the London Tech scene who likes to evangelise the use of Twitter, data portability and the use of the social web for businesses.

15.40 Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Recession Business Models for Tech Startups

Reshma Sohoni Seedcamp
Reshma runs Seedcamp on a day-to-day basis as its CEO. She joined Seedcamp from the Venture team at 3i. Prior to 3i, Reshma spent over 3 years at Vodafone in their Commercial Strategy team, working across the Europe and Japan footprints in marketing strategy and pricing functions. Reshma started her career in the US in investment banking (Broadview) and venture capital (Softbank).

15.55 Bankrobber – To VC or not to VC? That Is The Question

Fred Destin Atlas Venture
Fred Destin joined Atlas in 2004 and is a Partner in the technology group. He focuses on software and technology-enabled services and digital media infrastructure and applications. He previously co-managed OM Technology Investments, an IP Services and FinTech focused fund backed by Allianz/Dresdner. He served on the board of a number of companies including SGI-spinoff Kasenna, Xerox PARC-spinoff Inxight, Capital IQ (acquired by S&P) and Rainfinity (acquired by EMC). Previously he was a Venture Manager with Speed Ventures, a seed stage fund backed by Permira and Soros Partners. He was also an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs and has further experience with Zurich Capital Markets and J.P. Morgan. Fred authors a widely read blog at www.freddestin.com, commenting on European innovation and the digital media space. He currently serves on the boards of Atlas portfolio companies Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, NTRglobal, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever and Zoopla. He also serves on the board of Seedcamp, which provides mentoring and seed funding to European start-ups. Fred holds a Masters in Financial Engineering from the University of Brussels (Solvay). He is on the Boards of: Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever, Zoopla

16.10 TechCrunch Pitch! sponsored by UK Trade & Investment

Pitch judges:

Doug Richard, School for Startups
Startup Pitch Judge and Strategic Partner
Having appeared in the first and second series of Dragons’ Den, Doug is the Founder of School for Startups (www.schoolforstartups.co.uk ), Chairman and CEO of Trutap (www.trutap.net), Founder and member of the Cambridge Angels, Chairman of the Conservative Party Small Business Task Force and non-exeuctive director of AlertMe (www.alertme.com), VizWoz (www.vizwoz.com), and BeatsDigital (www.beatsdigital.com) Doug is a successful entrepreneur with 20 years’ experience in the development and leadership of technology and software ventures, both in the US and in the UK. Between 1996 and 2000 he was President and CEO of Micrografx, a US publicly quoted software company. Prior to that he also founded and subsequently sold two other companies: Visual Software and ITAL Computers. Doug holds a BA in Psychology from University of California at Berkeley and a Juris Doctor at the school of Law, University of California at Los Angeles. In 2006 Doug was an Honorary Recipient of The Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion. In 2007, Doug became a fellow of the RSA.

Julie Meyer, Ariadne Capital and Entrepreneur Country
Startup Pitch Judge
Julie Meyer has 20 years of investment and advisory experience, helping start-up businesses and industry standards to emerge and establish themselves. As Chief Executive of Ariadne Capital, she has overall general and financial management responsibility for the group which she founded in August 2000. Ariadne is an investment and advisory firm focused on the Software and Services, New Media, Communications and Life Services sectors. Julie is well-known for founding First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs, which many credit for igniting the Internet generation in Europe. It was sold for $50 million in cash in and shares in July 2000. Julie has raised hundreds of millions of capital for start-ups in addition to overseeing another $150 million of seed capital found for start-ups through First Tuesday. Named a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum and one of the top 30 most powerful women in Europe according to the Wall Street Journal, Julies mission is to back the best entrepreneurs in Europe with global ambitions. She was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year Award in October 2000 by Ernst & Young U.K.

Michael Smith, CEOMindCandy Moshi Monsters
Startup Pitch Judge
Michael has been fascinated by games and puzzles ever since receiving a copy of Masquerade for his seventh birthday. More recent distractions have included Poker, Go, Set, Sensible Soccer, Burnout Paradise, and Guitar Hero. In his early twenties he co-founded the online retailer, Firebox.com. Firebox recently featured in 13th place on the Sunday Times Fast Track list of fastest growing companies in Britain. Michael launched Mind Candy in 2003 and development on Perplex City began soon after. Michael’s interest in Monsters probably stems from reading too much Dr Seuss and Maurice Sendak as a child.

Alex Hoye Angel Investor
Startup Pitch Judge
Alex has an entrepreneurial internet background as founder, executive and investor matched with bootstrap as well as institutional global experience. As CEO of Latitude, one of Europe’s largest independent digital marketing agencies, he is driving industry change in marketing focused on customer conversion. Latitude runs campaigns in 57 countries using PPC, SEO, social media strategies, display and affiliate marketing and is on the leading edge of the cross channel advertising. In 1999, Alex co-founded online industrial auction company GoIndustry plc in Europe, which he and his partners built from the proverbial napkin into a 17-country global leader in online industrial auctions. He and the team took it public in London where it was valued at over $100M. Alex cut his teeth at Disney where he was the project lead for the launch of a division and learned the tools of finance and M&A as applied to traditional media business models including terrestrial and satellite broadcasting, and film. Alex perceived the power of online models for media while at Harvard Business School in 1994 and thereafter as a management consultant for McKinsey & Co. working with newspaper, television and music companies migrating to the digital medium. Since 2006 Alex has been encouraged by and encouraging the wave of entrepreneurial inspiration capturing Europe. To this end, Alex has acted as angel investor and mentor in technology and lead generation and advertising-based internet-based projects. In addition to Seedcamp where he is on the board, other investments include: Skimlinks, MyBuilder, RentMineOnline, Faction and GoMix. He also acts as an advisor to private equity firm Vitruvian Partners, a €1B private equity fund focused on technology, media and telecommunications and is a member of Cambridge Angels. Alex has worked and lived in the UK, Germany, the US and Latin America and speaks the respective languages to varying degrees. Ever the entrepreneur, after participating with the Oxford Wine Team during a stint there, he co-founded the wine clubs while obtaining his BA from Stanford and MBA from Harvard. Outside of his hectic schedule, Alex enjoys skiing, kite surfing and running and is a trustee of the Venture Partnership Foundation, which applies venture methods to the social sector. @alexhoye www.hoye.org

Startups Pitching:
Affect Labs
BookingBug
Buildor
Gigulate
Scribblar
Smarkets
Swiffen
VouChaCha
Aroxo
IRLConnect

16.50 Closing Remarks & a Surprise…

18.00 Close of conference

19.00 Networking Party at Cafe de Paris (Either main conference ticket or Party-only ticket required)